The Valley Of Heaven And Hell_Cycling In The Shadow Of Marie Antoinette

by Susie Kelly

  Leaning back to back, dozing, we were almost lifted off the seat by a sudden eruption of roaring, screaming and screeching noises. A fleet of miniature cars and scooters driven by yelling children came roaring into the streets. They careered around corners, bellowing, hooting and shouting, revving up at the ‘Stop’ signs and smashing the previous silence into atoms. Noise whirled around us like exploding fireworks. Ten minutes of it was sufficient to propel us on our way, back into the furnace heat. We followed a path that seemed to point to the river, stopping to talk to a small herd of fallow deer lying in the dust beneath the trees behind a chain-link fence. Terry wanted to photograph them, and made clicking sounds with his tongue. With reproachful eyes they heaved themselves to their feet and came to the fence to see if we had anything of interest to offer them. Satisfied that we did not, they retired, making irritable burping noises, and folded themselves back down onto the ground. A walker told us we were heading for a dead end, and directed us back on to the main road. We pedalled increasingly slowly up the endless hills until, with great relief, we reached the shady campsite at La Ferté-sous-Jouarre. The gardien greeted us like long-lost and cherished family members, and not like the one-night-standers we were.

  The royal family, too, had been welcomed with respect and kindness by a large crowd in La Ferté-sous-Jouarre. They lodged in comfort at the house of the mayor, where the ever-courteous Louis invited the National Assembly members to dine with him, an offer that they declined.

  Terry suggested that while he set up the tent, I should go and cool down with a cold shower. Standing beneath a cascade of icy water seldom appeals to me, but on this unbearably hot afternoon, all red from the sun and my feet swollen from the heat, there was nothing that I could have wanted more. Humming a tuneless but happy little ditty, I set off with shampoo, soap, towel and a heart full of anticipation. It was one of those small ironies of life that the campsite here fulfilled my most important criterion – that the water is hot. Every shower gushed a fountain of abundant, almost-scalding water. No mixer taps, just a single showerhead activated by a push button to deliver hot water. I pondered whether if I pushed the button for long enough I could drain away all the hot water in the system until it ran cold. This was not only a very selfish and antisocial idea, but also an ecologically unfriendly one. Instead I stood beneath the hot water and tried to imagine that it was cold, not completely successfully. At least I came out feeling clean, with the sweat and dust washed off. In the meantime Terry had assembled the tent and unloaded the bikes. I made my nightly contribution towards our comfort – inflating the mattress, which merely required opening a valve and giving two small puffs.

  Later we went to find something to eat. There were numerous pizza parlours, a few brasseries, and a Chinese restaurant. I was very peeved indeed that Terry vetoed it – he doesn’t particularly like Chinese food. I refused to eat pizza yet again – we seemed to have had it most nights. Around and around we cycled, up and down, hither and thither, in company with scores of boy racers in old bangers with noisy exhausts, around the neat and otherwise peaceful town. We eventually found an excellent restaurant where we had a splendid meal at a most reasonable price. If you are ever in La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, we can recommend Le Chat Gourmand very highly indeed.

  Our journey was almost over. Soon we would reach Paris, and after a couple of nights would cycle back to Versailles where our car awaited. I would miss the changing scenery, meeting new people, our daily challenges and discoveries. But I looked forward to our own bed, meals I could control, a hairdresser, and throwing away the horrible cycling shorts.

  Because my eyes were still streaming relentlessly all day long, Terry suggested I should wear goggles. I’d have to wear them over my glasses if I wanted to see anything. I tried to visualise how they would look with the Lycra stretched to the limit of its seams, the clumsy sandals, the crimson face and the diamanté baseball cap. I’d already reached my personal nadir in the worst-dressed-woman stakes. Lower I would not sink.

  The distance to our hotel in the eastern suburbs of Paris was too far to cycle in one day. It looked as if we were doomed to another night at Trilport’s noisy campsite. As we prepared to leave, the gardien and his wife came to see us off. She shook our hands, and he gave us both a bear hug. We asked if they knew of any alternatives to Trilport. “Yes! There’s a magnificent site here,” he said, pointing out a place called Jablines on our map.

