The List of My Desires Read Online Free PDF

breast in the fridge and some ratatouille that you can warm up.
    He went to the station with me and then hurried to the factory, to get there in time for his training course.
    In the train I think of the twins’ dreams, their disappointment every Friday evening when the balls fall and the numbers on them are not the numbers that Françoise and Danièle have chosen so carefully, thinking hard about them, assessing them, weighing them up.
    I think of the readers of tengoldfingers , those five thousand Princess Auroras who dream of pricking their finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel, going to sleep and being woken by a kiss.
    I think of Papa’s six-minute loops of time. Of the vanity of everything. Of what money can never make up for.
    I think of all that Maman didn’t have, the things she dreamed of that I could now give her: a trip up the Nile, a Saint Laurent jacket, a cleaning lady, a Kelly bag, a ceramic crown for her tooth instead of the horrible gold one that spoilt her wonderful smile, an apartment in the Rue des Teinturiers, an evening in Paris at the Moulin Rouge and the Brasserie Mollard with its delicious oysters, grandchildren. She used to say, grandmothers make the best mothers, a mother has too much to do to be a woman. I miss my mother as much as I did on the day she collapsed. I feel sad whenever I think of her. I always cry. Who must I give the money to so that she can come back, all eighteen million five hundred and forty-seven thousand, three hundred and one euros and twenty-eight centimes of it?
    I think of myself, of all that will now be possible for me, and I don’t want any of it. I don’t want what all the money in the world can buy. But does everyone feel like that?
    When I arrive, the receptionist is charming.
    Ah, so you’re the one who bought the ticket in Arras. And she asks me to wait in a small sitting room, offers me magazines to read, a tea or a coffee. I say: No thank you, I’ve already drunk three coffees this morning, and at once I feel stupid and provincial, a real idiot. A little later she comes back and takes me to the office of a man called Hervé Meunier, who welcomes me with open arms.
    Well, you certainly had us worried, he says, laughing, but here you are at last, that’s the main thing. Sit down, please. Make yourself comfortable, we want you to feel at home. My new home is a big office with a thick carpet; I unobtrusively slip off one of my flat-heeled shoes to let my foot stroke the pile, sink a little way into it. Gentle air conditioning keeps the temperature comfortable, and outside the windows there are other big office blocks. They look like huge pictures, Hoppers in black and white.
    This is the point of departure for new lives. Here, face to face with Hervé Meunier, people receive the talisman that will change everything for them.
    The Holy Grail.
    A cheque made out in their name. A cheque made out to Jocelyne Guerbette, for the sum of 18,547,301 euros 28 centimes.
    He asks me for the lottery ticket and my ID. He checks them. He makes a short phone call. The cheque will be ready in a few minutes’ time – would you like a coffee? We have the entire Nespresso range. This time I don’t say anything. Just as you please. Personally I’m hooked on the Livanto blend because of its smooth, rounded, velvety aroma. Well, while we’re waiting, he goes on, I’d like you to meet a colleague of mine. In fact, you must meet my colleague.
    The colleague is a psychologist. I didn’t know that having eighteen million euros was an illness. But I make no comment.
    The psychologist turns out to be a woman. She looks like Emmanuelle Béart; like her, she has Daisy Duck lips, lips so swollen, says my Jo, that they’d explode if she bit them. She is wearing a black suit that emphasises her plastic look (as in plastic surgery), she offers me a bony hand and says this won’t take long. In fact it takes her forty minutes to explain that what’s happened to me is both a stroke of