French Revolutions

causing
problems for the sprinters, whose boisterous competitiveness makes a flat
stage’s final kilometre powerfully reminiscent of the film Rollerball.
    But on the way out of town, hitting
the dead-straight road to Richelieu with the wind behind me, I realised Loudun
fitted perfectly into the whole ethos of the Tour de France. It was an ideal
counterpoint to Futuroscope’s mirrored-glass ultramodernism, the other side of
the franc. The idea that an ugly duckling could be a swan for a day was touchingly
romantic, and it was a credit to the people of Loudun and their passionné mayor
that they had invested so much to make this dream come true. I just hoped that
when it did they’d all have woken up.
    I’m sorry to go on about the wind,
but it really did make me very happy to coast at such nonchalant speed across
the flat fields of green wheat, the rustling sheaves all bending with me
towards Richelieu. Men in berets smoking on huge log piles; dogs with their
paws up on a tractor dashboard; a literally steaming barrow of ordure: if it
hadn’t been for the lorries this could have been the inaugural 1903 Tour.
    Probably because I’d been more
concerned with monitoring my physical condition, I hadn’t really noticed the
traffic before. It had certainly become obvious that French drivers treat
cyclists as fellow road-users, indicating as they overtook and pulling
respectfully right over to the other side of the road while doing so. There was
never any of the impatient revving of engines, no I’m-bigger-than-you cutting
up or jeers of the ‘Get off and milk it, you dozy twat’ variety that make
cycling in Britain such a high-octane experience.
    But despite their best intentions,
the huge articulated vehicles that are a universal feature of the French
landscape couldn’t help but scare your cleats off when they passed. First the
huge bow-wave of air they displaced would shove you forcefully towards the
gravelly verge; then, a powerful vacuum suck of slipstream pulled you violently
back towards the centre of the road. It was horrible. I’d read that, as a boy,
Bernard Hinault used to train by racing lorries up hills, and remembering this
as a sixteen-wheeler buffeted me into the fag packets and roadkill I realised
he must have been even madder than he looked.
    Richelieu was splendid, a proper walled town with moats
and gates and a beautifully proportioned square. The whole lot was built by the
famously horrid cardinal, bane of Porthos, D’Artagnan and Oliver Reed and one
of history’s moustache-twirling baddies. There were plenty of Tabac le
Cardinal-style reminders of this, though I’m not entirely sure he would have
approved of the huge branch of Intermarché, a supermarket chain that oddly
styles itself ‘The Musketeers’ (check out their ‘all-for-one’ offers).
    It was, in fact, a bit of a
seventeenth-century day. A majestic classical façade facing the N10 at Les
Ormes, fronting nothing, as deceitful as a film set; huge timber-beamed
marketplaces reinvented as pétanque courts in almost every village. Pedalling
over the first old Tour graffiti — fading emulsioned exhortations to French
favourites Jalabert and Virenque, more general war cries of ‘Vive le Tour!’ — I
breezed into Descartes, another Renaissance town with pyramid-roofed turrets
(it changed its name from La Haye in honour of its most famous son, the man who
thought and therefore was). Lunch was taken at an outside brasserie table, ZR
locked to one of the many statues of the famous philosopher with his
Sweet-style hairdo, both of us watching the farmers’ wives putter home in their
odd little two-stroke microcars, baguettes poking up over the passenger seat.
Understanding that Loudun had been an aberration, I thought how lucky the
French were to be able to take all this history and grandeur for granted. In
almost any other country Richelieu and Descartes would have been sightseeing
meccas; in a land spoiled for choice they were also-rans. The Rough Guide had nothing to say about either.
    Lunch could be considered the
highlight of the day and by far the most important meal, and that afternoon I
patented the formula. The breadbasket was emptied before the patron arrived to
take my order, invariably the plat du jour (in this instance a
plate-overhanging ham omelette) with a side order of French-fried carbohydrates
and a salad. Even on a tepid, windy day like this, fluid was ingested with
reckless lust: half a litre of Badoit, and