French Revolutions

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 obsession
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 fiaccidly 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 Rhone 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.
    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 Côte 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