French Renaissance

by Jeremy Whittle

  In the kitchen, I grind some coffee beans – ‘Carpe Diem’ from TOMS Roasting Co., on South Congress Avenue in Austin, Texas. I’d developed a taste for Carpe Diem during my four-day sojourn to see Lance Armstrong. I flew home with a rucksack stuffed with the beans.

  I’ve always liked the little homilies, the unintended double entendres that permeated the lexicon of the Armstrong myth. ‘Go hard or go home’ or ‘Ride like ya stole something’ and, of course, ‘Carpe diem’.

  ‘Man, that fuckin’ mountain. Carpe diem, dude . . .’

  Somehow, when I got back to the Ventoux, Carpe Diem felt like the right bean to be drinking. Now, however, I was halfway down the last packet and feeling anxious. But at the end of the ride I was planning that day, it was unlikely that my brand of coffee would make much difference.

  A decade or two earlier, the knot in my stomach might have been caused by the prospect of attempting the Ventoux twice in one day, as in the Tom Simpson randonnée. But today it was caused by the thought of a Tour of Ventoux – a long, lone ride of over 120 kilometres around the base of the mountain, through gorges and over low passes, down lonely valleys, past deserted villages and then back, through Malaucène and into Bédoin, hub of ‘Ventoux country’, before the final climb home to a hot shower and a welcome beer.

  Even after all the years spent on the road, travelling and covering bike races, I struggle to think of a more scenic route: through the Gorges de la Nesque, on beyond Sault and into the Toulourenc valley and up the Cols des Aires and Fontaube – corniche climbs familiar from Paris–Nice and the Dauphiné, with striking views of the Ventoux’s stark north side – before heading over the Madeleine climb and, finally, back up the hill to Blauvac.

  These are beautiful roads, and perhaps my favourite roads in all the world. It is a route with a little of everything: steady, big-gear roads, some long descents and some well-graded climbs. But I’d never completed the circuit on one day. I knew it would never be harder than when it’s 27 degrees at eight in the morning. That’s because you know it will be reaching the high thirties by mid-afternoon, when the blue sky bleaches to off-white, as if the furnace is too much even for the heavens to bear.

  Simpson died on such an afternoon, in what became the defining moment in the history of a mountain so daunting that it killed a man in the toughest endurance event in sport. That day though, it was even hotter and said to be nudging 42 degrees.

  For once, I’ve put in the miles. Nothing scientific has been done, there’s been no lab testing, power meters or wind tunnels; instead I’ve trained à la Pantani – on feel alone. I’ve lost a little weight in the spring, done some hill repeats and ridden decent distances. I’m far from quick, but I am steady. I know I can handle the distance: it’s the heat that worries me.

  After I’ve changed, I open up the freezer compartment in the fridge and pull out two bidons. I drop them into the bottle cages on the bike. They’re both frozen solid, but I know they will be tepid after the first hour or so of riding. I cram two fruit bars, a banana and some caffeine gels into my back pocket. I pull on a gilet and zip it up halfway. I’ll keep it on all day, despite the temperatures, zip undone for the climbs, pulled up for the descents.

  I hate the aftertaste of the gels – ‘spunk bags’, as a friend calls them – but they’re a necessary evil sometimes and they seem to work, albeit briefly. Over in the Toulourenc, the long, remote valley road in the shadow of the Ventoux’s north side, there are few villages or cafés and it’s unlikely any will be open on a Sunday. There, or in the rolling valley roads through the Baronnies hills – that’s when I am sure I will need the gels.

  Lastly, I pull on a plain white racing cap, just like I would have done back in the day, back in the alpha-male 1980s, when wearing a helmet marked you out as a ‘soft-cock tosser’ – as the same friend once said – rather than a responsible and intelligent adult. I need the cap to shield me from the blinding sun moving across the cloudless sky. The helmet sits on top. There’s a few minutes of perfunctory stretching before I pull on my shoes and I finally leave the house at just after eight.

  My legs are tight and the first pedal revs climbing up through Blauvac village sting a little but once past La Calade, the restaurant by the church, where a couple sits drinking coffee in the shade, I am warmed up. To my right, the Monts de Vaucluse give way to the irrigated flatlands stretching beyond Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, towards the Bouches-du-Rhône, while on my left the humpback of Ventoux dominates the skyline.

