French Revolutions Read online

  Looking like Bernard Hinault giving birth to a cement mixer I made it to the village at the top, distantly grateful that because this was a mid-afternoon in France there was no one around to see me. At Poitiers I’d filled both my 750-millilitre bottles – or bidons, as I would quickly be bullied into calling them – and already they were empty. It was 40 broiled and brainless kilometres before I found anywhere to refill them, a grotty bar in Angliers through whose nicotined net curtains I could see a clutch of Tuesday-afternoon regulars sitting before little glasses of fluorescent aperitifs.

  Until the Seventies it was a Tour tradition for riders to conduct lightning beverage raids in bars like this when the race passed through, tolerated and even eagerly awaited by the proprietors. As a silly-looking English tourist I hadn’t anticipated the same reception, but as soon as I stumbled in with an empty in each hand the place came to life. Dogs barked; a vein-faced farmer raised his glass and muttered some well-meaning alcoholicism; the fulsomely moustached barman wrestled the bottles from me and filled them with a blend of iced water and orange juice (‘Pour les vitamines,’ he said with a genially conspiratorial wink). After a long draught of this mixture I realised the presence of humanity offered a belated opportunity to establish whether my made-up route to Loudun was in any way accurate.

  ‘La Tour de France passe par ici?’ I said, another rehearsed phrase that would be given regular daily outings – though not quite regular enough for me to establish that by not saying ‘Le Tour’ I was in fact enquiring whether the tower of France would be passing through. Either way, however, the barman was not lying when, by means of the shaking head, the shimmied hand, the clucked palate and many more of the Frenchman’s considerable armoury of negative expressions, he indicated that this was not so. ‘La Roche-Rigault,’ he said, slightly wistful for both our sakes at the near miss. It was a name I’d been seeing on signposts all afternoon.

  Villages lobby for months or even years to be included in the itinerary: the towns that host the start or end of a stage pay the Tour organisers vast sums for the privilege. There is enormous prestige in being on the Tour route, but after the endless preparations – wholesale civic redecoration, new car parks – race day itself, as evidenced in the various reports I’d watched on Channel 4 over the years, seemed wilfully harrowing. First comes the grotesque cavalcade of promotional vehicles – mobile cereal packets and giant oranges manned by merchandise-hurling, garage-calendar blondes – before the riders themselves hurtle through in seconds, an alarming multicoloured swarm bookended by hooting and swerving support vehicles, police vans and motorcycle cameramen. It’s like spending a year getting dressed up for a big date and then being showered with tacky gifts, rudely groped and roughly dumped all in the space of an afternoon.

  The poor French. Cycling was their national sport, and they’d become rubbish at it: no winners since 1985; not even a stage victory for the last two years. I’d laughed about it before, but looking at the faces around me I realised how painful the last fifteen years must have been. ‘To a country obsessed with a fear of demographic decline, economic failure and military defeat,’ I’d read in an American account of the 1984 Tour, ‘the Tour de France offered a comforting image of Frenchmen as tenacious, strong and swift.’ Those were the days. In recent years their footballers had won the World Cup and the European Championships, but the average homme in the rue would have traded both of those for a native Tour champion.

  Payment was proffered but flamboyantly shunned, and driven on by the dank, electrical whiff of a brewing thunderstorm I reached Loudun so quickly I almost rode straight through the place. Beginning at stage two’s start point and ending at the right finish, I had done 104 kilometres – 65 miles – including my 16-kilometre stage-one car-park prologue. As the actual total for stage two alone was 191 kilometres, this did suggest that the corners I’d cut in between were generously angled, but at the time I really couldn’t have cared less. I’d gone from A to B, exceeded my recommended daily 80 kilometres, and I had survived. Despite spurning the Savlon, there didn’t seem to be any boiled eggs nestling among the usual contours down there; my buttocks had just about held their own in the battle of wills with the saddle. A quick flutter of the eyelashes – not a twinge, Mr LeMond. Having said all that, I usually find the time to take some of my clothes off before getting into bed, and don’t often do so at 5.45 p.m.

