Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre Read Free Book Online

of myself: an acute, vivid sensation would deliver me. I plaster my left hand against my cheek, I pull the skin; I grimace at myself. An entire half of my face yields, the left half of the mouth twists and swells, uncovering a tooth, the eye opens on a white globe, on pink, bleeding flesh. That is not what I was looking for: nothing strong, nothing new; soft, flaccid, stale! I go to sleep with my eyes open, already the face is growing larger, growing in the mirror, an immense, light halo gliding in the light. . . .
    I lose my balance and that wakes me. I find myself straddling a chair, still dazed. Do other men have as much difficulty in appraising their face? It seems that I see my own as I feel my body, through a dumb, organic sense. But the others? Rollebon, for example, was he also put to sleep by looking in the mirror at what Mme de Genlis calls "his small, wrinkled countenance, clean and sharp, all pitted with smallpox, in which there was a strange malice which caught the eye, no matter what effort he made to dissemble it? He took," she adds, "great care with his coiffure and I never saw him without his wig. But his cheeks were blue, verging on black, owing to his heavy beard which he shaved himself, not being at all expert. It was his custom to wash his face with white lead, in the manner of
    17Grimm. M. de Dangeville said that with all this white and all this blue he looked like a Roquefort cheese".
    It seems to me he must have been quite pleasing. But, after all, this is not the way he appeared to Mme de Charrieres. I believe she found him rather worn. Perhaps it is impossible to understand one's own face. Or perhaps it is because I am a single man? People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked? You might sayùyes you might say, nature without humanity.
    I have no taste for work any longer, I can do nothing more except wait for night.
    5.30:
    Things are bad! Things are very bad: I have it, the filth, the Nausea. And this time it is new: it caught me in a cafe. Until now cafes were my only refuge because they were full of people and well lighted: now there won't even be that any more; when I am run to earth in my room, I shan't know where to go.
    I was coming to make love but no sooner had I opened the door than Madeleine, the waitress, called to me:
    "The patronne isn't here, she's in town shopping."
    I felt a sharp disappointment in the sexual parts, a long, disagreeable tickling. At the same time I felt my shirt rubbing against my breasts and I was surrounded, seized by a slow, coloured mist, and a whirlpool of lights in the smoke, in the mirrors, in the booths glowing at the back of the cafe, and I couldn't see why it was there or why it was like that. I was on the doorstep, I hesitated to go in and then there was a whirlpool, an eddy, a shadow passed across the ceiling and I felt myself pushed forward. I floated, dazed by luminous fogs dragging me in all directions at once. Madeleine came floating over to take off my overcoat and I noticed she had drawn her hair back and put on earrings: I did not recognize her. I looked at her large cheeks which never stopped rushing towards the ears. In the hollow of the cheeks, beneath the cheekbones, there were two pink stains which seemed weary on this poor flesh. The cheeks ran, ran towards the ears and Madeleine smiled:
    "What will you have, Monsieur Antoine?"
    Then the Nausea seized me, I dropped to a seat, I no longer knew where I was; I saw the colours spin slowly around me,
    18
    I wanted to vomit. And since that time, the Nausea has not left me, it holds me.
    I paid, Madeleine took away my saucer. My glass crushes a puddle of yellow beer against the marble table top, a bubble floating in it. The bottom of my seat is broken and in order not to slide, I am compelled to press my heels firmly against the ground; it is cold. On the right, they are playing cards on