French Revolutions Read online

  As the crowds began to gather in the two brasserie-ringed squares that were the festival’s focus, I gazed up at that dominating sandstone fortress. It was this mighty edifice, I had been severally informed by the tourist leaflets, that had allowed Belfort to hold off the advancing Germans during the 1870 war in which the rest of Alsace was annexed. I knew the commanding officer, Denfert-Rochereau, from the names of any number of squares and streets and metro stations throughout France, and contemplating the huge red lion that growled out from the fortress-supporting cliff in commemoration of his siege-resisting exploits I understood something about the hero-worshipping culture that begat the Tour. It was perhaps no coincidence that those cycling nations with the noblest Tour traditions also shared a romantic attachment to their sons and daughters who had defied the odds with acts of extraordinary valour in other fields, an enduring and powerful national affection for those rare few who achieved the apparently unachievable. Whoever just said ‘Belgium?’ is in detention for a week.

  The wind dropped and the heat was soon stultifying. Very glad that I hadn’t tried to cycle 254 kilometres in these conditions, I ambled drowsily about the old town, watching lizards flash up walls, skirting round the bovine groups of riot police who set off up the street in a clomping rush every time someone dropped a bottle in the distance. Away from the squares the Moldovan ululations and death metal and jazz melted together like a badly tuned radio, but everywhere the atmosphere was wonderfully civic, partly no doubt because of the complete absence of entrance fees. All the public buildings were opened up as venues, and in the crowds outside pram-pushers mingled with pot-smokers, couples in their Sunday best joining crusties in their Wednesday worst at the kebab queues. I enjoyed it, and would have enjoyed it even more if I hadn’t been compelled by nascent blisters to wear socks inside my espadrilles.

  England were playing Portugal in that night’s Euro 2000 game, and as the sun dropped below tomorrow’s hills I walked into a bar manned by two crones, one quite old and one very. From the pink ceiling dangled the vast screen that had lured me in, and being the only customer, by the time I’d finished my first beer I had learned a great deal about this item and its life to date.

  Good, isn’t it, said the barmaid. Yes, I said. Mother paid 49,000 francs for it, said the barmaid. In Spain, said the mother. Because of the longer guarantee, said the daughter. But during the last World Cup the extra business paid for it twice over, said the mother. Are you interested in the Tower of France, I said. We cleared almost 20,000 francs on the night our boys beat Brazil, said the daughter. The tuning is difficult, said the mother, but it brings the customers in. Bicycles, I said. And it was tax-deductible, said the daughter. Look, England are winning 2–0, I said. It’s all go in Belfort these days, said the mother. First these student musicians, said the daughter, and next month the Tour de France. Yes, I said. Christophe Moreau, said the mother, that’s him in the photo up on the wall. That little beard didn’t do him any favours, said the daughter, but he’s a nice lad. Lives just down the road, said the mother, opposite the Novotel. Five bedrooms and a swimming pool, said the daughter. Look, Portugal have scored a goal, said the mother. And another, said her daughter. Oh, look at our friend, he’s upset, let’s give him a drink, said the mother. Here you are, said the daughter, a nice Dubonnet. Thank you, I said. You English love Dubonnet, said the mother. Do we, I said. Yes, said the daughter. I’m cycling to Troyes tomorrow, I said. Do you like my blouse, said the daughter. It’s 254 kilometres to Troyes, I said. Oh no, dear, said the mother, I don’t think so. Philippe once did it in two hours, said the daughter. Not on a bicycle he didn’t, I said. A bicycle, said the mother, I don’t think anyone goes to Troyes on a bicycle. I do, I said. Don’t you like Dubonnet, said the daughter. Yes, I said, I’m just tired. Yes, said the mother, and aren’t your hands hot. And your cheeks, said the daughter. We could tell you were a sportsman as soon as you came in, said the mother. The legs, said the daughter. Stand up and show us again, said the mother. Come on, there’s no one else here, said the daughter, it’s just a bit of fun. Wait, said the mother, you have a small wound on your neck. Come here, little wounded soldier, said the daughter, and I’ll make it all better. Well, there’s no need for that, said the mother, she was only trying to help. Excuse me, said the daughter, but don’t think you can just leave without paying. I have paid, I said. Not for the Dubonnet, said the mother. Typical English, said the daughter. And Portugal scored again.

