A Traveller's Life (31 page)

A country with a working class which has largely fled the land, leaving a train of deserted or semi-deserted villages, as any visitors to France can see for themselves. Many of them succumb to what is known as
la Tristesse Ouvrier
, a malady described by one French writer (Georges Navel) as ‘a kind of pervasive depression induced by the claustrophobia, monotony, fatigue and insecurity of factory labour and by a continuing nostalgia for country ways'.

A country with a capital which in spite of years of what has been called
gaullo-destructiomanie
still contrives to be the city of which Flaubert wrote, ‘an ocean in which there will always be unexplored depths'. A city in which a
toubib
is a doctor, a
pote
a friend, a
panier à salade
a police car.

The French, whatever changes are taking place in their way of
life, are still a people who believe in work well done, in craftsmanship, which has its origins among the peasantry. They have a genius for the production of prototypes, what the
hauts couturiers
call
modèles
or
toiles
; less interested until recently in the dissemination of copies
en masse
.

A people of infinite resource. They have given birth or are popularly supposed to have done so, especially among themselves, to the aeroplane, suppositories, the submarine, Colette, the soufflé, Chanel Number Five, Wagons-lits (a wagon-lits is a wagon-lits, even if its owners insist on calling it a
schlafwagen
or a sleeping-car), Château Yquem, Tintin and Milou and the Vuitton trunk.

The French are still capable of writing in Michelin in terms of self-congratulation of their best restaurants as no other people in the world would dare, or have the right to, except the Chinese, who resemble them in their contempt for foreigners and in the intimate solidarity of their family life.

A people with the oldest colonial tradition in Europe who built up one empire, lost most of it and then started all over again to build another, the second biggest in the world, in which no one in what the empire builders called La France de la Métropole was ever very interested. Voltaire's description of Canada as a ‘few square miles of snow' was not only witty but typical of what les Métropolitains felt about it. In the thirty years since the war I had followed many of the trails that they had left: in the New World where they had opened up the country from the Atlantic to the Rockies and as far south as New Orleans and the Caribbean, on the feverish coasts of South America, in Syria and Lebanon, where descendants of Scandinavian pirates who had remained long enough in La France de la Métropole to become assimilated before taking off for Hastings, Sicily and the Levant, had left their mark. And I had seen the remnants of their stations on the Hooghly, at Chandernagore, and on the coast of Coromandel, at Pondicherry,
where Indian policemen in
kepis
still trilled away, just as if it was half past five in the Place de la Concorde.

I admire them, but like so many of my fellow islanders, I find it difficult to be friendly with them. They are too prickly.

By this time it was dark.

Day 3

Set off at 6.30 a.m. Huge moon above, freezing eye-level mist below. Descended into the beautiful valley of the Eure and followed it to its junction with the Aunay, a lesser stream. On the way discovered that I had left a satchel containing all my money and travel documents on a fence in a village while adjusting a brake. Went back five kilometres and found it still hanging there. Then followed the Aunay almost to its source emerging on another prairie, the Plaine de la Beauce on which the name of almost every village terminates in ‘-ville'. Memorable luncheon in a fantastic, untouched peasant interior, La Croix Blanche at Oysonville, about nine francs. Afterwards slept in a ditch – it was terribly hot – and then plunged into the Fôret d'Orléans, eighty-five thousand acres of beech, elm and ash, something which, thanks to the Forestry Commission, we will never see the like of again in our islands, and travelled through them down interminable grassy rides that were like something in a beautiful dream. Stayed the night at the Hôtel du Châteauneuf-sur-Loire which was cheaper than it sounded, having covered one hundred and sixty-eight kilometres. How much nicer French hotel and pub keepers – even quite grand ones – are to cyclists than many of their British equivalents met last year cycling across England.

Day 4

Crossed the Loire in freezing weather and rode upstream on the embankment towards Sully where I bought a large wound-dressing
in a
droguerie
for my bottom, which now had more than one hole in it, with blood all over the place; and which, without a mirror, I stuck on with some difficulty behind a hedge, before riding south along the edge of the Collines Sancerrois. The sun was hot now: had a delicious mini-picnic under a tree, small, ripe melons and a bottle of cold Sancerre.