  I ride through the avenue of plane trees on the approach to Villes-sur-Auzon, their root systems buckling the verge of the road, passing the wine cooperative run by Éric Caritoux’s brother-in-law, Bruno. There’s a smell of baking and coffee in the still, hot air as I ride through the village. I turn right, leaving Villes, and pedal towards the Gorges.

  The climb begins steadily and my heart rate adjusts. After a few minutes I hear voices over my shoulder. A chiselled group of six, in VC Monieux jerseys and white arm warmers, spin past with a single muted ‘Bonjour’. I think about accelerating and tagging onto their back wheel but I know it would be too much, too soon. By the time I have thought it through, they have gone and are exiting the next bend. I glance up and see them, synchronised, a few metres higher on the road ahead. For a while after that, I am alone with my breathing, as the hedgerows give way to the rocky walls and high cliffs of the Gorges themselves. The gilet, now fully unzipped, flaps open.

  The long climb to the top of the Gorges becomes a false flat, a barely perceptible gradient. Sunday, though, is hunting day, and every now and then white vans, dog cages in the rear, come into view, parked up on the verge. Somewhere ahead, I can hear shouting, dogs barking, above the road. As the shouts of hunters and barking of gundogs grow louder and echo around me, I find an easy tempo.

  Up ahead, there is a rustling in the thick scrub. A Pastisfuelled hunter, stumbling around, I think, as a few rocks drop onto the verge. Then almost nonchalantly, a sanglier, the size of a calf, emerges and trots across the road, just in front of me. The giant boar quickly disappears into the bushes clinging to the steep drop on the right-hand side of the road. The shouting and barking recede behind me. I slow a little and look down into the thicket below the road. Already the beast is hidden from view.

  The road winds upwards, following the cliff, and passes through dank unlit tunnels until it levels out at the top of the Gorges. I wheel to a stop at the viewing point to eat and drink. Opposite is the Rocher du Cire, a towering 200-metre-high cliff, supposedly home to hundreds of bees’ nests. A century or so ago, in a test of courage, young men – including the poet Frédéric Mistral, who came here in 1866 – would abseil down to gather honey, as part of their rites of passage. Not any more, however. A few may still have the old skills, but most of them stack shelves and drive low-loaders in the retail park at Le Pontet, in the sprawling suburbs of Avignon. Maybe their dads still come up here sometimes, pootling their way up the Gorges on their off-the-peg bikes from Decathlon or the Leclerc hypermarché in Carpentras.

  Overlooking the Rocher du Cire is the Ferme St Hubert. Hidden in the forest behind that, is the Mur de la Peste, a plague wall, built in 1721 in a bid to keep out the pestilence coming north from Marseille. The wall, which stretched between the Durance river and the Ventoux, was guarded day and night, but proved ineffective. There were 126,000 deaths in the region from the plague between 1720 and 1722.

  The remote and lonely road past the Ferme St Hubert was also the scene of fighting in August 1944, when a German convoy, raiding the farm for supplies, tangled with the local ‘Maquis’, the Provençal name for the French Resistance. As the Germans headed on towards St Jean-de-Sault, the Maquis opened fire with a machine gun. The Germans fought back, forcing the Maquis to retreat. Local boy Robert Giraud, 19 years old at the time, was a casualty, shot in the head as he covered his comrades.

  The Maquis were hugely active across the slopes, foothills and gorges around the Ventoux, defending the lonely roads that
climbed and descended through the wooded hills of the Drôme and Vaucluse. They had some notable recruits, including Irish poet, writer and Resistance sympathiser Samuel Beckett, who fled to the Vaucluse region in 1942 as the Gestapo began a purge of the Resistance and other subversives in Paris. Beckett, who travelled to Germany during the 1930s, hated the Nazis and despised their racism. ‘You couldn’t stand by with your arms folded,’ he said.

  Much later in his life, asked why he had joined the Resistance, he said: ‘I was fighting against the Germans, who were making life hell for my friends, and not for the French nation.’

  His flight from Paris, south to the ‘free zone’ of the Vaucluse, took six weeks, much of it spent hiding from German patrols. ‘I can remember waiting in a barn until it got dark,’ Beckett told his biographer, James Knowlson. ‘We could see a German sentinel in the moonlight. The Germans were on the road so we went across fields.’

