French Revolutions

tortured by the cool bottle whose contents
he dare not even dab to his own cracked lips. ‘Where have you been?’ tuts Bobet
as his mobile factotum breathlessly un-stoppers the bottle for Monsieur
Louison’s convenience; then, peering at the label, shrieks, ‘And you know very
well I hate that brand!’
    But even Bobet, even Merckx, even I
in my wildest dominatrix fantasies, could never quite aspire to the autocratic
excesses of René Vietto, France’s first King of the Mountains. Some months
before the 1947 Tour, troubled by a septic toe, Vietto asked his doctor to
remove the offending digit: ‘Take it off,’ he breezed. ‘I’ll be lighter in the
mountains.’ Extreme behaviour, I think you’ll agree, but for René this was only
the warm-up act. Training for the Tour, he sidled up to his trusted deputy Apo Lazarides and had a quiet word. Apo was an unusually impressionable fellow; the year
before, leading the peloton by a country mile up the Izoard, he was seized with
a fear of imminent attack by wild bears and stopped to wait for the rest to
catch up. Behaviour such as this may have made him vulnerable to René’s more
lunatic whims: though we may never know what was said between the pair, the
fact of the matter is that Lazarides also set off from Paris in 1947 one toe
short of a shoe-full, and walked with a limp until the day he died.
    I broke out of formation with a
cheeky ‘As you were, men!’ then arced round to the lakeside bar. Paul was
sitting under a parasol, bike propped against the quay wall, shades on,
surveying the glorious vista. In one hand he held what was full enough to be
his second beer, and in his other — this was better than I dared hope —
smouldered a small cigar. ‘That was quick,’ he said with a happy, lazy smile,
and I felt a twinge of regret for what I was going to do to him. But it soon
passed, and I heard myself say, ‘Well, you’ve got time for another, then.’
    ‘What — beer or cigar?’
    ‘Well, Switzerland starts just up the
road and everything’s going to treble in price,’ I said, squinting at the
white-crossed red flags hanging limply on their poles by the distant border
post. ‘Better make it both.’
    Evian was hardly Detroit, but
crossing the frontier the contrast was astonishing. Fresh, flat tarmac slipped
smooth and silent under our wheels; the fields looked as though they had been
ploughed by craftsmen working delicately with small trowels. We didn’t see any
roadside rubbish for an hour, and even then it was a can of Italian beer.
    But at the same time the cycling
experience was diminished. In France, riding two abreast is accepted practice,
but as I chatted to Paul about this and that — this being the importance of
smoking a lot of cigars while cycling, and that being the added benefits of
doing so while riding at the front — we were furiously honked at four times in
ten minutes.
    That the perpetrators were invariably
hidden behind smoked glass which shook to the amplified beat of the power
ballad was the first indication of an unlikely truth: the semi-rural Swiss male
fancies himself as a bit of a lad. Over the next two days we saw hundreds of
strutting young men proudly displaying the tight jeans, rolled-up jacket
sleeves, flicked-back tonsorial splendour and threadbare moustache of the prize
arse. Additionally, every town seemed to have its own sex shop — sadly, not one
of these was called The Alpine Horn — and though at first we thought it was a
one-off customisation job, repeated sightings eventually persuaded us to accept
that Volkswagen had officially released a special Swiss edition of its
best-selling product and entitled it the Golf Bon Jovi.
    The road levered upwards, and looking
ahead I saw spots of perspiration moistening my domestique’s back as he fumbled
with his gears. Settling comfortably behind him, I recalled a recent
conversation that only a stern sense of duty prevented me from sharing with my
domestique. ‘The col des Mosses? Ooooh, that’s quite a climb. I’m going to give
it a go one day — maybe next July.’ I’d been discussing my itinerary at the
breakfast table with an American who seemed involved in some way with the
running of our hotel, but because he was both older and balder I hadn’t been
overly concerned. The col des Mosses was only a category two, after all: the
Tour’s last big hill, maybe, but only a hill.
    Between neatly terraced vineyards we
climbed, boy racers screaming round hairpins