  At Trilport we stopped to picnic in a small park.

  “Bon appetit,” said a couple of passing schoolgirls.

  “Bon appetit,” said a group of four young black men.

  “Bon appetit,” chanted a gang of small boys.

  “Bon appetit,” said a young couple walking slowly with a very, very new baby hanging from a sling across its mother’s chest.

  A man in a suit marched past, swinging a briefcase. “Bon appetit,” he called.

  We threw our crumbs to the birds, and set off for Jablines.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Being Difficult

  “Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.” George Bernard Shaw

  AS we cycled away the mobile phone rang, sending me instantly into panic mode. At home we had left behind two goats, two dogs, two cats, a parrot and four hens. The year before our current adventure, a couple had come to stay in our gîte. The husband was a quintessential English gentleman with curly hair, very direct eyes that had stolen the blue from the sea and the sky, and a soft soothing voice. His tiny, beautiful wife was a talented artist, strict vegetarian and passionate animal lover. When they were away from their home they left out food and water for the shrew that lived in their kitchen. In return, the shrew left them offerings of small piles of peanuts – beneath cushions, under their pillows, or stuffed into their shoes. They were our kind of people.

  They established an immediate rapport with all our animals, and when they left said: “If you ever want us to house-sit for you, we’d be more than happy.”

  And so, two days before we set off to Versailles, they had installed themselves in our house and surrounded by barking, meowing, clucking, chattering and bleating animals, waved us on our way.

  Each time our mobile phone rang, I was certain that something was terribly wrong at home. I don’t know why, because I’m very much an optimist. But whenever we’re away from home I always anticipate that something dreadful will happen. Despite assurances from our house-sitters that all was well, the house was still standing and the animals were behaving, I could never shake off private doubts that they were heroically dealing with a never-ending stream of disasters that they weren’t telling us about. So I worried anyway, irrationally, particularly since I knew that if anything did go wrong we could rely on them to put it right.

  Terry spoke for a few minutes, and when he finished, I asked: “Did they sound happy? Was her voice normal? Why did you say ‘Oh dear’ when you were talking to her? What were you saying about Dobbie?”

  “Everything is fine. The animals are all well. There are no problems, and nothing to worry about,” he reassured me. I continued worrying.

  After we left La Ferté-sous-Jouarre the comfortably dull weather of the morning turned into another excessively hot and sunny afternoon. The first time we had cycled through Meaux’s chaotic traffic I thought it couldn’t possible be worse. But I was wrong. This time utter bedlam ruled. It was 5.00 pm, people were leaving work, and the whole centre of the town was in the throes of major roadworks. Diversionary signs seemed to have been dropped into place haphazardly, sending the traffic round in circles. Everybody appeared to be in the wrong lane for where they wanted to go, and nobody wanted to give way to anybody because everyone was in a hurry. Drivers were using brute force to get to where they thought they wanted to be, forcing paths through the long queues. Klaxons roared non-stop. The noise was deafening. Cars reversed, hooted, tried to do U-turns.
People waved their arms and shouted. Terry threaded his way through slowly, but I had to dismount and stagger between bumpers, finding myself stuck in the middle of several lanes just as the temporary lights changed and the cars surged forwards. People shouted at me and ordered me to get off the road. If only I could. If tears hadn’t already been streaming down my face, they would have been by now. My ankles were black and blue from whacks delivered by the pedals. Trying to negotiate my way through the traffic, at the same time I had to keep sight of Terry. Hair-raising wasn’t the word.

  The royal family and their captors had stopped briefly in Meaux, and made a very early start on their way back to Paris. Marie-Thérèse wrote that they slept at the bishop’s house ‘which was full of priests who had taken the oath, but otherwise civil enough; the bishop himself served us. They informed us that we must start the next day at five in the morning so as to reach Paris in good season.’ [During the Revolution, the clergy were required to swear an oath of allegiance to the new Constitution, or face expulsion from the church, or even execution. Those who swore the oath were no longer answerable to Rome.]

