French Revolutions Read online

  The promised wind was belatedly building up and pushing me into the verge. The sun started to nestle down near the horizon, blinding me if I looked up and even, as was more common, if I looked down, reflected into my eyes off the steam-cleaned chain and sprockets. The road settled into a depressing routine, ribboning up and down a parabolic succession of large green humps; as dusk fell, the troughs between these filled with gnats and midges and other toothsome windborne snacks.

  With my shadow twice the width of the road I climbed up to Chaumont, a railway town whose International Poster Festival had climaxed yesterday, its empty streets a testament to the citizenry’s sullen realisation that there would consequently be no reason to emerge from their homes for another year. The sun had gone but its last silvered rays, Zorro-slashed with jet-fighter vapour trails, were still bright on the horizon as I swept giddily out of town on the N19. The 150k was up; soon I had passed my daily record and as I entered uncharted territory the last Plasticened palmful of Holmes broached my feebly protesting lips.

  All I wanted now was a sort of controlled bonk, the semi-delirious accumulation of distance by a body too knackered to complain, slackly governed by a brain too knackered to notice if it did. I needed to be taken down to a place where nothing was real, where everyone had Eddy’s legs, Lance’s lungs and Tommy’s drugs, and the Tour de France’s final hill, the category four Cote d’Alun, took me there.

  I couldn’t tell you much about how I got up and less still about how I got down. At its foot lay Colombey-les-deux-Eglises, de Gaulle’s former (and, in a less active sense, current) home and the place where in 1960 ol’ Big Nose halted the entire peloton for a photo opportunity with the yellow jersey. For days I’d been wondering what kind of a show this ultimately French village would be putting on for this ultimately French event, but the next time I squinted through the gloom at my map and itinerary was at Bar-sur-Aube. I’d passed through Colombey 15 kilometres back and hadn’t even noticed.

  If it hadn’t been a week away from the year’s longest day, it would have been pitch black long before I rolled past a sign welcoming me to Troyes, city of art, history and gastronomy. As it was, the full, dark weight of night only dropped around me as I dumbly uncleated outside a McDonald’s – gastronomy be damned: if anyone had ever needed food fast, it was me, then. It was 10.17 p.m.: I had been cycling for over eleven hours, twice what it would take the pros. The stage was supposed to be 254.5 kilometres but looking at my computer under a streetlight I registered that somewhere along the way I’d picked up another 3.2k. All I’d noticed during the last 50 kilometres had been a lot of long names – Montier-en-l’Isle, la Villeneuve-au-Chêne, Saint-Parres-aux-Tertres – and a horrid smell of Poupou-sur-les-Fields. I had travelled through five French departments and across huge swathes of two Michelin maps. Not bad for an old man.

  Feeling almost totally disembodied I clicked spasmodically across the tiles like Mrs Overall, the food chain’s heavily oiled final links piled up on my tray. It was Tuesday and the only other clients were students, who accepted my appearance with a nonchalance that cheered and depressed in equal measure. Having filled my face in the most literal fashion I remounted with predictable difficulty and set off for the finest hotel Troyes had to offer.

  It didn’t take long to find, snug up against the cathedral in a theatrically spotlit alley. But then it took even less time for the very kind and very young night receptionist to send me back into the night with some desperately awful tidings. A conference was in town. No room at the inn, nor at the three others she telephoned on my behalf. ‘Try ze steshun,’ she said, handing me a map of Troyes as I tried to get my face to do something grateful.

  The station was not nearby, and as suspected its semi-industrial ambience made it the natural home of the city’s tawdriest overnight accommodations. A couple of them had ‘complet’ signs outside the reception window, but one didn’t, partly because the reception window was on the first floor. This probably needn’t have required me to wheel ZR right through the busy ground-floor restaurant and over the feet of a dozen diners, but I could feel coursing through my veins a sort of drunken recklessness, an ugly, animal determination. Man need bed. Give man bed. I shouldered my bike up the stairs, panniers and all, to be greeted by a tall, skeletal crow of a woman grimly shaking her head and one hand.

