The First Thing You See

by Gregoire Delacourt

Genres: Humor & Satire; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

Imagine you are a young mechanic living in a small community in France. You own your own home, and lead a simple life. Then one evening, you open your front door to find a distraught Hollywood starlet standing in front of. This is what happens to Arthur Drefuss in the village of Long, population 687 inhabitants.

But although feigning an American accent, this woman is not all that she seems. For her name is Jeanine Foucamprez, and her story is very different from the glamorous life of a star. Arthur is not all he seems, either; a lover of poetry with a darker past than one might imagine, he has learnt to see beauty in the mundane.

The First Thing You See is a warm, witty novel about two fragile souls learning to look beyond the surface - for the first thing you see isn't always what you get!

Read by David Thorpe

(p) 2015 Orion Publishing Group

Release date: September 3, 2019

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 240

Sample

‘This smart romantic comedy is charmingly Gallic and cries out to be filmed as a sentimental comedy’

Sunday Times

‘At once tender and harrowing, light-hearted and profound, it is a highly original and affecting read’

The Lady

‘It’s a powerful message which begins with the novel’s title – a meditation on our obsession with beauty, celebrity and the consequences for those lumbered with one or both, delivered in a deceptively simple package stuffed full of filmic references and peppered with poetic quotations. It’s a little gem and it’s been a long time in the offing in translation’

A Life In Books

‘The List of My Desires is a gorgeous little novel … a fable-like tale of how money can’t buy you happiness’

Stylist

‘A runaway bestseller that looks set to follow the success of The Elegance of the Hedgehog. But that’s not surprising – Grégoire Delacourt is an author who knows how to make his readers feel happy … [he] describes the dilemmas of the heart and the vagaries of fate with tenderness and empathy’

Elle

‘A massive seller across Europe, this little book of Gallic charm is likely to warm British hearts too’

Choice

‘This thought-provoking debut from Grégoire Delacourt is a huge bestseller in France’

Good Housekeeping

‘The List of My Desires has a natural charm and a clear sense of accomplishment’

L’Express

‘Impeccably translated from French by Anthea Bell, it’s a sparkling and intriguing read … This is a very elegant novel. Its restraint is wonderful, with not a superfluous word. Grégoire Delacourt’s keen eye pans deftly across the inner landscape of desire and longing, presenting a tender homage to almost unfashionable virtues – loyalty, duty, patience – without ever taking the high moral ground … These days, it is regarded as clichéd and hyperbolic to describe a novel as a tour de force. But I can’t think of a more appropriate description for this book’

Irish Independent

Arthur Dreyfuss liked big breasts.

He had wondered whether, if he had happened to be a girl, and because his mother’s breasts were small but his grandmother’s sizeable, at least in his memory of her suffocating hugs, his own would have been large or small.

He thought that a substantial chest made a woman walk in a more graceful, feminine way, and it was the grace of those delicately balanced figures that enchanted and sometimes deeply moved him. Ava Gardner in The Barefoot Contessa, Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? And so many others. These images enraptured him, made him blush. A fine bosom was impressive; it made you fall silent, it called for respect. There wasn’t a man on earth who didn’t revert to being a little boy.

A man could die for such a thing.

Arthur Dreyfuss, who had never yet literally laid hands on them, had studied many different versions in back issues of L’Homme moderne, a magazine that he had discovered stashed away at his boss, PP’s house. He had also seen them on the internet.

As for the real thing, there were Madame Rigautmalolepszy’s, spilling out of her blouse in spring: two gleaming watermelons so translucent that you could imagine pale green arteries bubbling just beneath the surface, tumultuous when she quickened her pace to catch the bus that stopped twice a day in the Grande Rue (really a small street into which a Scotsman by the name of Haywood had parachuted on 1 September 1944 to liberate the village) or when her nasty little russet-coloured dog, in a state of high excitement, dragged her off to investigate a pile of dog shit.

