French Revolutions

of
these over the years, but the one that really stuck in my mind focused on a
Belgian couple holding a long, hot roadside vigil on some uninspiringly flat
stage.
    Mr Belgium, emulating his many
surrounding peers, settled down at a folding table to consume pastis with a
gusto that belied the hour. If he got to bellow aniseed-spittled encouragement
into a hero’s hot face it would have been a good day; if he remembered having
done so, even better. But his wife was working to a different agenda. All
morning Mrs Belgium had toiled morosely in the motorhome, assembling sandwiches
for her unsteady husband and generally defining the adjective long-suffering;
then there was a distant volley of silly musical horns and as a sort of Mexican
cheer spread slowly up the road she rushed to the tarmac, clapping her hands,
slapping her haunches and constructing facial expressions consistent with a
triple jumper psyching himself up at the start of his final run-up: the free
crap is coming.
    A motorised tub of potted meat; four
fibreglass racehorses frozen in mid-gallop on the roof of a Citroën; a mobile
oversized gas bottle; a two-stroke globe with leering Michelin men strung round
its equator; a coffee cup on wheels. Some of these vehicles and all the others
were manned, in addition to the driver, by a couple of weary blondes hurling
complimentary merchandise into the crowd, and the ugly feeding frenzy that
occupied the next minutes of footage showed Channel 4 viewers the unacceptable
face of audience participation.
    Dazed and craven, Mr Belgium beat an early retreat. Blundering haphazardly from the scrum clutching an armful of
swag, his sagging features fell further as he laid it out on the camping table:
junk-mail brochures for car insurance or cubic zirconium jewellery, vouchers
entitling him to bugger-all off his next packet of cack. What had happened to
the packets of sweets and key rings, the cycling caps and yellow food-bags, the
sachets of coffee and Camembert portions and sausages and windscreen
sunshields? He didn’t know, but having watched the truth emerge through Channel
4’s all-seeing eye we did: everything, absolutely everything of any value had
been caught, scooped, plucked or snatched by the darting form of Mrs Belgium.
One moment she was diving full stretch to grab a packet of first-aid plasters
from in front of an old man’s cupped hands; the next she was screaming in the
face of the Michelin blonde as if that promotional bottle opener was her
birthright. Everything had her name on it. Through a forest of beseeching hands
it was hers alone that came away clutching a France Télécom baseball cap; when
a neighbouring Dane took a flying videotape in the guts and went down, there
she was, snatching it from his side like a battlefield corpse-robber.
    She was the star but there were some
glittering cameo performances. A sockless loafer stomped proprietorially on a
mini frisbee; a woman with a face like a spat-out toffee held a small child up
to the cheesemobile, screaming ‘Pour mes enfants!’ in the manner of a Balkan
beggar. Some sort of moped-based Norse god of the sea chugged past dispensing
small items of unpromising aspect wrapped in cellophane; a man in aviator
Ray-Bans scooped one up and yelled, ‘Saucisson — magnifique!’ Children were
dispatched into the road on insane crap-catching missions, plucking caps and
biros from the small gaps between vehicles. As the last biro-hurling bath-tub
puttered laboriously away through the pines and the crowds, Mrs Belgium puffed out her cheeks, aimed a rearwards nod at her mountain of merchandise and
announced to the camera, ‘Une bonne récolte.’ A good harvest. I mean, I
appreciate a cascade of free crap as much as — no, much, much more than — the
next man, but it takes a special sort of front-line foolhardiness to mix it
with the Mrs Belgiums. It ain’t what you get, it’s the way that you get it.
    The Tour riders were to leave Dax at
10.45 a.m., setting off an hour and three quarters after the publicity caravan.
I gave myself a 2 5-minute head start and settled down into a rhythm
appropriate for the considerable heat: slow enough to maintain on a slight
hill, fast enough to get a breeze down the unzipped front of my humid jersey.
    As the roads got narrower and the
villages smaller, so the Tour preparations seemed to gather impetus. At Habas,
three separate gangs were doing flower-beds, road markings and telegraph-pole
creosoting; every tiny hamlet