7 p.m. Arrived at Dun-sur-Auron, south-east of Bourges in the department of Cher, having covered one hundred and thirty kilometres, just in time to have a hot shower in the municipal bath-house down by the river near the camp site where I then pitched my tent. Excellent dinner at the Hôtel de la Poste, Patron, M. Bresse, F8.50 plus wine.

Day 5

Left at 6.30 a.m. As always cold early, hot later. To Charenton along the edges of the Bois de Meillant, another noble forest. Ghostly white druidical-looking cattle – I suppose they're Charollais – in the fields, swathed in fog. Breakfast at a woodman's cottage in the great Fôret de Tronçais – home-cured ham, wine, freshly-baked bread and fresh butter, served by handsome, slim woman who wanted to come with me to Italy. What is the French for tandem –
tandem
?

Next, terribly hard hilly stretch through the outer defences of the Massif Central to La Roche Bransat where I lunched
chez
Madame Meunier, ideal place and food for tired cyclists – fresh fried eggs and tomatoes with herbs, steak and dollops of creamy potatoes, three kinds of cheese, fruit, a litre of wine, coffee, ten francs. She also had
chambres
. Pity it wasn't evening. Afterwards again slept in a field, ostensibly to dry tent which every morning I have to pack wet because of the heavy dew. Then wasted a lot of time trying to avoid cycling on terrible N9 to Clermont-Ferrand. Failed to do so and ate marvellous home-made ice
cream at Gannat. The heat was appalling. Although I carried cold water in three thermic bottles they were so heavily insulated that there was hardly any room in them for any water. During these days I was doing about thirty kilometres to the bottle of beer or else to a
bière au pression
which was much better – cycling under such conditions is expensive. Finally left the horrible N9 at Aigueperse and arrived at dusk at the Hôtel de la Gare, St Beauzire, having covered one hundred and sixty-eight kilometres by my cyclometer. There was no longer a
gare
or a
chemin de fer
, but there was a stone trough in the back garden full of cheerful, naked
routiers
soaping and washing themselves all over, and I joined them.

No room at the inn, but ate copious, excellent lorry man's dinner for ten francs, and drank copiously, too, before pitching tent in the orchard; bombarded all night by falling apples. Hotel had a weighbridge and when they put my bike on it the scale turned at ninety kilos – can this be right?

Day 6

Cycle fifteen kilometres to Clermont-Ferrand to find Les Usines Michelin hidden away in vast Zone Industrielle. Courteously received. Bought three tyres and three tubes – not going to be caught again. Then they whizzed me in a van to the shop of M. Thomas, crack cyclist who had just returned from cycling to Czechoslovakia and whose hand-built bicycles were works of art. Here M. Thomas adjusted the
enveloppe
with his own hands. Saw from the map that because of having come to Clermont-Ferrand I could never now arrive at Alessandria in four days. It was over four hundred and twenty kilometres by way of the Massif to the Col de Larche where I planned to cross the Alps into Italy – this meant three days to Gap and probably another three to Alessandria, it was difficult to say. After agonies of indecision and
disappointment I decided to take the train to Valence, and from Valence to Gap.

At the station at Clermont-Ferrand the staff tried to make me remove all the luggage from my bicycle before accepting it as accompanied luggage. I was lucky to travel on the same train with my bicycle – a rare event in France and Italy where not all passenger trains have luggage vans and the bicycle either goes on ahead or arrives later. For this reason, travelling with a bicycle in France by train, it is essential to have pannier bags with connecting carrier handles so that you can carry them, otherwise you are left on the platform with a mound of immovable impediments.

Dark when I got to Valence, a nightmare place in what was still apparently the holiday season, in the valley of the Rhône. Worse even than Montélimar – the town of nougat further downstream – where even the door knobs are sticky with the stuff. Town full of what the French call
cars
and I call enormous coaches. In the holiday season it is impossible either to eat well or sleep cheaply in such places, and probably at all other seasons as well. At the Restaurant des Gourmets I ate the worst meal I had ever eaten in France – significantly I was the only customer; and at the Hôtel des Voyageurs, on the advice of Michelin, I slept in a rotten room that cost a monstrous F37.40 (£2.80 or $6.70).