  Horribly disorientated, I woke up two hours later with my abdomen pleading noisily for rectification of a huge calorific deficit. The Ibis at Futuroscope could have been almost anywhere, but taking belated stock of my immediate surroundings it occurred to me that I was now definitively in a French hotel. Balding flock wallpaper, knackered wooden shutters, carpet that exuded visual and olfactory evidence of having been licked by a dog rather than vacuumed, and under my aching neck an unyielding bolster pillow the size and weight of a drugged publican. Dopily I washed my shirt and shorts in the basin, then wrung them dry in the spare towel – an old pro’s trick picked up from Paul Kimmage’s book (how monstrous it seemed that, having flogged themselves half to death in the saddle, peloton riders were expected to relax by laundering their own filthy kit in a hotel bidet). Then, round-shouldered and espadrilled, I shuffled out to inspect the town that from the afternoon of 2 July to the following morning would be the focus of the sporting world’s attention.

  By being rather ugly and boring, Loudun offered the first suggestion that towns prepared to pay apparently large sums for brief glory as a ‘ville d’étape’ – one where a stage ended or began – were invariably hoping to rectify some sort of image problem. The threatened thunderstorm had come and gone during my slack-jawed coma, leaving the messy streets wet and empty; the only sign of life was a lot of bad-tempered shouting from a snooker hall under the scary hotel that I’d tried first and was delighted (not to say astonished) to be told was full. The Rough Guide could find no reason even to mention Loudun in the course of its 1,124 pages, and it wasn’t hard to see why. From the trolleys upside-down in the pot-holed supermarket car park to the sombre ranks of dirty-windowed nineteenth-century terraces there was the drab, neglected air of a place where there was nothing to do and yet so much to be done.

  A lot of the small towns I’d passed through that day had introduced their unique attractions beneath the road sign that welcomed you in: Ouzilly – ses parcs, Lencloitre – son château. Approaching Loudun the locals were getting desperate: son camping was the best one place could do; the next could only manage son parking. Loudun itself gave up altogether (though did proclaim to visitors that it had been twinned with a town in Burkino Faso, presumably because no one else would have it). Outside a bar near the centre, however, I did see an ad for a modest casino wooing punters with the memorable boast son craps.

  There were National Front posters on most of the many abandoned houses; the youth whose parents once occupied these places had presumably gone off to the Big Smoke, or at least the small puff that was Tours, 60 kilometres to the northeast. The few who remained now cruised mournfully about in sorrily customised, black-glassed old Renaults souped up by the traditional bucolic expedient of long-term exhaust neglect. Hordes of discarded blue flyers rain-glued to the pavement suggested that the place to go for club-style nightlife was Morton, which I later noticed was a tiny village over 20 kilometres away. Having perused the local estate-agent windows it wasn’t hard to conclude that however tempting the possibility of trading your poky little London flat for a huge nineteenth-century château with turrets and woodland, you probably wouldn’t want to do so if it meant having to do the weekly food shopping in Loudun.

  Still, they were trying. After an aimless fifteen minutes of rather zombie-like, malnourished blundering, I eventually found myself in what must have been the old town, up on a slight hill, its narrow, meandering streets brightened with fountains and frantically scrubbed limestone. And wandering at random into a cellar crêperie, I pondered that though there isn’t much to be said for being marooned in a dead-duck, d
ead-dull town, at least in a French one you get to eat well. Around me, even on a wet Tuesday night, shifty, sniggering kids were doing it en masse, clinking glasses of rosé and tossing their salades vertes, whereas in England they’d have been hanging dimly around a bench with a damp bag of chips, trying to think up a new way of melting stuff.

  With the tolerance that the mean and hungry man experiences on finding himself presented with a large plate of cheap food, I set about a Bible-sized lasagne in a mood of rapprochement. The NF posters were old and faded. The Burkino Faso link imbued the town with a sense of exotic mystery. The arrival of the Tour would resurrect Loudun’s flagging fortunes and unite the dispirited populace; thinking about it, even my hotel had been getting ready for the big day, or anyway thrown all its old carpets out into the back garden. Brushing aside the deleterious effects of three thousand calories on an empty stomach and four glasses of red on an empty head, I even attempted to enquire of the unkind-looking waitress what the Tour meant to Loudun. She stared grimly as I floundered through my syntax, then delivered a wordless answer that was both inscrutable yet somehow eloquent: the bill.

