French Revolutions

leaking as I set about the buffet with the gusto of the
slightly hungover. Surveying a table groaning with cooked meats, cereals, fruit
and cheese, I realised how deeply poxy French breakfasts were, how even in a
flash French hotel you only got a couple of croissants and a foil-topped
preserve. Breakfast was One of the Good Things About Switzerland — not, let’s
face it, an unwieldy list. The only entries I’d managed so far were the nice
little crests on car number plates and public conveniences that were both clean
and not peopled by brazen cockwatchers — surprising, perhaps, in the land that
spawned Oscar Plattner’s Flying Circus.
    Groggy with calories, we agreed the
meeting place and left my family to occupy their final fall day abroad. It was
a glorious morning for Paul and me, a glorious day in fact: an endless parade
of sun-dappled, chuckling brooks; of wild flowers and tailwinds; of doe-eyed
cows in verdant pastures and doe-eyed blondes in Mercedes convertibles. We
raced narrow-gauged trains through narrow-gauged villages, rattling along at
such effortless speed that we only noticed that the gorges and peaks and
cliff-top castles had gone when we sneaked off the Tour route at Bulle and
looked behind us.
    ‘I suppose that’s the end of the Alps,’ said Paul, and he was right. I’d never realised how flat are vast tracts of the
Swiss landscape. For the next two days the worst you could say was that it
rolled, but even then only gently. With the mountains gone the cyclists
returned, again generally retired ones, and in our new co-operative relaying
formation we fairly flew past them all with a taunting vigour that Paul seemed
to find uncharitable.
    ‘It’s dog eat dog with these old
blokes,’ I insisted stoutly as we ate big pieces of meat by a fountain in
Payerne. ‘Give them half a chance and they’ll make you suffer.’
    He looked at me the way he had when
I’d deserted him halfway up the col des Mosses, then ordered a farther pair of
beers.
    Swiss people generally prefer not to
say anything at all, but of those who do, only 18 per cent speak French.
Unastonishingly the Tour route had been designed to meet most of them, and for
the last day and a half the towns Paul and I had pedalled tended to kick off
with a La or a Le and take in at least a couple of acute accents. Murten seemed
to mark some sort of boundary. Beyond it were a sea of achs and umlauts and
reckless overuse of the letter z; just before it everything was confused —
there were villages whose names started off French but lost their nerve right
at the end: la Corbaz, Greng, Faoug.
    Murten itself was the front line, and
the German-speakers had dug in deep. Along its meticulously preserved medieval
streets, a chevron-shuttered shop-front stood out between the witch-hat towers
and Gothic script and flagstoned fish shops, ‘ boucherie / charcuterie’ read the gilded glass sign
above, but decades of rust crusted the shutter padlocks and the upstairs
windows were cobwebbed and flaky. The butcher had clearly been Murten’s final
Frenchman, and it was tempting to picture him being drummed out of town by a
baying Teutonic lynch mob. But this was not the Swiss way. All that day I’d
been surprised to notice that the French-Swiss villages welcomed visitors with
one of those blue ‘Commune d’Europe’ signs ringed with the EU’s stars. I would
have thought Switzerland was about as likely to apply for EU membership as to
host the start of the next round-the-world yacht race, but there these signs
were, presumably a symptom of some fundamental socio-political split cleaving
the French community from its dominant German-speaking counterpart. In almost
any other country this would have expressed itself in an ugly orgy of ethnic
cleansing; here, they’d settled for a light dab with the cultural duster.
    The hotel was excellent, partly
because of the turrets and stone staircases and terrace overlooking a watery
sunset, but mainly because my room had a huge circular bed with a headboard
stereo encased in a sort of limestone and leatherette inglenook. So proud were
the proprietors of this splendidly misplaced feature that they’d put a huge
photograph of it outside their dungeon-style front door. ‘Something is missing
from this picture...’ teased the multilingual caption beneath it, following up
with a strident ‘you!’ that
conjured images of Lord Kitchener frogmarching alarmed honeymooners up the
stairs.
    I was asleep in my