  Still not quite understanding how this was happening to me, or why it had to happen to me now, I found a phone box and rang Birna. The blathering torrent of self-pity was by this stage a staple of our telephonic encounters, and she listened patiently as, dispensing with respiration or punctuation, I stated that I was in a town with no hotels, that she had the hotel book, and that having cycled 94,000 miles I had forgotten how to speak French. ‘You want me to find a room for you, then call you back,’ she précised slowly, and with the now traditional lack of grace I agreed.

  Five minutes later the phone box rang. ‘I’ve found you the last room in Troyes,’ said Birna. I made a little noise like a puppy being reunited with its mother. ‘But there is one problem.’ And then having its tail stamped on. ‘It’s not actually in Troyes.’

  The lady Birna had spoken to at the Holiday Inn Forêt d’Orient said her establishment lay 13 kilometres from Troyes. In theory this information should have led me to explore further avenues. It was a warm night; I could have dossed down in a park. I kept feeling that in my condition I shouldn’t have cared where I slept. But I did. I cared passionately. I had done something exceptional and I wanted a reward. ‘Tell them I’ll be there in half an hour,’ I muttered, and having scribbled down directions off I went into the night.

  Thirteen was a lot of kilometres, particularly because – and you’re going to love this – they involved retracing my journey right back up the N19. On passing the outlying hypermarkets I entered a dark world whose secrets were not about to be revealed by my feeble little flashing lights. Intended, as I now realised, solely for urban commuting under street lamps, these were memorably inadequate in the rural environment. The moon was more use. It was terrifying. My only fellow road users at this hour – and by now it was gone midnight – were enormous double-trailer lorries avoiding motorway tolls, roaring past with a what-the-fuck-are-you-doing-out-here blast of their foghorns.

  I was relieved to turn off the N19, but not for very long. The trees rose up about me and blocked off the moon; if the roads hadn’t been almost dead straight I’d never have made it. I could barely make out the fingerposts at all and, when I did, the only way to read them was to shin up the pole and hold my flashing light an inch away from the lettering. An owl hooted. I ran over something pulpy. There were other sounds. I hadn’t seen any signs of life for an eon. The suggestion that somewhere in this wooded wilderness lay a Holiday Inn was an outrage against logic. Wolves – certainly; vagrant lunatics – odds-on; a solitary cleated foot emerging from recently disturbed soil – well, the night was young.

  Thirteen was a lot of kilometres, but it wasn’t quite as many as 22, which is what I learned I had covered from Troyes after an incongruous pair of illuminated roadside globes welcomed me up the drive of the Holiday Inn Forêt d’Orient. That made it 279.7 for the day. I fumbled and bumbled through the dark ranks of BMWs and clumsily manipulated ZR through the automatic doors. Two sturdy young men were bent over a pool table in the downlit gloaming; behind them a bald barman stood washing glasses. To my left the night receptionist was already eyeing me with something beyond interest, and as the three other faces angled towards mine I slapped my free hand against my left buttock and in a surprisingly mellifluous singsong, said, ‘A welcome sight at any time.’

  And ten hours later I was back in Troyes.

  Seventeen

  It was interesting to note how unremarkable I felt waiting on the platform for the 11.39 to Paris. Cyclists from Lance Armstrong to Terry Davenport invariably discovered at least one inner truth about themselves in the eye of some desperate ordeal. ‘I met a guy up on that mountain who I grew to kind of like, and do y
ou know who that guy was? That’s right: it was me.’ That sort of thing. But looking back over the already slightly unreal events of the past twenty-four hours, the only epiphany I could claim to have experienced was this: some mornings, even five croissants are not enough.

  Though actually there was something else. Wheeling ZR back out through the Holiday Inn’s automatic doors and into the misty sun I’d seen a roomful of sales-conference delegates staring bleakly into their Styrofoam cups as a bald man drew pie charts on an overhead projector; one of them turned to me as I cleated up and as our eyes met we both understood an important truth: however wretched my day might be, even if it meant going back to Belfort and back his was going to be far worse.

