by Paul Howard
Of course, this means that not only the morality but also the legality of their domestic set-up is open to question. However, of more direct pertinence to a full appreciation of the context in which it happened is an awareness of the paternal relationship between Anquetil and Annie that preceded the sexual one. This remains unclear. At one point, Sophie writes that Annie and her brother Alain lived with Jacques and Jeanine from when she was ten years old – that’s to say, in 1962. Later in the book, Alain and Annie are said to have lived definitively with Jacques and Jeanine only from 1967, having initiated the process in around 1964 or 1965. What’s clear, however, is that at some point the children broke away from their father.
Sophie says that this rupture was irrevocable, although Dominique, who of course was initially married to Jeanine’s son Alain, disagrees. In fact, given Sophie’s comments, I expressed my surprise when I met Dominique and she said that she knew Alain’s father, Jeanine’s first husband. ‘Yes, of course I knew him,’ she said. Does this mean the children regained contact with him? ‘More or less,’ she replied, before telling me how the rupture had occurred: ‘He remarried, and you know that with women there are often jealousies. They separate their new husbands from their children, push them away, put them in the dustbin, because they’re not their own children. So, he was deprived of his children, not by himself, but perhaps because of this woman, who also had her own children and wanted to promote hers at the expense of his. It’s a story that’s as old as the hills, the story of the nest, even if it’s not a nice story.’
If the complicity of their father in the departure of Annie and Alain and their decision to move in with Jacques and Jeanine is uncertain, what is clear is that, whether for only two or three years or whether for the best part of a decade, Anquetil assumed, and didn’t shirk, his responsibilities as a father figure. Jeanine has already explained how his rapport with her children, even from before their affair in the mid-1950s, was a determining factor in her seduction. Sophie is equally glowing in her assessment of his role as a father to his two step-children: ‘As soon as Annie and Alain went to live permanently with Jeanine and Jacques, he became head of the family, an exemplary father and at the same time a doting dad.’
Annie agrees: ‘He took us to the circus and to the fair. He paid close and sometimes critical attention to how we got on at school, but he was very kind. We loved him.’
The question that remains is to determine what it was that allowed Anquetil to either insist on or at least accept a relationship that was possibly illegal and certainly beyond accepted social norms. When I asked Bernard Hinault how he thought people had reacted to the revelations in Sophie’s book, he said it would largely depend on how people perceived his motives: ‘There will be those who say he was just a coureur, in every sense.’ The significance of this description comes from the fact that ‘coureur’ in French has an unlikely dual meaning. It means both racer, as in racing cyclist – ‘coureur cycliste’ – and also womaniser – ‘coureur des filles’ (someone who chases after girls – or skirt, as Hinault puts it). This is clearly Hinault’s interpretation of his close friend’s actions. It is also clear that, in Hinault’s eyes, this is an interpretation that doesn’t merit great censure. Whether the result of traditional French ambivalence to sexual indiscretions that might make prudish Brits blush, or whether a function of Hinault’s own earthy virility, for him Anquetil’s stereotypical male appetite for sex should simply be seen as a fact of life. Some people are like that, some people aren’t. ‘Les problèmes de cul [loosely interpreted as ‘women problems’], as we say, they mean nothing. If you’re a very good athlete, a very good politician, you’ve got to start from the position that it’s up to them. It’s their private life. C’est la vie.’
Yet while this might well be a fact of life, it might not have been a fact of Anquetil’s life. Although he was clearly a man with a considerable appetite for many things, his desire to chase after women in general is at best uncertain. He clearly enjoyed his time as a bachelor before marrying Jeanine – at the time of his relationship with Paule Voland, he boasted of the column inches that would be produced if the newspapers wrote about all the girls he saw – but Géminiani, for example, goes to some lengths to spell out to Sophie in Pour l’amour de Jacques how faithful he was once married:
‘Once, we went to Algeria at the end of the season without Nanou. I don’t know why. Every day, there was a minor race. We stayed for a week, and, of course, each night we had a party. There wasn’t much problem if you didn’t want to sleep on your own at night . . . and nobody did sleep alone . . . except Jacques! Yet he was the most sought after, and sometimes there was quite a queue outside his hotel room. It was as if he couldn’t see them.’
Dominique paints a similar picture: ‘He wasn’t a womaniser. It was women who chased after him, not him chasing after them. I’ve seen him at the Tour. I’ve seen us arrive somewhere and girls come and say, “Mr Anquetil, I’m on the Tour. I’m working for such and such a company. I hope we’ll be able to see each other again during the Tour.” That’s nice. I’m there, and I’m watching young girls come and try and chat him up in front of me. It’s just part and parcel of being a public person. But that wasn’t the man.’
Sophie provided an alternative explanation when I asked her how her father came to say yes to the possibility of having a child with his stepdaughter when most people wouldn’t consider it, even if they found themselves in the same situation: ‘I think it’s in his origins and his roots: his proximity to the land; the sense of wonder about and the importance of the family; the desire to stay close to kith and kin. I think he thought it was OK to have a kid with his stepdaughter, as it was the closest he could come to having one with his wife. It was to avoid having recourse to the outside world, for the outside world represented a danger. Someone from the outside could have done a kiss and tell, so it was harder. I think it was truly a desire to stay close to the family.’