When young Arthur Dreyfuss reached year ten at school, his liking for such fleshy fruits induced him to sit near a girl called Nadège Lepetit who, oblivious to him as she was, wore a bra with a voluptuous size 38C cup, and thus had the advantage over the lovely Joëlle Ringuet, whose chest was as flat as a board. It was a bad choice. The unappreciative Nadège jealously protected her budding melons and wouldn’t let greedy admirers near them. Aged thirteen and aware of her charms, Nadège wanted to be sure that she was loved for herself, and at that age Arthur Dreyfuss was not much good at fine words and deceptive verses. He hadn’t read Rimbaud, and didn’t really remember the sweet words of the songs of Cabrel, or the older songs of C. Jérôme (for instance, Oh, do not leave me / Give yourself freely).

When he discovered that Alain Roger, his friend at the time, had had the modest fruits of the ravishing Joëlle Ringuet at his fingertips, and then close to his lips, and then right inside his mouth, Arthur Dreyfuss thought he would go out of his mind and wondered whether he should revise his ideals and lower his expectations.

At the age of seventeen he went to Albert (the third largest town on the Somme) with the proud Alain Roger to celebrate his first payday. He chose to lose his virginity and experience vertiginous bliss with a well-endowed streetwalker, but was so impatient that he immediately paid tribute to his trousers instead. At this point he fled, ruined and ashamed, before he’d even had the chance to caress, feel, and embrace the girl’s opalescent treasures.

This misfortune calmed his ardour. It put things in their proper place. He read two romantic novels by the American writer Karen Dennis, from which he learned that desire for another person is sometimes conveyed by a smile, a scent, or perhaps merely a look, as he discovered for himself six months later at Dédé’s chip shop in the village – Dédé’s was also a bar and tobacconist’s that sold fishing gear, lottery tickets and newspapers as well. The fishermen were mainly interested in the bar. Its red Jupiler beer sign was their guiding star, shepherding them back home on interminable, freezing winter nights. It also attracted smokers, because no one took any notice of the 2006 anti-smoking law there.

That day, at Dédé’s chip shop, something very simple happened to Arthur Dreyfuss: when asked what he would like, he raised his eyes and met the rainy grey eyes of the new waitress. They bowled him over. He also liked the sound of her voice, her smile, her pink gums, her white teeth, her perfume – all the beautiful things described by Karen Dennis. He forgot to look at her breasts, and for the first time he didn’t mind whether they were discreetly small or appetisingly lavish. A flat plain or a hilly landscape, who cared?

It was a revelation: his first experience of love at first sight. And his first ventricular spasm – a kind of irregular heartbeat.

But nothing happened between him and the afore-mentioned waitress, because it would be no use beginning a love story at the end, especially as the waitress with the rainy grey eyes already had a lover, a truck driver who worked the Belgian and Dutch roads, a hefty guy with small but crushingly powerful hands and impressive biceps on which the name of his beloved was tattooed, Éloïse. She was taken, and by someone with a possessive streak. Everything Arthur Dreyfuss knew about karate and other martial arts he had learned from the blind master in Kung Fu Panda – the unforgettable Master Po – and from the savage cry of Pierre Richard in The Return of the Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe, directed by Yves Robert. So he thought it best to forget the poetry of Éloïse’s face, the rainy grey of her eyes, her pink gums; he stopped going to Dédé’s for his morning coffee and even gave up smoking for fear of meeting the jealous truck driver.

To sum up this first chapter, it was on account of a sturdy and suspicious truck driver, on account of life in the little village of Long – population 687 persons, known as Longinians, situated on the Somme with its eighteenth-century château, its church steeple, its midsummer bonfires, its Cavaillé-Coll organ and its marshes, maintained in ecological balance by a few horses imported from the Camargue – and also on account of his profession as a motor mechanic, which leaves the fingers black and greasy, that at the age of twenty Arthur Dreyfuss, although an attractive young man (Éloïse had said he was like Ryan Gosling, only better-looking) lived alone in a small, isolated house on the way out of the village, set back from the D32 leading to Ailly-le-Haut-Clocher.