  The festival was sweeping up its glass when I trudged slowly back across the squares to my hotel. Roadies were messing about with the instruments as they cleared the stages, and as I flopped on to my bed and clicked on the weather forecast there was an ominous drum roll from outside: circling wind and thunderstorms. Then the phone rang. It was reception. ‘Monsieur Moore? I ’ave a message about your … massage.’ Please don’t say it like that. ‘Is change for ten surty. Good night.’

  The bad thing about the delay was that it severely compromised my marathon itinerary. Even without a stop I’d be hard pressed to cover 254 kilometres in less than ten hours. The good thing was that it bequeathed me one and a half hours for additional preparation.

  With my usual ruminative lunch no longer an option, early the following morning I stocked up with what I hoped might comprise 254 kilometres’ worth of sustenance: five Mars Bars, one litre of apricot nectar and two of Yoplait Energie, a pack of Fig Rolls and a set of ‘Baker Street’ fruit cakes – the Holmes, which apparently had some butter in, and the Watson, which was slightly less turquoise. Then I retrieved ZR from the laundry room and cycled up the hill to a petrol station, where, before the curious gaze of staff and clients, I paid 10 francs to blast her abused and filthy flanks with a high-pressure jet of hot, soapy water. Finally, having temporarily redeposited ZR at the hotel, with a sense of foreboding in its own way more wretched than that I felt when the Pyrenees first hove into view, I trooped dismally into an Yves Rocher beauty salon and quietly asked a lady in white clothes to depilate my legs.

  It had to be done. I’d spent too much time thinking about it: why they did it, how, when. Through all the countless hours I’d spent surveying my hairy knees as they rose and fell, rose and fell, I’d felt I was looking at the legs of a pretender. Now I’d done the mountains and got the tan, and if I wanted to be taken seriously by my masseur, the hair would have to go.

  They were very nice in the salon. Some of the questions I had feared were asked (did I want a full-leg wax or a half; was I aware that the process might involve some discomfort), but most were not (did I mind if passers-by were herded in to watch; was there a long history of cross-dressing in my family; would it matter that as the first depilatory client after the Pentecost I was obliged by local tradition to retain an unshaved area on each shin in the form of an inverted crucifix). As Martine ushered me into her quiet depilatorium I explained my relief that such a procedure was clearly commonplace amongst Belfort’s male population. Hardly, she said as I removed rather more clothing than I felt comfortable about. I was the first man they’d ever had in.

  I knew it was going to hurt, but actually the pain was no worse than the last time I tore off a pair of gaffer-tape trousers after they caught fire. After the first Velcro-parting rip my eyes clamped shut while my mouth did the opposite.

  Filling her second bucket with strip after waxed strip of flayed follicles, Martine confessed that she had once depilated her father. He was ‘almost’ a professional cyclist, a man who covered 500k a week for years, but after one shin’s worth of her follicular yanking he yelped off the trolley and hobbled away in search of his razor. Christophe Moreau, now there was a super-hard man. He wouldn’t have made a squeak, not even at this bit – ow ow ow STOP NOW – where I frenziedly pluck out any remaining individual hairs with these tweezers.

  A razor, I thought. Why hadn’t I just shaved my stupid legs with a razor? And why had I bothered anyway? Martine had assured me it was nothing to do with aerodynamics: part of the reason was to facili
tate the massage process, but from what her father had told her the main intention was to reduce the risk of infecting the regular and serious leg abrasions that are the cyclist’s lot. How awful, I’d thought; what a ghastly rationale. Shaving my face every morning was dull enough, but imagine if I did it not for presentation purposes, but because at some stage during the journey into work I would inevitably headbutt a postbox.

  Walking out of the salon it felt strange to have thanked and paid someone for such an experience, though not as strange as my bald leg flesh felt as my trousers swished freely over it. I’d ordered a cab to take me from beauty salon to massage parlour and, gratified that even such an itinerary did not apparently mark me out in his eyes as a ‘john’, felt brave enough to ask the driver to wait. Thanking God and – behold the sound of crawling flesh – last night’s predatory pensioners that I wasn’t going into a massage parlour stinking of stale booze, I walked through an unassuming door and into an unassuming surgery.

