French Revolutions

the Japanese tour groups and the pee-stained alleys,
away from a juvenile populace who for two nights had competed with such
diligent distinction at moped polo, played in the traditional Provençal fashion
with beer bottles instead of mallets.
    A warm wind whipped the café awnings
as I emerged with a discreet whoop of liberation through the city walls at
Porte Thiers, and — bless my frothing bidons — it was behind me. Mixing it
cavalierly with every caravan and coach and camion blanc homme I pedalled
slickly out of town at 40 k.p.h., muttering my own respectful commentary on
Moore’s smooth, effortless style as he pulls away from the peloton on this flat
but sunburned thirteenth stage to the military town of Draguignan.
    Fresh new tarmac shaded by poplars;
garish cherry orchards edged by rustling, house-high bamboo groves; luminous
vineyards with tiny, newborn grapes like bunches of broccoli. At Robion I even
took the uphill, downwind sprint, standing up in the saddle along the
dead-straight, tree-lined boulevard to pip a farmer dawdling along in his
foolish microcar.
    Like a thousand partisan spectators
the wind pushed me up a fourth-category climb to the crest of the long, low
Montagne du Luberon, from where tight, tall Italianate hill villages looked at
each other across the plain. Nearly all were cute, Bonnieux the most painfully
so just as long as you didn’t mind the bijou art galleries and estate agents
and Austrian number plates, and most particularly paying three quid for a can
of Coke. A huge, lorry-licking descent into a granite canyon, all dead snakes
and air brakes, then a ham baguette of reckless proportions by a fountain in
Lourmarin, a knot of narrow streets that opened on to a sort of oversized
village green backed by one of the haughtiest châteaux I’d yet seen.
    The wind was getting slightly out of
hand now, spinning rotary signs outside petrol stations into a deafening
turbine frenzy, sending waiters across pétanque squares in pursuit of airborne
parasols. But so what? It was behind me. A mistral in full howl plays havoc
with the Tour: in 1969 it blasted straight into the riders at 70 k.p.h.,
persuading the organisers to let everyone hide behind their team cars, and two
years later blew Eddy Merckx and 200 hangers-on into Marseilles so far ahead of
schedule — 250 kilometres at an average speed of over 45 k.p.h. — that no one
was there to greet them. By the time mayor Gaston Deferre turned up two hours
later to present the prizes, Eddy and co. were in the shower back at their
hotels; Deferre could have taken this humiliation badly, but being French he
merely vowed that the Tour would return to Marseilles only over his dead body.
(After twenty-seven consecutive visits up to 1971 the race next visited
Marseilles in 1989, three years after Gaston’s last gasp.)
    More screaming fighter jets buzzing
the barns, a bollock-bullying stretch of cobbles, three kids riding waywardly
home from school on a moped — I flashed through villages, in and out of slow
lives at glorious speed. At Pertuis, which I had only previously been aware of
in an onomatopoeic context as the noise Snoopy makes when orally expelling an
unloved foodstuff, I even managed to intimidate a trucker who drove me off the
road. When I jumped up on to his footplate at the next set of lights, battered
his window and described in detail some of the more surprising aspects of his
lifestyle, he just did what I always do: stared straight ahead and clicked down
the central-locking button with a discreet elbow.
    I crossed the gaping river Durance at
Mirabeau, the monstrous fluvial power that once sliced out the gorge around me
now castrated by hydroelectric schemes and canals. At Saint-Paul-lez-Durance
the Tour route veered away, perhaps to avoid doing what I now did — namely,
cycling right through the middle of a nuclear-research complex the size of Berkshire. The French really are a bit funny about this sort of stuff. I still cannot quite
believe that over 70 per cent of the nation’s electricity is produced by
nuclear power, nor that there is almost no opposition to this state of affairs.
When their secret service blows up Greenpeace boats so that France can test its nuclear bombs in the Pacific, Parisians just snigger like Muttley. Mind
you, it never pays to delve too deeply into French politics — flicking through
the Rough Guide I discovered that two-thirds of the adult population are
in favour of deporting legal immigrants