A special night
by Gregoire Delacourt
Grasset, 200 p., 19 €
Before dawn, everything will have changed. Olivier, Aurore’s husband, will leave her during the night. Thirty years together, a daughter, a loving passion that seemed to be able to overcome everything with one requirement: to choose each other every day. Devastated by this separation, Aurore cannot bring herself to return home to see him leave.
She wants a man for the night, a man to forget hers, a man to distract the coming loneliness. On the Parisian sidewalk where she meets him, Simeone seems to be drowning while smoking his cigarette. A vulnerability that moves him in this stranger with light scents of bergamot and a voice bristling with scrap iron. Aurore slips her hand into his. «Take me. » A brasserie, a stroll through the streets of Paris, a hotel room and the temptation to go far away.
After his moving autobiographical story The Repaired Child, Grégoire Delacourt delivers a serious novel about love. The first part gives the floor to Aurore, entirely filled with the flame of the past and the void that she will leave within her. With intoxicating lyricism, she recounts the passion that linked Olivier and her for three decades. She offers herself to a stranger with the calm resolution of a woman in despair.
spells
Simeone’s words follow, anchored in turn in a painful present, but more concrete, more explicit. The evening began for him with an argument with Marie, his companion. His voice so singular and which seduced Aurore, Simeone owes it to thyroid cancer: 25% five-year survival provided he performs an operation to which he cannot resolve. Marie does not accept her deserter’s cowardice, she questions her love which gives up in the face of obstacles, refuses to fight to tear from life a little more time together.
Coming out of a support group on cancer, Simeone therefore meets Aurore, who leads another group. As he takes her to Paris at her request, he remembers Marie and the birth of their story. One night, four destinies that Aurore weaves together with secret dexterity, between life and death. As comfortable in the gallop of passion as in the small steps of daily life, Grégoire Delacourt depicts with his poetry and raw sensitivity a delicate story that will deliver all its spells only to the most attentive readers.