  Once clear of the town centre we were buffeted by a constant stream of heavy traffic on the undulating road. Downhill, Terry was always much quicker than me with his lighter, faster bike but uphill I could usually catch and overtake him. For many miles this was the pattern as we alternately passed each other, laughing.

  When I spotted the first sign for Jablines, Terry was half a mile ahead of me. By the time I had reached the same spot he had vanished, and it was here that the road split into two. Jablines, said the signs, was both straight on and off to the right. I sailed on straight ahead, and heard a bellow from behind. When I pulled on to the side of the road and looked back, there was Terry on the other side of a roundabout on the bridge over the road. To reach him I had to turn and go in the wrong direction against the traffic, on the wrong side, up the slip road and clockwise around the roundabout in the face of the oncoming vehicles. I climbed off and pushed the bike against an unbroken line of trucks, heavily laden with rocks, sand and gravel from the quarry next to the roundabout. As I did so I was directing very rude words at Terry, the trucks, and life in general.

  In all the accounts I had read of people touring on bicycles, none of them mentioned having encountered the kinds of conditions that we were meeting. The worst that ever happened to them was a puncture or broken spoke. They breezed through traffic like Moses through the Red Sea, and they could pedal effortlessly all day long, regardless of the terrain, in weather that was always perfect. Their eyes did not leak constantly, and they didn’t suffer from swollen feet or sunburn. I couldn’t recall ever reading about any of them having to shove their bikes in the wrong direction while surrounded by lumbering trucks driven by jeering Frenchmen.

  These vehicles were driving in convoys in the same direction as we were going. A stream of empty trucks came from the opposite direction, returning to the quarry to refill. The road was not very wide, and the trucks were uncomfortably close to us. The road surface was lumpy and broken from the constant heavy traffic. Our bikes jolted into potholes, and the wheels skidded on layers of sand and shale. As it went past, one of the trucks hit a bump heavily and spewed a thick cloud of dust and grit which bounced onto the road and created a desert-storm effect, momentarily blinding motorists and us. For a few seconds I could see nothing and panicked as I tried to wipe the dust from my glasses. Our bikes, faces and clothes were covered in a coarse yellow coating. So were the cars behind the truck. We all looked as if we had just driven through the Gobi desert on a windy day.

  We thought we had missed a turning during the sandstorm, because we could find no signs for Jablines. So when another cyclist whooshed past we called out and asked him for directions. He signalled us to follow, and led us a few miles to the entrance to the leisure centre. Sticking his thumb in the air and yelling that he wished us bon après-midi, he swooped back around on himself at racing speed, vanishing down the road.

  The Jablines leisure complex stands in 400 hectares of wooded and beautifully landscaped gardens, with lakes for sailing, fishing and water sports. Horse riding, archery, football, tennis and mini-golf are all available there, but it’s also a perfect place to just sunbathe, picnic or watch the rest of the world playing. There are chalets for rental, mobile homes, camping car and tent pitches, several snack bars and a self-service cafeteria. It’s all immaculately maintained and well organised, and offered a heavenly oasis of calm greenery after the beastliness of our ride that afternoon.

  While Terry put up our tent, I stood under the shower watching rivulets of sepia-coloured water swirling away, and sweeping piles of wet sand and grit down the drain hole with my foot. At the basins, where I looked bleakly at my awful appearance, a Spanish family of mother and three haughty small girls, with little brown noses tilted at the ceiling, were having a hysterical screaming match about the ribbons in the girls’ crow-black hair. Ines wanted the red ribbon that Julia had; Julia wasn’t prepared to swap it for Ines’ blue ribbon, and Isabel didn’t want to wear one at all. Her mother was holding Isabel by her splendid long shiny hair and trying to wrap a yellow ribbon around it with one hand, while Isabel writhed and squirmed and Ines and Julia shouted at each other. None of them appeared to be aware of the growing crowd of spectators watching with amusement and/or horror as the children yelled and hissed and stamped their feet and wagged their fingers. As their voices rose higher and higher in fury and indignation, their mother tried to make herself heard over them. It was a scene of such dramatic outrage that it made me think of a particularly violent opera, and wonder how they might behave in a real crisis.

