French Revolutions

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 book-ended 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