French Revolutions

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 doubletrailer 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 you 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