  The restaurants on site didn’t serve evening meals, and the small shop was closed, but the ladies in the reception office said there were two good restaurants close by – a couscouserie in one direction and a pizzeria in the opposite direction. Having already eaten sufficient pizzas to last a lifetime due to force majeure, I welcomed the prospect of a change. Terry, on the other hand, would live on pizza if he could. It took a mixture of encouragement, threat and tantrum on my part to get him to go to the couscous restaurant. Off we cycled, and here I am going to make a confession.

  The couscouserie was about three miles away. We studied the menu in its glass box on the wall and it seemed rather expensive for what is, whichever way you look at it, in essence just a pile of semolina with some bits and pieces in it. At €22 a head for the vegetarian version, Terry balked, but I had set my heart on having a meal that was a little different. Remember, he’d already vetoed the Chinese restaurant in La Ferté-sous-Jouarre. I did agree that the couscous seemed grossly overpriced, but wondered whether it really mattered, just this once. I think if Terry liked couscous we’d probably have gone ahead despite the price. But he said he didn’t. (He eats it happily at home, though.) By his body language and grunts I could see there was no point in forcing the issue. We skirmished for several minutes, and feeling very grumpy I scrambled onto my bike.

  “Right,” I said ungraciously: “Let’s go and get another bloody pizza.”

  Then, of course, Terry was immediately contrite and said that if I really wanted couscous, we would have it. But I wasn’t going to be mollified, and pedalled away really fast so he that had to follow. We cycled several miles to the pizza place, which was in fact a French/Italian restaurant that looked very inviting. It had a varied and exciting menu, and was closed. I was delighted. That would teach him a lesson.

  Terry was frustrated and shook and rapped at the door.

  “Come on, we’ll go back and have the couscous,” he said. Now I played my trump card.

  “I can’t – my bike’s almost out of power. It won’t get there and back.” I didn’t think that was true. I could probably have made it with power to spare, but I was enjoying being awkward.

  “Never mind, you go. There’s no reason for us both to be hungry. I’ll go back and wait for you in the tent, and you go and enjoy a meal,” I said cheerily.r />
  “Don’t be so stupid. Of course I’m not going without you. But what are we going to eat?” he asked sadly.

  “Well, I think there’s a bit of cheese in one of the bags. You can have it. I’ve already eaten more than I should today.”

  “But you can’t go all night with nothing to eat.”

  “I wouldn’t have to if we’d had the couscous,” I said triumphantly. “Don’t worry, I’ll get something to eat in the morning, when the shop opens.” I wanted to make him feel as bad as I possibly could. I sometimes wish I wasn’t so difficult.

  We cycled back to the tent in silence, and I rummaged around in the panniers until I found a small cylinder of goat’s cheese and a bottle of Baileys that I’d forgotten about.

  “Here you are,” I said, handing him the cheese and hanging on to the Baileys. “Eat up.”

  In his guilt Terry tried to force the cheese upon me, but I obstinately refused, quoting my high cholesterol level. Then I tipped everything out from the panniers and discovered tucked away in their depths a small packet of withered apricots and half a jar of tapenade that we must have bought so long ago that we had forgotten it. Apricots dipped in tapenade may sound weird, and it was, but the combination of sweet and salty was actually rather delicious. Washed down with half a bottle of Baileys it put me in a sufficiently good humour to share my feast with poor Terry, who had finished his cheese and was looking longingly at my odd meal. We sat there in a very fine drizzle, dipping, chewing and swigging happily.

  Some English people in a large tent nearby had a small boy called George who would only do what he was told if his parents explained clearly why he should do so.