This in itself might seem unlikely. Yet Philippe Brunel suggests, with his tongue only partly in his cheek, that in Normandy, at least, similar arrangements were more widespread than might initially be supposed: ‘Don’t forget, in Normandy it’s quite normal. Cases like his, things like the Anquetil family set-up, they happen frequently. If you read Maupassant, you find lots of Anquetil’s life in there, lots of blood relationships, lots of relationships within families. It happens. Why, I don’t know. It’s a region of close-knit communities, in small families, shut off from the outside world, maybe. I’m just saying that in those books you can see it a lot.’
Nevertheless, in addition to the more or less improbable notion of a stepdaughter acting as a surrogate mother for her stepfather, the Anquetil family had also to deal with the fact that their relationship became something more than one of convenience. In fact, Annie and Jacques maintained a sexual relationship, under the same roof as Jeanine, for more than a decade. The result was that Anquetil went to Annie’s bed every night before then joining Jeanine. The young Sophie, who initially slept near Jeanine before being transferred to her mother, went in the opposite direction. It’s little surprise that Sophie says she referred – and still sometimes refers – to both women as her mother, even though she was fully aware of the biological truth of her situation. Annie explained it to Sophie in Pour l’amour de Jacques:
‘Everybody was quite comfortable with it. That’s how it was. We were caught in a sort of gentle madness that didn’t actually make anyone crazy. It took me 12 years to realise it wasn’t what I wanted. I think I didn’t want it right from the start, but without knowing it, without admitting it, it came upon me slowly – very slowly. I should have left after you were born. But I loved him!’
The feeling was apparently reciprocated, again suggesting that Anquetil was more than a mere sleeping partner in the establishment of their relationship. Annie told Sophie:
‘They were playing with fire. Before Nanou came to explain to me that I had to have a child with Jacques, and that he
would find it difficult, but that it was necessary . . . I knew that he wouldn’t find it so difficult. He’d started to look at me in a different way. His genuine desire to have a child, had it driven him to prepare me gently to accept him into my bed? With him, it’s quite possible.’
Annie even suggests that his desire for a child may have been just the excuse he needed to hide from Nanou his real motivation – to establish a relationship with Annie:
‘Having me, he had a young Nanou again, without having to lose the old one . . . I’m not their victim. I too played with fire. And once it had happened, instead of spending a few nights with me to make me pregnant, he fell in love with me and stayed for 12 years. You wanted the truth. That’s mine, or how I see it, anyway.’
TWENTY
The Cyclist, the Stepson, His Wife and Her Lover
IN TYPICAL ANQUETIL STYLE, even a good old-fashioned ménage à trois was too conventional. Only if it involved his stepdaughter as well as his wife could his desire for control, for family intimacy and for progeny be fulfilled. What was perhaps more remarkable still, he managed to make it work, more or less, for 12 years. Certainly, the first few years of Sophie’s life passed off without notable antagonism: ‘Life was without too many obvious tensions, parties and winter and summer holidays all helping, of course. There were plenty of good times, full of fun and laughter, underpinned by the relaxed atmosphere my father was so good at creating.’
Mostly this involved having a party. ‘Every weekend, the whole group of friends would come round. Friends from childhood, some from cycling: they would all come round and have a party,’ she told me, surrounded by pictures of the equally frequent festivities that are now held at the auberge she owns with her husband in Corsica. ‘Yes, I must have inherited something from them, my father, mother, grandma,’ she says with a smile. ‘My children like to party, too. My daughter loves to dance – and we all like champagne as well.’ Cue more laughter.
Anquetil’s schoolmate Dieulois was a regular visitor at this time: ‘We quite often went there for meals at birthdays, although, actually, you didn’t need a birthday. We just happened to enjoy sitting and eating round a table then going and playing baby-foot or going for a walk in the woods to see the birds.’
Jeanine agrees: ‘Jacques couldn’t be on his own, so any birthday, any weekend, every weekend, once he’d stopped racing, he was the host. He made a fuss if he had to go and eat at a friend’s house: “No, come to the house. It’s easier.” So, every weekend, from Friday to Sunday, there would be 15 or 20 of us. Obviously, my maid left on Saturday, so the wives did their bit – we roasted a lamb, made pasta, did the shopping. It was a laugh, and in the evening we got dressed up and had fun, and Jacques adored that. We were happy like that, every weekend, every weekend, every weekend.’
Whether as a result of these parties or not, Sophie is also adamant that throughout her childhood, in spite of all the later emotional upheaval, she was the beneficiary of the unreserved love and affection of all those around her, in particular her father: ‘Yes, he spoiled me. He was away for a part of each year, but when he was there he took me everywhere, although there was no routine. If he wanted to go somewhere in the middle of the night and he wanted to take me with him, then off we’d go. If he needed to wake me up to show me something, he’d wake me up. What I liked most was when we took out his binoculars to look at the moon. He showed me the craters on the moon, Saturn’s rings, that a star looked like a huge diamond in a telescope, that you had to follow the trajectory, as it moved all the time. They were wonderful moments. And also night walks in the wood when he would explain the marks made by animals, the noises. I was scared to start with, but he said don’t be. He just put the noises into context, and I was fine.’
