French Revolutions

stockpiled tears and a clumsy
dismount.
    Seeing this, the Transit man jogged
over with a look of concern. He placed one hand on my shaking shoulder, the
other on ZR’s crossbar, and displaying a characteristic intuition for le mot
juste said, ‘Da?’
    What a kind man, I thought, what a
good man, and then, because fatigue had changed parts of my brain, I thought
how confused and upset he would be if I opened one of those bottles of
antifreeze and poured it down his shirt.
    ‘Da,’ I replied, and oddly began to
feel better. After all, 48k was only ten shy of the total; despite the
intrusions of traffic management I’d covered three times my prologue distance
at a significantly higher speed. It was all right. Five minutes later I went
back into the shop and spent my last deutschmarks on two cans of Red Bull and
some toothpaste I would shortly discover tasted of crushed Rennies. As I gingerly
remounted again, the guy with the towel emerged and intriguingly disappeared
into a flat-tyred caravan that was clearly a long-term feature of the quiet end
of the enormous lorry park. Then, in no particular hurry, I went back to France.

Sixteen

     
     
    Mulhouse was the end of the
time-trial stage, but the next one started from Belfort, 45k to the west, or
rather 60k by the time I’d become imaginatively lost amid the teenage snoggers
in a maze of dead-end allotments. Under melting leaden skies and with a beastly
wind pushing the whole countryside in my face, those late-afternoon kilometres
tolled by with agonising sloth. Looking at the map now I can still remember
every town: Reiningue where there was a cow loose in the maize fields;
Bernwiller where I was respectfully applauded by an exiting congregation;
Balschwiller where a crow pecked horribly at two roadkilled fox cubs.
    Grovelling along it occurred to me
that although these disordered assemblages of roofless barns were unthinkable
over the Rhine, every town without exception bore a stridently German name.
Crossing the Rhine-Rhone canal, now a good 50 kilometres inside France, I spotted a roadside shrine of some antiquity dedicated to ‘Herr Jesus Chrisms’.
Until 1919, all this land, the area known as Alsace-Lorraine, had been German
territory. Seeing a memorial to ‘Nos Enfants, 1914-18’, I realised that the
enfants in question would have been wearing spiky-topped helmets and laying
down their lives for the Kaiser.
    Reasoning it would at least be flat I
followed the bleak canal for a bit, the bullrushes bent double towards me. But
then the towpath ended and it was back across the damp, darkening hills, past
an ostrich farm, past a dozen spaced-out ravers sitting by their cars in a
lay-by, past an old bloke tipping the rain off his patio furniture and waving
at me so cheerily that despite myself I got up on the pedals and gave him a bit
of a show.
    It was almost night when, with 131
kilometres on the clock, I wound wetly into Belfort past the floodlit bulk of a
mighty red fortress that stared down at the town from a steep hill. A jumble of
distant, amplified sounds and rain-blurred floodlights suggested that something
was going on.
    The upside of my visit coinciding
with the Fourteenth World Festival of University Music was the looming
opportunity to eat huge kebabs in a bracing sea of lithe young bodies. The
downside was that the only hotel with any rooms left was called The Grand Hotel
of the Golden Cask. The receptionist, presiding over a colonnaded lobby that
led, eventually, to an opera-house double staircase, watched me wheel ZR
towards her across the marble with an expression that eloquently betrayed an
internal debate pitching human charity against decorum. It was the sort of
dilemma you might face, I suppose, upon seeing the caretaker being
extravagantly unwell while slumped on the pavement after your office party.
    ‘La Tour de France passe par ici?’
    It was the only time it ever worked.
Her long face lit up, and in English so astonishingly good that I instantly
forgave her for using it before I did she began to hold forth, or possibly even
fifth.
    ‘Yes, absolutely, the Tour is
departing from here for its…’ and here she slipped in the savouring smile of
someone about to say something clever in a foreign language ‘ penultimate stage on July the twenty-second. You are interested in the event?’
    I explained my quest, and when I had
finished she tilted her head, smiled a different smile and said, ‘Chapeau!’
    I could have kissed