  With his partner, Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil, Beckett made most of the 700-kilometre journey south on foot. They holed up in Roussillon, a village perched on red ochre rock in the valley between the rough scrub of the Monts de Vaucluse and the more manicured Luberon range. But they were constantly uneasy. The Maquis were active in nearby Gordes, just a few kilometres away, and even though he spoke fluent French, Beckett was the odd foreigner, with Irish accent and Jewish first name, living on his nerves and dodging German patrols.

  He found work picking grapes on the Bonnelly farm and also finished Watt, his second novel, during the evenings. He didn’t neglect supporting the Resistance either, storing weapons in his yard and helping the Maquis carry out acts of sabotage against the Germans as they patrolled the hills of the Vaucluse.

  Beckett certainly rode a bike when he lived in the Luberon valley. I don’t know if he ever tackled the Ventoux – how would he have found the time, given that he was busy fighting Fascism, dodging Nazis and being a literary genius every evening? – but he loved bicycles and had the gaunt, hook-nosed, hollow-cheeked appearance of a post-war climber. Riding alongside Bobet, Coppi, Koblet or Kübler, Beckett, haunted eyes and ruffled, stand-up shock of hair, would have been a stylish addition to any post-war peloton. He would have relished the sense of liberation that drew the crowds to the roadside and, surely too, his post-race existentialist analysis would have been the stuff of legend.

  Beckett’s interest in cycling is widely believed to have fuelled the title, at least, of Waiting for Godot, his best-known play, completed at the start of the 1950s and premiered in 1953. He shared a fascination for two-wheeled endeavour with Ernest Hemingway, and once apparently described the mythical Godot as ‘a veteran racing cyclist, bald, a “stayer”, recurrent placeman in town-to-town and national championships, Christian name elusive, surname Godeau, pronounced, of course, no differently from Godot’.

  And there was in fact, a real ‘Godot’ – Roger Godeau, a relatively undistinguished road rider, but an accomplished track rider, most at home on the boards of the Vélodrome d’Hiver in Paris – the infamous ‘Vel d’Hiv’, used as a base by the Nazis to stockade Jews before transportation – where he held the Derny Hour Record. A contemporary of Rik Van Steenbergen, Stan Ockers and Jean Dotto – the first Frenchman to win the Vuelta a España – Godeau’s stocky build earned him the nickname ‘Popeye’, something he learned to play on. He appeared in six-day races in Frankfurt, Berlin and even travelled to New York, but never truly shone on the road.

  Yet legend persists, rather shakily, that Godeau was always slow, always at the back of the peloton, although his track speed might suggest otherwise. So there are two vague stories, often repeated, of how Beckett summoned up the title of his renowned play. In the first, he is strolling the boulevards, possibly in Paris, when he comes upon a small knot of spectators, gathered at the roadside.

  ‘What’s going on?’ the Irishman asks them.

  ‘We’re waiting for Godeau,’ they reply.

  In the second version, Beckett has made a trip to the impoverished and chilly north-west of France to see cobbled Classic race, Paris–Roubaix. He spends the day waiting endlessly at the roadside to see ‘Popeye’ Godeau ride wearily by. That experience may also have inspired the play’s title.

  I don’t believe either of them.

  Numerous local members of the Maquis were in hiding during the German occupation of the Vaucluse. Most roads were subject to German military checkpoints, although the many remote tracks and minor roads climbing through the wooded foothills of the Ventoux at least offered some protection. But in the communities below the mountain suspicion pervaded everyday village life, as many were believed – sometimes wrongly – to be collaborating with the Germans or the Vichy government.

  One of the most infamous incidents in the villages around Ventoux came on 1 August 1944, in Sarrians, a few kilometres to the north-west of Carpentras. It explains why the name Albin Durand is so evident on many street names, squares and monuments across the Vaucluse.

  Albin Durand was a farmer and a Maquisard in Sarrians. On a summer’s night of violence and horror, the SS Charlemagne, stationed at the nearby Château de Taureau, and a group of French fascists, arrived at the Café du Casino. Their ruthless enquiries led to Durand’s farm, where they began to torture him and farm worker Antoine Diouf. Durand was brutally beaten but would not give away any information. The torture became more horrific. He was given injections by a doctor, ostensibly ‘to keep him alive’. Then the Germans cut off his legs above the knee with his own electric saw. Still Durand, remembered as particularly courageous, would not talk, so they took him into the farmyard, set his farm on fire and shot him and Diouf.