  Troyes had not surprised me by looking rather better by day: haphazard, half-timbered streets opening into well-scrubbed, geometric boulevards, a Gothic cathedral, market squares – a proper French town; the kind of place you wouldn’t mind being twinned with, especially because every time the maire came over you’d be able to go on about the post-Agincourt Treaty of Troyes that recognised our own Henry V as heir to the French throne.

  There were two tourist offices, and lured by window displays of bikes and jerseys and ville d’étape posters I visited them both. I didn’t expect much, and I didn’t get it – not even a souvenir bidon. But at least this time the ignorance was cheerful, and the lady at the second place did endeavour to help by telling me I’d got my helmet the wrong way round, even though I hadn’t.

  It was here I learned that it might indeed be possible to take my bike on the train, and so at least vaguely emulate the Tour riders, who would transfer by Orient Express to Paris for the final stage, a circuitous roam about the capital followed by the traditional mad scramble of laps up and down the Champs-Elysées. After painstaking ticket-office conversations and timetable consultations, I established with as much certainty as any tourist can hope for that the 11.39 to Paris Est was a service on which accompanied bicycles could be carried free of charge.

  The 11.39 was one of those Sixties efforts with a windscreen that sloped the wrong way, the only sort I’d imagined being allowed to take a bike on, but it creaked up to the almost deserted platform on the dot and with difficulty I bundled ZR aboard.

  ‘Eh! Non! Eh! Monsieur! C’est interdit!’

  There were rapid footsteps and further cries and suddenly two inspectors were outside on the platform, gesticulating at the driver and yanking my door handle. Someone had already blown a whistle and there we were, having a tug of war through an open door with ZR as the rope. I’d been wondering when the monstrosities of yesterday would catch up with me, and now I knew. There was little physical resistance and less mental: a four-armed yank and ZR was on the platform; a slight shove from an onboard official behind and I joined her.

  ‘Oh, c’est joli, le maillot,’ said one of the inspectors, dusting off my jersey as the train awoke with a long, rusted yawn and moved slowly away. ‘Un rétro?’

  His kind, trustworthy voice was so unexpected and disarming that I somehow found myself quietly discussing Merckx, Simpson, Bernard Thévenet and other Peugeot riders of yore when by rights I should have been well entrenched in a physical confrontation whose final scene would see me bellowing the terms of the Treaty of Troyes as the gendarmerie dragged me down the platform by my ankles. As the pair gently escorted me out of the station I did halfheartedly draw their attention to my pocket timetable, and in particular the little bicycle symbol next to the 11.39, but they both just smiled and nodded like uncles being shown their small nephew’s inept artwork. It didn’t really matter. There was an Avis office almost next door and in half an hour I was shooting past fields of lilac opium poppies, a handlebar in my ear, hairless thighs sticking to the hot upholstery of an Opel Corsa.

  In one way it was a shame not to be cycling into Paris, not to see the Eiffel Tower taking shape on a hazy horizon and gradually reeling it in with each portentous turn of the pedals, but in most ways it was not. Everyone was getting sweaty and bad-tempered as I approached the outskirts – it was no place to be on a bike. The signs warned pedestrians to cross in two stages, but the way things were going it was more likely to be two pieces. After turning off the périphérique ring road it got worse, and the apparently straightforward task of finding a hotel and parking the car required me to commit several dozen motoring offences, from illicit U-turns to driving the wrong way down a one-way street. On the pavement.

  The hotel, near the Place d’Italie in the city’s unfashionable south, was unsatisfactory to the point of outrage. It looked no worse than grubby from the outside, set in a street behind an enormous hospital and flanked by the sort of dirty-windowed, faceless government offices you could only imagine being responsible for the most obscure bureaucratic pedantries: issuing crab licences, approving artichoke export quotas, plotting the wholesale assassination of environmental activists.

