Stationed in Alsace in 1939 and 1940, during the so-called phony war [drôle de guerre] that preceded Nazi Germany’s invasion of France, Sartre con-templates the structure of adventurous and gritty travel, pitting it against the seemingly mundane practice of tourism, but ultimately locating an in-delible link between the two. As he describes it, even his attempts to break through the rigid strictures and plots of tourism by traveling off the beaten path and transgressing the cultural norms of his era were destined to fail because the impulse that guided them was already inherent to the practice of tourism. There is no real difference between tourist and traveler on the existential level; his transgression was merely convention. Sartre’s belated response to the cliché is already a cliché. Yet, in his careful self-analysis, he identifies the logic that he is now wise to, the logic that assigns value to travel abroad when it provides a “true” and “profound” experience of self, other, and place. As he casts it in the epiphanic passage, his attempts to find fresh adventures and discover unseen vistas were themselves the result of a problematic equation between veritableness and genuineness on the one hand, and purity and aesthetic recompense on the other. In the terms of this book, Sartre had been a quester for authenticity.