  In 2005, Jean-Marie Le Pen, then the leader of the Front National, told a right-wing magazine: ‘the German occupation was not particularly inhumane, even if there were a number of excesses . . .’ Le Pen was rounded on, even by his own daughter, Marine, and subsequently fined and subjected to a suspended prison sentence.

  The liberation of the Vaucluse was bloody and poisoned by recriminations. Suspected collaborators – seen as traitors – were beaten and abused, spat at and sometimes shot as ‘tribunals of the people’ sprang up across the region. ‘Justice’ under the tribunals was rough. One village doctor and his wife were accused of fraternising with the Germans and implicating Durand, while the doctor was also claimed to have performed abortions on French women who’d slept with the German occupiers. Both were shot by firing squad.

  The cruelty and brutality of the occupation remains both unforgotten and, even now, in some places unforgiven. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 2015 and 2016, that flame of patriotic pride flickered more brightly than ever, particularly in the south of France. In late 2015, in Beaumes-de-Venise, at the foot of the jagged Dentelles de Montmirail, there was a performance of ‘Maquis Ventoux’. The evening celebrated the spirit of the French Resistance, conjuring up the secret routes on and around the Ventoux, remembering the suffering of Durand and Diouf, as well as the viciousness of the firefights on the mountain roads, just above the Rocher du Cire.

  I rode on, descending away from the top of the Gorges into the Pays de Sault. The lavender had already been harvested, but the sickly sweet aroma still hung in the air. The few switchbacks leading up to Sault pass another monument to the Maquis, before the road arrives in the small town, widely known as the lavender capital of Provence. In July 1987, my boys of summer had stopped here, wet and exhausted after riding through a thunderstorm, seeking refuge from the deluge and lunching on red wine and tripe. All of us, that is, except Peter, the vegetarian with vertigo. We had no rain capes for the long and sodden haul back to the gite in Murs, so instead bought a roll of bin bags, tearing holes in them for arms and head.

  Sault has since become a regular coffee stop, both before and after climbing or descending the Ventoux, but also en route to nearby climbs such as the Col de la Croix de l’Homme Mort and my favourite, the wild and deserted Col du Négron, in the hills above Revest-du-Bion.

  At the hear
t of Sault are the convent gardens, with views over the lavender fields and across towards the Ventoux’s white summit. I stopped at the Promenade café for a grand crème to wash down the warm banana I’d pulled out of my jersey pocket. On market days, Sault has a cheery feel to it, but on quieter days it can be bleak. That may be due to the proximity of the eerily beautiful Plateau d’Albion, where France stationed an arsenal of nuclear warheads until the late 1990s.

  Now the missile sites lie abandoned, with some given over to solar power. There are few villages, and only a semi-deserted Foreign Legion post betrays much sign of life. One former missile silo, high on the hills south of the Plateau d’Albion, is now the acclaimed Bistrot de Lagarde d’Apt. But the Plateau, ringed by hills and with few cars or cafés, makes for spectacular riding on rolling, wide roads, built specifically to take the large military vehicles and missile transporters that have long since gone.

  There is one great café stop, at a quiet crossroads on the edge of the plateau. Just below Simiane-la-Rotonde’s circular fortress, you can sit outside the Chapeau Rouge bakery, tearing into fresh almond croissants and sipping sweet coffee, the Ventoux far behind you and the Lure mountain, its slighter, distant twin, over your left shoulder.

  This crossroads reminds me of the deserted bus stop in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. I sit there sometimes, drinking a grand crème, scanning the landscape and the long straight roads, not for low-flying crop dusters, but for signs of life. For a long time, nothing happens, nothing at all. But every now and then, a lone two-wheeled silhouette emerges from the shimmering heat haze. I watch them approach, until they whirr past, head down, making their way on across the vast landscape framed by mountains, before they are out of sight once again.

  Bottles refilled and crammed with ice, I left Sault and set off towards Aurel and the long descent through warm, lavender-scented air, across the border into the Drôme département, and then on into the Toulourenc valley. The north side of the Ventoux is completely different in character to the south side, more Alpine and dominated by an intimidating near-vertical cliff, rising out of the Toulourenc to the summit of the mountain. There is little reason to stop between Sault and Malaucène.