Coup de foudre
koo duh FOOD-ruh
n.Love at first sight — literally a lightning strike.
FrenchEstablished linguistic term
The Nine Seconds
He was buying a lightbulb.
Camille has told this story perhaps forty times and always starts there, because the mundanity is load-bearing. There is no version of it that survives being told romantically. It was a quincaillerie on a Tuesday in March and she was buying a bulb for a lamp in a flat she was about to leave.
He was ahead of her in the queue and he turned round to see how long the queue was, which is a thing people do, and it took approximately nine seconds.