Soon he decides it must be he who has changed and begins writing about the moment when he decided to return to France then, too, he was overcome with a strange disgust. He can’t quite tell if he himself or the outside world has changed. Antoine writes that something has come on him like an illness, subtly and slowly. The dated pages begin on Monday, the 29th of January, 1932. By that night, his strange feelings have passed without a trace, and he returns to his research. After he threw a stone into the sea, the children laughed at him, and he experienced a sort of disgust. Quickly he states his inability to describe a recent Saturday, when he saw children playing “Ducks and Drakes” (skipping stones) and wanted to join in. In the “Undated Pages,” Antoine writes that he intends to keep this diary in order to describe things in acute detail, tracing his experience minute by minute. The Editors explain that the opening pages of the notebooks were undated but likely written earliest. After traveling around Europe, Africa, and “the Far East,” he lived in the fictional town of Bouville for three years to finish his research. An “Editors’ Note” explains that what follows are the notebooks found in the papers of Antoine Roquentin, a historian who was working on a book about the Marquis de Rollebon.
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