  Later I was told that in France, massage has none of the stigma attached to it by the British, and is indeed widely available on the health service. How I would have appreciated this knowledge as I took my place in the vet-smelly waiting room next to a scabrous old tramp reading a well-thumbed Marie-Claire. His turn was called by a pale-eyed young man of ominous appearance and he slowly rose into an arthritic hunch. In moments the sound of heavy skin being roundly belaboured thundered out of a half-closed door. When the old man began to protest wearily it was slammed shut.

  ‘Monsieur?’

  I’d been in two minds about staying, and they’d both decided to make a run for it when a cheerful man in his forties popped a curly-haired head round the corner. In moments I was, for the second time in less than an hour, lying face-down on a trolley with my trousers on a chair and my pants wedged up my crack, waiting for a hired stranger to get cracking on me.

  ‘Alors,’ he said, offloading a wristy squirt of cold white cream on to my hairless, goosebumped thighs. I’d noticed since returning to France that my ability to sustain conversation with the natives had improved exponentially, and also that I kept wishing it hadn’t. Even two weeks ago I could have just bitten the headrest in agonised semi-silence; now I felt obliged to formulate considered replies as he systematically worked me over. The backs of my calves weren’t too bad, permitting me to explain my quest in an almost normal voice, and to return the genuine excitement this seemed to cause him with appropriate modesty-conveying noises. For a brief moment we were two middle-aged men exchanging sporting anecdotes in a wholly humdrum fashion; then, as we moved on to discuss the region’s cycling stars, he pressed his thumb into the nearside tendon beneath my right knee and with a stridency normally used to invoke the name of Mr Gordon Bennett I shrieked, ‘CHRISTOPHE MOREAU!’

  Thus ended my meaningful contribution to the debate, along with any residual fears that I might inadvertently develop an erection. My vital signs were still some way from normality when, working his way up, my cheerful tormentor manually encountered a contorted ganglion of muscle tissue in the underside of my left thigh. ‘Aaah,’ he said, and so did I, only with a generous helping of silent ‘G’s and many additional punctuation marks. After ten minutes he speculatively prodded my spine, and having issued a short sound at the upper limit of a human being’s audible spectrum I frenziedly shook my head. The legs were one thing; if I’d wanted my back done I’d have … I don’t know, had it waxed.

  ‘Eh bien,’ he said, towelling down his hands as he assessed my slathered bald bits, ‘c’est pas mal. Vous avez … trente-six, trente-sept ans?’ Those were awful words to hear. I’d thought he had been genetically impressed by my achievement, but I had been wrong. I understood that all the kind words and encouragement I’d received in recent days had been rounded off with an unspoken coda: Not bad for an old man.

  While Birna was packing I’d bundled most of my Tour books into her suitcase, weary of the humbling heroics of Messrs Cannibal and Badger. All I had left now were Paul Kimmage’s brutally poignant Rough Ride and a novel Birna had brought out with her, The Yellow Jersey, featuring none other than the ‘legendary fictional cyclist’ Terry Davenport. An account of a slightly seedy 36-year-old Englishman making an improbable comeback in the Tour, this had been heartwarming bedtime reading for the last week. After the disqualification of most of the Frenchmen for doping offences (hissss!), and having literally beaten off a mob of Belgian bullies with his bike pump (hurrah!), Terry finds himself wearing the eponymous shirt, to the sporting world’s astonishment, with only two days left. The night before, still unsettled by the groping grandmothers, I had snuggled up in bed to cheer myself with Terry’s triumphant ride up the Champs-Elysées.

  It is difficult to imagine that the literary editor of Bicycling magazine is a busy man, but without wishing to contest his presumably irrefutable verdict of The Yellow Jersey as ‘the greatest cycling novel ever written’, I have to say that after reading the first page I felt I could predict with some confidence what would happen on the last. How wrong I was. What no doubt sets The Yellow Jersey apart from the other cycling novels weighing down the nation’s shelves are the wholly unexpected calamities of its abrupt denouement. On page 282 Terry is within sight of the Tour’s most famous victory; then he gets really tired, and, eschewing the gnarled determination that has carried him through far more lurid crises, on page 283 he suddenly gives up. He is sitting in the back of the team car trying to come to terms with this turn of events, when someone hands him a letter from his girlfriend’s mother. He opens it on page 284 and learns on page 285 that Bobbie has abruptly announced her engagement to a younger man who ‘looked loaded and had a big car outside’. The end.

