In 1952, between 23rd and 28th August, Michèle Bernstein spent time in the French port of Le Havre, Normandy seeking out the places that had inspired Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel, Nausea , or so we learn from some fragments left by Patrick Straram, collected together as Les bouteilles se couchent . The Sartre novel which inspired Michèle Bernstein was from 1938; it was Sartre's first published novel. Sartre set the story in the port city on the estuary of the river Seine in Normandy where he had been a schoolteacher. Nausea is written as diary entries, with street-names that should be easy to find for any literary dériviste ; in the quotation from Nausea below, the narrator, Antoine Roquentin has just come out of the library. A bronze statue of Gustave Impetraz stands nearby: Thursday, 11.30 I have worked two hours in the reading-room. I went down to the Cour des Hypotheques to smoke a pipe. A square paved with pinkish bricks. The people of Bouville [Le Havre] are proud of it ...
ISSN 2753-7803
