French Revolutions

wordless answer that was both inscrutable yet somehow eloquent: the bill.
    On my unsteady way back, I found the
hotel I should have stayed in, all burnished stonework and chandeliers. On
going up to the porch to see what it would have cost — actually only three quid
more than my rusty-bidet job — I incidentally learnt something else. There,
photocopied from a local paper dated two weeks previously and taped to the
window, was a detailed map of the stage route as it passed through the region.
With the idiotic phrase ‘beeeeeeg secret’ looping around my brain, and soon
trilling idiotically out of my pursed lips, I knelt down on the wet stone
stairs for a closer look. After Loudun the Tour headed off northwest to Nantes; because this route quickly took the race out of the local département of Vienne, there were no details beyond the first few kilometres. But after trooping up to Brittany, it wound back through Tours four stages later, proceeding down to Limoges. The minutiae of this section were displayed in full, and as standing water soaked
slowly through my trousers I avidly scribbled down the relevant village names
on the front flap of my Michelin map: Chambray-les-Tours, Loches, Verneuil,
Saint-Flovier, Azay-le-Ferron.
    Still muttering darkly to myself, I
set off towards my bed under an angry sky. Old tramp’s bottoms to the press
officers of France. What was wrong with these people? Why, I asked myself,
could they not have told me what they told the Arse-end-of-Beyond Advertiser a
fortnight earlier?
    Sighing and blaspheming, I sheltered
under a Peugeot garage canopy as the first spots of rain fell. It was 9.30, but
a group of old fellers were still playing pétanque in a sliver of parkland up
the road. Only when forked lightning split the sky and the thunder started
booming against my chest like drum ’n’ bass did they pack their boules into
little briefcases and set off home, cursing foully into their Obelix
moustaches. One stormed splashily into a huge, crippled house right opposite
me, emerging two minutes later, amid harsh female laughter, wearing a parka and
leading two silly little dogs. I’d now been under the canopy for twenty minutes
and, galvanised by the presence of other life on the street, made a run for it.
This was a mistake, and one that could not be fully undone by sheltering under
a short tree next to the pétanque court. The storm was now a real brown-sky
drainpipe-gusher, a tempest whose ratcheting fury soon shredded much of the
vegetation from my arboreal umbrella. It was a bad time to be wearing
espadrilles, particularly when I looked down and saw a small canine leg cocked
over my feet.

Three

     
    They say cheats never prosper, but
whoever they are they can’t have done much cycling in France. The first ever bike race was held in Paris in 1869 (won by an Englishman, James
Moore, who I’m delighted to claim as my great-great-grandfather, even though he
wasn’t), and it didn’t take long for sportsmanship to be superseded by
gamesmanship. Bidons, then made of glass, were deliberately tossed over
shoulders to puncture the tyres of following riders; fans were on hand with
handfuls of tacks if that should fail. Riders stole all the ink from
checkpoints so that their pursuers would be penalised for failing to sign on.
The winner of the inaugural 1903 Tour, Maurice Garin, was disqualified after
finishing first in the 1904 race when it emerged that he had employed the
unimaginative but devastatingly effective measure of forgoing his bicycle in
favour of a railway carriage during some of the longer stages. Indeed the next
three finishers were also stripped of their honours, two of them for being
towed uphill by cars trailing corks which they popped between their teeth.
Itching powder in rivals’ shorts, spiked drinks, altered road signs— it was all a bit Wacky Races.
    Another popular trick was to saw
through important parts of a rival’s machine while he slept, something I’d been
peripherally mindful of when asking the hotel proprietor to lock my bike in his
garage. The early riders always took their bikes up to their hotel bedrooms, a
measure recommended by Richard Hallett to combat theft rather than sabotage,
but one I’d have felt much too peculiar both requesting (‘Yes, we’ll take the
honeymoon suite’) and experiencing (‘Budge up, ZR, it’s always me who gets to
sleep in the oily patch’).
    I suppose it’s becoming obvious that
I am about to justify an act of