  On my unsteady way back, I found the hotel I should have stayed in, all burnished stonework and chandeliers. On going up to the porch to see what it would have cost – actually only three quid more than my rusty-bidet job – I incidentally learnt something else. There, photocopied from a local paper dated two weeks previously and taped to the window, was a detailed map of the stage route as it passed through the region. With the idiotic phrase ‘beeeeeeg secret’ looping around my brain, and soon trilling idiotically out of my pursed lips, I knelt down on the wet stone stairs for a closer look. After Loudun the Tour headed off northwest to Nantes; because this route quickly took the race out of the local département of Vienne, there were no details beyond the first few kilometres. But after trooping up to Brittany, it wound back through Tours four stages later, proceeding down to Limoges. The minutiae of this section were displayed in full, and as standing water soaked slowly through my trousers I avidly scribbled down the relevant village names on the front flap of my Michelin map: Chambray-les-Tours, Loches, Verneuil, Saint-Flovier, Azay-le-Ferron.

  Still muttering darkly to myself, I set off towards my bed under an angry sky. Old tramp’s bottoms to the press officers of France. What was wrong with these people? Why, I asked myself, could they not have told me what they told the Arse-end-of-Beyond Advertiser a fortnight earlier?

  Sighing and blaspheming, I sheltered under a Peugeot garage canopy as the first spots of rain fell. It was 9.30, but a group of old fellers were still playing pétanque in a sliver of parkland up the road. Only when forked lightning split the sky and the thunder started booming against my chest like drum ’n’ bass did they pack their boules into little briefcases and set off home, cursing foully into their Obelix moustaches. One stormed splashily into a huge, crippled house right opposite me, emerging two minutes later, amid harsh female laughter, wearing a parka and leading two silly little dogs. I’d now been under the canopy for twenty minutes and, galvanised by the presence of other life on the street, made a run for it. This was a mistake, and one that could not be fully undone by sheltering under a short tree next to the pétanque court. The storm was now a real brown-sky drainpipe-gusher, a tempest whose ratcheting fury soon shredded much of the vegetation from my arboreal umbrella. It was a bad time to be wearing espadrilles, particularly when I looked down and saw a small canine leg cocked over my feet.

  Three

  They say cheats never prosper, but whoever they are they can’t have done much cycling in France. The first ever bike race was held in Paris in 1869 (won by an Englishman, James Moore, who I’m delighted to claim as my great-great-grandfather, even though he wasn’t), and it didn’t take long for sportsmanship to be superseded by gamesmanship. Bidons, then made of glass, were deliberately tossed over shoulders to puncture the tyres of following riders; fans were on hand with handfuls of tacks if that should fail. Riders stole all the ink from checkpoints so that their pursuers would be penalised for failing to sign on. The winner of the inaugural 1903 Tour, Maurice Garin, was disqualified after finishing first in the 1904 race when it emerged that he had employed the unimaginative but devastatingly effective measure of forgoing his bicycle in favour of a railway carriage during some of the longer stages. Indeed the next three finishers were also stripped of their honours, two of them for being towed uphill by cars trailing corks which they popped between their teeth. Itching powder in rivals’ shorts, spiked drinks, altered road signs – it was all a bit Wacky Races.

  Another popular trick was to saw through important parts of a rival’s machine while he slept, something I’d been peripherally mindful of when asking the hotel proprietor to lock my bike in his garage. The early riders always took their bikes up to their hotel bedrooms, a measure recommended by Richard Hallett to combat theft rather than sabotage, but one I’d have felt much too peculiar both requesting (‘Yes, we’ll take the honeymoon suite’) and experiencing (‘Budge up, ZR, it’s always me who gets to sleep in the oily patch’).

  I suppose it’s becoming obvious that I am about to justify an act of mountainous deceit as being merely the carrying on of a long and proud tradition. Sitting alone at breakfast, pouching bread and jam and tapping my cleats on the cold, old tiles, I looked out at another grey day, a sky of clouds barrelling along on a potent westerly. Was I really going to head into the teeth of this dispiriting unpleasantness, hauling my panniers of wet espadrilles up to the coast of Brittany on a route I’d be making up as I went along, away from the sun and the Alps and everything else the Tour was about? Or was I about to do a Maurice Garin, sticking my bike on a train to Tours and rejoining the race four days on, where at least I’d be pedalling down roads I knew were the right ones?