Even the potentially disorienting fact she had two mothers didn’t unsettle her. Although France Dimanche, in a commemorative edition brought out after Anquetil died in 1987, either still didn’t know or chose not to publicise the fact that Sophie was Annie’s rather than Jeanine’s daughter – ‘And then, in 1971, a miracle: after 13 years of marriage, Jeanine has a daughter: Sophie. Anquetil is over the moon’ – Sophie’s real parentage was far from a closely guarded secret, as Jeanine recalls: ‘Those who were close to us knew our situation. They didn’t feel any need to talk about it, but everybody knew. We had journalist friends who knew right from the start that Sophie wasn’t my daughter but was my daughter’s daughter. But nobody said anything. Everybody accepted it because Jacques had explained things to them and that was that.’
‘I grew up quite normally in the middle of all this, where nothing was hidden and where there was lots of love,’ Sophie says in her book. ‘In fact, there is nothing but love in this story. I experienced it first hand. I know.’ Later on, she expresses the ease with which she accepted her situation:
As soon as I appeared at Les Elfes, life was wonderful. Very quickly, I understood that I had two mothers: no problem. On the contrary, I could give two presents on Mother’s Day, and I could play them off against each other. When I fell out with one, I sought solace with the other. Later, at school, I found out that other children didn’t have two mums, which seemed a shame for them. Life was great. I was the centre of attention.
That’s not to say, though, that Anquetil family life didn’t suffer from the stresses and strains inherent in such a set-up; after all, two’s company, three’s a crowd, and for good reason. The fundamental issue, according to Sophie, was the power struggle between Annie and Jeanine in their mutual desire to be ‘first lady’. Even in the first few years, before tensions had had time to take root, a family friend told Sophie that domestic harmony did not always reign: ‘There was constant friction in the harem. Sometimes your mothers argued ferociously, even in front of you.’
The catalyst for the inevitable breakdown in the relationship, however, was the arrival at the chateau of Alain’s wife Dominique. Although only six at the time, Sophie says she can remember precisely when Dominique came to live with them in 1977: ‘From that moment on, there was a different atmosphere among the adults of the house. Straight away, I was convinced, even if I didn’t tell anyone, that things would change.’ According to Sophie, Jeanine and, even more so, Annie turned against Dominique, a woman too many. A ‘foreign body’ had been detected in the almost organic Anquetil family unit and needed expelling: ‘Above all, Annie accused Dominique of playing Machiavellian games. She was convinced that she had married Alain, her brother, simply to be able to steal Jacques from her once she’d come to live in the chateau.’
Dominique’s own recollections of the distance and formality of her interaction with Anquetil at the time suggest otherwise: ‘When we knew each other before we became a couple, we used ‘vous’ [the formal French form of ‘you’] not ‘tu’ [the informal equivalent]. We respected each other. If you like, I was his daughter-in-law without being his daughter-in-law. My father-in-law was Dr Boëda. Jacques was no more than the husband of the mother of my husband.’ The use of ‘vous’ doesn’t preclude a warm relationship, of course. After all, it’s still relatively common in France for sons-in-law and daughters-in-law to be required to address their parents-in-law as ‘vous’, although this is often while being addressed as ‘tu’ in return. Yet for both people to use ‘vous’ does suggest a degree of distance beyond that which would allow for the seduction of a man already in the middle of a ménage à trois.
Certainly, the only initial change in the standings of the three women was that Dominique’s stock began to fall. After little more than two years, in 1979, Dominique and a reluctant Alain moved out to a property on the other side of Rouen. Even though he would bring his son Steve to visit the chateau every weekend, Alain also had to give up working alongside Jacques as farm manager. This appears to have been a cruel blow. Anquetil described Alain to Sophie as ‘the guy that I loved the most. He was my son,’ and the feeling appears to have been reciprocal. Perhaps the perception, rightly or wrongly, that his wife was at fault for this separ
ation was the cause of their own eventual parting of the ways.
Back at the chateau, the imbalance apparently created by Dominique’s brief residence would worsen, rather than improve, after her departure. The principal agitator for change was the young pretender, Annie. Sophie wrote:
With regard to my mum, the more time passed, the more she felt her youth was being spent a prisoner of an impossible situation. She waited years hoping for everything to change, for normal relationships to take over . . . But she knew it was in vain. In fact, she’d known this for a long time, and before she realised it, twelve years had passed. She knew it was now or never to leave Les Elfes.
Yet even though she’d met someone who tried to persuade her to leave with him, she hesitated. Her initial move was not to leave completely but to try and find a job outside the chateau, a move categorically rejected by Anquetil. It took another year of the intolerable status quo before she could be persuaded to leave. Sophie says that she was 12 at the time, so her departure must have been sometime in 1983.
Sophie writes that she was also remarkably sanguine about the fact her mother left her:
