French Revolutions

lion-hearted
incorruptible, the one who got on his bike instead of getting off it. Humbly
thanking Eugène, I went upstairs, changed into my jersey and shorts, came back
down, cleated myself into ZR and headed for the hills.
    The D17 out of Massat was thin, steep
and so quiet that dogs slept on it. With the sun working on the wet greenery
you could smell photosynthesis going into overdrive: Jan had given up her
vegetable plot after weeding it became a painting-the-Forth-Bridge job, and
Nick said hillsides like this one were regularly buzzed by police helicopters
looking for pot plantations. It was almost tropical up there. I nodded at a
couple of ageing hippies on their corrugated veranda; three blokes pretending
to fix a barn roof jeered, ‘Eh — le Tour est arrivé!’ as I rounded the hairpin
alongside. The road dipped slightly, then pitched radically upwards, but even
as it did so I became aware of an important fact: I was not slowing down. The
D17 climbed through a dark arc of woodland and I climbed with it, looking down
at my back wheel to note that I was only in gear twenty-four, three shy of the
bottom of the barrel. The trees petered out and suddenly there it was, a yawning
360-degree panorama of perpendicular pastures and snow-veined granite that
swept all the way across to Spain.
    My heart felt like bursting, but not
for the reason I had become accustomed to on reaching such altitudes. Reaching
the brow of the col de Saraillé was a religious experience: I am healed; I can
see; in conquering the savage beauty around me I have, in fact, become its
creator. The climb had not been a calvary but a road to Damascus, one that had
converted me to a self-believer. For the first time in over twenty years I
raised both my hands from a set of handlebars and punched the blue sky.
    On the loop back to Biert up the
gorge I stopped at Castet-d’Aleu for a celebratory coffee at an excellent
bar/shop, where an unbelievably old man presided over dark cabinets of pre-war
preserves. Was it the lack of panniers, I wondered as I sat outside watching
the traffic, or the additional rest, or the brevity of the day’s 3 3-kilometre
itinerary? Probably all three, but none of them played any part in the conclusion
I arrived at during the course of a bitter, beetle-black coffee and what would
have been a complimentary chocolate if the old man’s old wife hadn’t nicked it
while I was in the loo. I had gone off that day to search for the hero inside
myself, and somewhere up on the col de Saraille I had found him. To return to
Pyrenean Pursuits and be obliged to dismiss my climb in casual terms was a very
hard thing to do.
    On this basis, it was a shame that in
the pitiable depths of my long, dark night of the soul I’d already committed
myself to more cheating. Biert was a good 60k off the route of a stage which
dead-ended at the unpromising town of Revel, from where the riders would take a
plane transfer across Languedoc to Avignon (alight here for Mont Ventoux).
Birna had not been required to use all of her powers of persuasion to convince
me on the phone to bunk off the bit to Revel, and had even, as a call from her
that morning revealed, booked me a hire car to drive myself from Toulouse airport to Avignon.
    I would get to Toulouse by train, or
rather I wouldn’t, for as Nick established during an epic sequence of
chair-bitingly contradictory telephonic encounters with assorted transport
officials, of the three trains a day which would accept bicycles, an impressive
seven were affected by wildcat strike action. Of the remaining five, six were
redirected to Barcelona, though the front two carriages of the other four would
proceed to Carcassonne, arriving eleven minutes before they had left. ‘I’ll
drive you,’ said Nick; I instantly protested at this further act of generosity,
but not for very long.
    We left the next morning, my body
still processing a snails ’n’ quails gourmet extravaganza that had made an
additional mockery of Pyrenean Pursuits’ 250F-a-night half-board tariff. Rhys,
now infected by the Zen-like inertia that apparently governs many an Ariègeois
lifestyle, was planning to stay a few more days, cooling his heels and more
particularly their adjacent ankles. A serendipitous phone call from Nick’s next
guest, an American called Mike, asking to be picked up at Toulouse airport,
made me feel slightly better about his 200-kilometre roundtrip, and proved an
additional boon when it became clear that the