French Revolutions

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 fourarmed 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’ltalie 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