  A big-faced man with a moist neck made me pay up front before entering my name with difficulty in his soiled register of the damned; as I trod carefully towards the lift he issued a two-tone grunt of dissent and without looking up thumbed at a dark stairwell. My fourth-floor window overlooked a forgotten courtyard full of dead pigeons and an avant-garde installation entitled One Hundred Years of the Fag End. Inside, the view wasn’t much better. The wardrobe was the size of a child’s coffin and contained a vegetable. Rolling back the tramp’s blanket on a bed of institutional design, I beheld a pillowcase that might have been used to filter coffee. But of course it hadn’t: after all, what’s the bathroom towel for? Still, clicking off the Bakelite switch with wet hands I wished I’d used it. The shock was so violent it flung me halfway to the bed – not bad seeing as the bathroom was a shared one right down the end of the corridor.

  But do you know what? I simply didn’t care. I didn’t care because it reminded me of the tawdrily romantic hotels I’d patronised during my first teenage visit to Paris. I didn’t care because it was cheap. But mainly I didn’t care because I was setting out into a flawless summer evening with a bottle of pink champagne inside me, and because having put it there in a very small number of minutes I was already strangely untroubled by the negative aspects of my environment, and because the reason I had put it there was because I had done it. I had gone all the way round an enormous country, all the way across Europe’s hugest range of mountains: 2,952 kilometres, with almost 10 per cent of them in a single historic day. I had done all these things, and here was the bit I still couldn’t get over as I jostled out into the zigzagging scooters and the apple-polishing Turkish grocers and the mincing old women walking their Pekineses: I had done them on a stupid bloody bicycle.

  Feeling smug and splendid and world-famous, I promenaded luxuriously up to the Place d’Italie. It was remarkable that somewhere so humdrum by Parisian standards – this was just one of the minor étoiles, those vast roundabouts where boulevards converge – could seem the epitome of Continental sophistication in British terms. The nearest equivalent in London would be some brutalist concrete nightmare, a gyratory wasteland such as the Elephant & Castle. But here there was space and light and the huge glass wall of a daring new cinema complex and cobbles and ashlar and bars with outside tables: a proper urban focus for a proper urban community.

  Sweden were playing Turkey and the local supporters of the latter team were out in force, filling the bars to the rafters and standing on chairs outside to get a view of the telly. It was all terribly exciting. I had a peek through one door and in seven loud seconds established that far post was ‘deuxième poteau’ and that Ross from Friends was playing on the left side of the Turkish midfield. And it was good to hear that even in such an environment, ‘ooh la la’ remains the exhilarated Parisian’s default expression.

  I found an outside table at a bar that wasn’t showing the game, next to two old men almost inevitably playing chess. Lovers were sitting on the statues around us, stroking each other’s warm faces in the 9 p.m. sun, and as my tall glass of cold beer arrived I surveye
d the scene with the avuncular fondness of the reasonably plastered. But then, succumbing to this same group’s vulnerability to wild swings of emotion, I suddenly felt a profound sadness. A snapshot photographed by my eyes the previous day was belatedly developed in my brain, and as it took shape I found myself looking at three teenage girls silently sharing a Coke outside a bar flanked by abandoned homes in a decaying rural town strung carelessly along both sides of a thundering main road.

  How could you expect any young person to put up with a life like that when they could be having a life like this? The girls were mentally thumbing a lift from anything that passed – they even plotted my weary passage through their lives with glum envy – and one day soon someone would stop and pick them up and they’d be off. It was tragic to think that when the Tour first visited Londun or Obterre, or Carpentras or Chaumont or a thousand semi-derelict towns in between, each had been as vibrant as this in its own modest way, each had its own thronging Place d’Italie. But industrialisation and social mobility and any number of other demographic phenomena had lured people away to the cities, and even those rural towns that weren’t just slinking off to die alone were doomed. They’d pay their million francs and string up their bunting and resurface their mini-roundabouts, but when the Tour came to town, that one day of sex and speed would only serve to highlight the snail-paced, strait-laced parochialism of the other 364.

  I made my way back to the hotel, as wistful as it’s possible to be with a leaking kebab in your mouth. The traffic was still insane at 10.30 and I knew that my final trans-Parisian stage would be feasible only at dawn, and that consequently I should go to bed straight away.