French Revolutions

chorus of ‘Happy Birthday’. The tomato/monkey/zoo version.
    It was very difficult to believe that
the Tour riders were expected to do Tours-Limoges in one day. A single hill
seemed to slog on for a lifetime; the previous afternoon’s incident with the
mad binwoman of Obterre was like a recorded childhood memory, yet the pros
would have taken only three hours to bridge Obterre and Limoges. I kept
thinking about the riders who weren’t sprinters or climbers, managing to win
races on determination and stamina alone. ‘Hard men’ they were called, almost
officially, and if you could bully your bike and body more brutally than most
you might even aspire to the ultimate accolade of ‘super-hard man’.
    The last haul to Limoges was one for
the super-hard men, a lot more ups and a few more downs, though they might have
skipped the bonus round of squatting under the porch of an abandoned hovel
waiting for the rain to shut up.
    I can’t think of many cities that
don’t look worse in a downpour, except maybe Atlantis, but by any reckoning Limoges was unappealing. ‘Not a city that calls for a long stay’ was the Rough Guide's tart assessment, and squeaking and splashing through the rush-hour it was easy
to see why. Limoges was one of those places bodged together out of a job lot of
leftover drab suburbs, with the sort of city centre you passed straight through
without noticing. The china that made the town famous is no longer
authentically produced — the kaolin mines were exhausted long ago — though this
didn’t stop a succession of souvenir shops displaying racks of plates garishly
decorated by graduates of the Weeping Pierrot school.
    Without wishing to extrapolate too
much from my limited contact with them, I have to report that the people of Limoges came up rather short on the awareness front. Keen to find the route of tomorrow’s
stage, south to Villeneuve-sur-Lot, I popped into a bike shop to catch fifteen
minutes of The Vacant Proprietor , and the over-staffed and
under-customered tourist office seemed profoundly sceptical of the concept of
buildings with bedrooms and restaurants that tourists could stay in.
    I did find a hotel in the end, up a
loathsome wet trunk road whose gradient confirmed the unlikely truth that,
flying in the face of conventional civil-defence wisdom, Limoges’s founding
fathers had opted to locate their town in a huge hole in the ground. The Hôtel
Belvedere was named after its attractive view of many lanes of Toulouse-bound
traffic, but the restaurant looked respectable enough — at least until I’d sunk
a birthday bottle of fine wine and begun to do slightly fatuous things with the
little ‘Boeuf Limousin’ flag that had been speared into my steak. By the time
the crème caramel arrived I was waving it happily at an elderly Dutch-sounding
diner at the next table.
    Cointreau number two coincided with
the arrival of half a dozen middle-aged and moustached men, who greeted the
room with slight nods and a ‘Bonsoir, m’sieurs, dames’. This extravagant
display of respect, coupled with their whispered but earnest gastronomic
discussions — agonising over vintages, asking the waitress if the goat’s cheese
was local — led me to wonder fuzzily if they weren’t a party of retired Tour
pros on a reconnaissance mission, a sort of warm-up brigade of sporting
ambassadors. Only after I completed the painful ascent to my room — why did I
keep ending up in the flaming attic? — did I find the truth, looking out of the
window to see a phalanx of France Télécom vans in the hotel car park. Phone
engineers with social grace and epicurean connoisseurship — it was enough to
make you forgive an entire nation of spiteful press officers and tourist-board
nellies. Providing that you had then gone to bed without watching telly.
    Tuning into a late-night documentary
about the Ariane rocket launch in French Guiana, my first thought was the
recollection that there had been talk of staging the 2000 Tour prologue on the
French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, a 13,000-kilometre round trip for a
20-minute bike ride. Though this was cancelled on logistical grounds, the fact
that it was seriously considered served as a reminder of how colonial France
remains — imagine the FA Cup final being staged in the Falklands — as well as
showing the evident relish with which the nation markets the Tour as an
international showcase of France’s global importance. Along the roads I’d seen
regular