The Marquis de Rollebon

Most abandoned books in this catalogue were too dangerous to finish. Rollebon is too contingent.

Roquentin needs the Marquis the way a drowning man needs a rope that happens to be a dead diplomat. The research is real enough — archives, memoirs, the municipal library of a town Sartre modelled on Le Havre — and the life will not cohere. Rollebon lied to everyone, which is charming until you are the person who has asked to be told the truth. When Roquentin gives him up, the Nausea has nothing left to hide behind. Existence is no longer a biography in progress. It is a chestnut tree.

The diary you are reading is the book that replaced the biography: editors’ note, found among the papers, the usual frame. Sartre is not subtle about the substitution. The historian of a fake aristocrat becomes, at the last, a man who might write a novel, which is to say a man who might justify himself in a different tense. Rollebon remains unwritten on purpose. A completed life of the Marquis would have been the wrong answer to the problem Nausea is.

File it beside Casaubon’s Key. Both are works that ate their authors’ present. Casaubon’s is sterile certainty. Roquentin’s is the moment certainty fails, which is why it belongs here and the Key belongs next to it.

On the readability rating. Scattered remarks, a failed method, the sentence about the second death. No chapter of the biography. The diary is what got written instead.