  I was deeply shocked, but the moral was clear: the Tour was a young man’s game, and if you tried to beat him at it you’d get really tired and give up. Then he’d drive off with your girlfriend in a big car. The end.

  As I shuffled brokenly outside, the old tramp strode past me with a spring in his step. It was as though our bodies had been swapped. Still feeling as if my legs were leaking some vital life-force through their scooped-out, fingered pores, I was driven back to my hotel where I got myself jerseyed and cleated and Savloned up, then grabbed ZR and asked the receptionist to photograph rider and steed at the foot of the sweeping staircase. It was 11.10 a.m., and I knew that one way or another I would still be cycling long after it got dark.

  My body seemed to heal with use. Reaching the brow of the first of the day’s many rolling hills, I was beginning to believe that massage might after all be a beneficial treatment rather than a punishment, and my enhanced control of the bike now permitted mobile refuelling, the in-saddle consumption of fig roll or Mars Bar. At Ronchamp the route left the big road and for the final time I followed the Tour back to its rural origins, beating a track through forgotten hamlets where man made no sound but his best friend made plenty, places with waist-high weeds in the churchyards and dumped-car farms and mad and ancient names like Esboz and Quers.

  Luxeuil was a market town of the old school, the banners across its narrow streets advertising another Day of Blood and – how I laughed – a looming Festival of Nocturnal Cycling. On any other day I’d have stopped here for my coffee; instead, with a practised air I slyly palmed a ProPlus from my jersey pocket and washed it down with chlorine-tainted apricot nectar.

  The huge storms that brought down 20 million French trees in the last week of 1999 had been at their fiercest around here, and where I transferred from Michelin Map 243 to 241 every copse and thicket had at least a couple of prostrate victims, soldiers who’d passed out on parade. I thought of the forecast wind and wondered where it had gone. The sky’s morning pallor had been burned away and now it was really very hot; looking down at my schoolgirl’s knees, I could already see the tan reddening up.

  It’s never good when, as lorries overtake, you find yourself deliberately edging out in order to get nearer that cooling gust of cleaved air. Soon I could think only of fluid, an obsessio
n fortified by the fact that, with 165k left, my remaining supply of solids consisted, in toto, of Holmes and Watson. Simon O’Brien had recommended fruitcake as the ideal long-distance sustenance, but then he wasn’t to know that the recipe posthumously endorsed by Victorian England’s favourite crime-fighting duo could find little space for fruit, and less for cake, in a list of ingredients that began and ended with stained lard.

  The 100k was up and at just past 3 p.m. I waved flaccidly at the rust-pitted, crutch-toting invalid silently urging me to enjoy my stay at Bourbonne-les-Bains, a gentleman whose striking resemblance to Josef Goebbels suggested a spa-town heyday even more distant than I had become accustomed to. Then, horribly, the road pitched itself directly up the last set of double chevrons I would face. The Côte de Chagnon was only a category four, but long before I creaked over its unremarkable summit I was mumbling to myself like the mother of a recalcitrant toddler: ‘Come on, come on – no, I’ve told you already, you’re not getting any warm Yoplait until you’ve finished up your Watson.’

  The last day before Paris was supposed to be a mobile party. Paul Kimmage’s account of the ride into the capital was of singing and linked arms and the playing of practical jokes, but riding into Dammartin I felt less end-of-term and more first-day-back. Here I crossed the Meuse, and was reminded by an accompanying sign that I’d just entered the true north of France: the last big river I’d bridged, just before Bourbonne, had been the Saône, which went on to meet the Rhône at Lyon and thence flowed out into the Mediterranean. But the Meuse went the other side of whatever flaming hill I’d been ridging, winding its way up to the Channel. If I’d been near Troyes this would have girded me up for the final stretch. But a dizzy, unfocused peer at the itinerary confirmed what I’d feared: I was less than halfway there, and it had gone four o’clock.