For anyone unacquainted with Ryan Gosling, he is a Canadian actor born on 12 November 1980 and he achieved worldwide success in 2011, a year after the date of the present story, with the magnificent and very dark film Drive, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn.

But never mind that.

On the day when this story begins, there was a knock on the door of Arthur Dreyfuss’s house.

He was watching an episode of The Sopranos (season 3, episode 7: ‘Uncle Junior has an operation for stomach cancer’). He jumped up. Cried out, ‘Who’s there?’ The person knocked again. So he went to open the door. And he couldn’t believe his eyes.

There, standing in front of him, was Scarlett Johansson.

Apart from getting horribly drunk at the third wedding of his boss Pascal Payen, known locally as PP – a drinking bout, incidentally, that left Arthur in such a stupor that he spent two days sucking on a watermelon – Arthur Dreyfuss didn’t drink. Or only had a Kronenbourg in the evening now and then, in front of the TV.

So the hallucinatory vision of Scarlett Johansson standing on his front doorstep could not be put down to the ill effects of alcohol.

By no means.

Until that day, Arthur Dreyfuss had led a normal life. To give you a quick summary, and before we return to the disconcerting appearance of the actress, he was born in 1990 (the year of publication of the novel Jurassic Park and of Tom Cruise’s second marriage to Nicole Kidman) in the Camille-Desmoulins Maternity Hospital in Amiens, capital and administrative headquarters of the Picardy region, the son of Louis-Ferdinand Dreyfuss and Thérèse Marie Françoise Lecardonnel Dreyfuss.

An only child until 1994, when Noiya Dreyfuss arrived. Noiya means Beauty of God.

And he became an only child again in 1996, when Inke, the neighbour’s powerful Dobermann, confused the Beauty of God with its dog food. The little girl’s face and right hand emerged from Inke’s other end as the waste product of Canis lupus familiaris, left behind in the shade of the wheel of a Grand Scenic. The local community supported the bereaved family as best it could. Little Arthur Dreyfuss shed no tears because they made his mother cry as well, reminding her of the horrors of this world, the supposed beauty of things, and God’s shocking cruelty. And so the boy, an only child again, kept his grief to himself, like marbles concealed in the bottom of a pocket: little bits of glass.

People felt sorry for him, they ruffled his hair, they whispered, poor boy or it’s hard for a child. This time in his life was both sad and happy. In the Dreyfuss family they ate a lot of stuffed dates, baklava and babaganoush, and in homage to the part of the family that came from Picardy they indulged in cakes made with Maroilles cheese, and charlotte puddings flavoured with coffee and chicory. Sugar is fattening and it melts your sorrows away.

The bereaved family moved to the little town of Saint-Saëns in the Seine-Maritime department, on the outskirts of the state-owned forest of Eawy (pronounced ay-ah-vee), where Louis-Ferdinand Dreyfuss became a forestry worker. On certain evenings he returned home bearing pheasants, partridges, hares and other game, which his wife from Picardy made into pâtés, supremes and stews. Once he brought home the skin of a fox to be turned into a fur muff (winter was approaching), but Thérèse turned pale and cried out that she could never, never plunge her hands into a dead body.

One morning the poacher set out, as he did every morning, with his pouch and several traps over his shoulder. At the doorway, he said, also as he did every morning, See you this evening! But no one did see him that evening, or any other evening. The police were informed, but gave up looking for him a dozen days later. Madame, are you quite sure he doesn’t have a little friend in town, a young girl, maybe? A man often goes missing for such reasons; it’s a kind of an itch, he just wants to enjoy himself, he needs to feel alive, we’ve seen it all before. Not one trace of him, no footprints or fingerprints, no body. Thérèse Lecardonnel Dreyfuss quickly lost what little interest she still took in life and instead sought refuge in the Martini bottle each evening, at the time when the forestry work. . .