Day 7

To Gap up the beautiful valley of the River Dôme, passing the source of it en route. Wished I had had time to ride this section but although it was not difficult and there was very little traffic it was more than one hundred and fifty kilometres uphill and would have taken me at least a day.

At Gap I got my bicycle back and rode past an enormous, unlovely, artificial
lac
– the shape of holiday places to come, formed by damming two rivers, the Ubaye and the Durance, and covered
with
amateurs des sports nautiques
. Then up the valley of the Durance to Mont Dauphin, an astonishing fortress, a little world really, as remote as the Potala, built of pink marble and set high above it on a vast, flat-topped rock. Very late lunch at a restaurant next door to the station at La Durance, in the valley below. F12 (90p or $2). Delicious trout.

Now began the twenty-seven-kilometre climb to the Col de Vars in the lowest gear, thirty-six inches, which is not really low enough for this long, in many parts more than nine-degree ascent which is part of the Tour de France, but about the lowest obtainable at that time with a Campagnolo gear. Laden with camping gear I really needed a thirty-inch gear; but finally I wound my way up the endless hairpin bends to St Marcellin-de-Vars, a village among stands of larch with great snow-covered
pics
looming up beyond its pastures. Stayed at the Auberge Vieille which was as old as its name implied – and very cheap – where I was given a marvellous welcome. They washed all my clothes and then dried them overnight in a red-hot cellar.

Day 8

Left at 8 a.m. Gruesome stretch to St Marie-de-Vars through terrain ruined by winter-sport developments, which look even worse in summer when denuded of snow. Then through a wilder nine-degree stretch up to the Réfuge Napoléon which looked genuinely refuge-like and then to the Col itself (2109 metres) with the huge, sawn-off Brec-de-Chambeyron (3390 metres) rising above the other peaks away to the east in the boundary range between France and Italy, followed by a breathtaking, freezing, eight kilometres, multi-hairpin descent, losing more than six hundred and thirty metres of hard-won altitude on the way down to St Paul-sur-Ubaye, followed by a further seven kilometres descent through weird slate defiles to the N100, which is the main
road from France to Italy by way of the Col de Larche. In the course of this descent from the Col de Vars I saw only one other human being: an elderly cyclist, like me
en tourisme
, pushing his laden bicycle fifteen kilometres uphill to the Col de Vars in carpet slippers. Very hot uphill stretch of eleven kilometres, at first through a dangerous-looking region in which all the rocks seem to be falling to pieces above the Ubayette River to Larche, where the French customs man didn't even bother to look up when I passed. Then a long, long climb through high pastures, the weather becoming colder and colder and more and more windy as I approached it, to the Col itself, a terrible sight with freezing cloud streaming over it, the wind so strong that on the way up to it I was blown off my bicycle and forced to walk the last kilometre or so – the first hill since leaving Wimbledon I hadn't ridden. Visibility nil at the frontier – which is 1994 metres up – and after attempting to attract the attention of a solitary, demoralized
carabinieri
sitting in a hut, whom I thought might offer me some sort of refreshment and, him failing to do so, I began the descent into Italy with chattering teeth, down an interminable, brutally potholed road in streaming rain to Pietraporzio on the River Stura, where I was given a warm welcome at the Albergo Regina delle Alpi (which was not much to look at from the outside but inside was filled with local people),
pasta e fagioli
(pasta made with beans) and lots of good wine from the Langhe in the plains of Piemonte, all for L1800 (90p or $2).

7 p.m. Reached Borgo San Dalmazzo after pedalling steeply downhill for fifty kilometres into the teeth of pouring rain and wind from the east so strong that I had the illusion of pedalling uphill. Put up at the Albergo Barra di Ferro, a what was by then in Italy almost extinct sort of caravanserai with a galleried courtyard, having covered one hundred and forty kilometres, as many another wet and weary traveller arriving from France by way of
the Col de Larche must have done. It also had a wonderful cook. Dinner L2000; room L1500.