  Every time I pored over the procycling Tour map the same tempting thought had nagged me. Snip that irritating little loop off; make the route look more like the Grande Boucle it was supposed to be and less like a dropped shoelace. On the other hand, I’d be pruning 634 kilometres from the itinerary, and though this still left 3,000 kilometres, 634 was a lot whichever way you looked at it … A fold here, a tear there, and the procycling map was effectively doctored. Time for recriminations later. I had a train to catch.

  In a sport riddled with chicanery, it’s inevitable that the best cyclists are also the best cheats. Maurice Garin probably wouldn’t have planned Operation Choo-Choo in a tourist-information office two hours before the stage started, and so probably wouldn’t have found himself being told: ‘Zere is no train for … passagers. Only is for, uh, marchandises, oui?’ Sigh. I looked at the map: it was an 80 kilometre ride to Descartes, where I could rejoin the route of stage seven. Accepting this as a form of penance (and one whose blow was softened by the realisation that if the weather persisted I’d be pushed there by a hefty tailwind), I made a slight fainting sound, then remembered the other reason for my presence in the office.

  ‘The Tour is important for Loudun?’

  The woman at the counter had reacted to my entrance as if she’d been locked up there since 1974, and was indeed dressed accordingly. Once the initial wide-eyed alarm had receded, she spoke with the nervous deliberation of someone hearing their own voice for the first time. ‘Yes … zis ze, uh … first time Loudun is ville d’étape.’ Was it to boost tourism? ‘Non. No. Uh … Loudun is une ville bicyclette.’ It is? With a start I realised I had not encountered a single rival cyclist – not even an old bloke in a beret with a pig in his panniers – since setting off. ‘Ze maire is, uh, passionné du vélo.’ Was he around today? Non. Did the town have to pay for the privilege? Oui. How much? Enormement. Would the teams be staying overnight here? Non. Poitiers. Only sree hotels ici à Loudun. (Tell me about it, love.)

  Sent on my way with a shy but genuine ‘Bon courage’, I followed her directions to the finish line for stage two and the start line for stage three, the only parts of the route granted to Loudun’s tourist officials by th
e fickle guardians of the Beeg Secret. The Place du Portail Chaussée, the stage three start line, was studiously unassuming: a silent, open thoroughfare bordered by a whitewashed billiard hall (une ville snooker, more like), a petrol station and a driving school in whose window plastic toy cars shared a dusty cardboard roundabout with many dead insects. Now I understood why Loudun looked the way it did: the ruler-straight roads that converged there from far afield suggested it had made its name as a transport hub back in the Napoleonic days, and all that late-nineteenth-century architecture showed the railway age had given it another boost. When the autoroutes came and the railway went, Loudun was suddenly surplus to requirements.

  Picturing this scene thronged with cosmopolitan crowds, commentators and sporting superstars required not so much a mental leap as a triple jump. The night-before’s finish straight, the service road for a half-built industrial estate round the back of the (hawk, spit) station, was a barely more credible stage for the world’s biggest annual sporting event. The Avenue de Ouagadougou (clearly named either after something Burkino Fasan or the leftover letters at the end of a Scrabble game) had the sole benefit of linear uniformity, though even this was compromised by a huge sweeping turn about 500 metres from the end. Even I could see this causing problems for the sprinters, whose boisterous competitiveness makes a flat stage’s final kilometre powerfully reminiscent of the film Rollerball.

  But on the way out of town, hitting the dead-straight road to Richelieu with the wind behind me, I realised Loudun fitted perfectly into the whole ethos of the Tour de France. It was an ideal counterpoint to Futuroscope’s mirrored-glass ultra-modernism, the other side of the franc. The idea that an ugly duckling could be a swan for a day was touchingly romantic, and it was a credit to the people of Loudun and their passionné mayor that they had invested so much to make this dream come true. I just hoped that when it did they’d all have woken up.