August 8, 2019
Double Dutch
Charolles to Montchanin
KIKI and Oskar are university students in Amsterdam. They've been a couple for four years, studying the same subject - earth sciences - with rooms in the same corridor.
They're riding a stretch of the Eurovélo 6, the route from the Atlantic to the Black Sea. They've already ridden some and this time they're going as far as Basle, where France runs into Switzerland. And from there they'll get a lift home.
What they won't boast is that they rode the EV6 the whole way, because we persuaded them it was flatter and barely busier to ride the road beside the canal for another 15km or so. Their guide book had them looping through the hills, plenty of which they'd ridden already. We could see from their faces, when they turned up at a village shop where we'd stopped for drinks, that their morning had been three-dimensional enough already.
"But isn't that a 70 road?", Kiki asked. An odd question because the limit on country roads is generally 80. Kiki, by the way, is her real name. Her parents successfully wanted something unusual.
"I think French drivers aren't very respectful of the speed limit," she chided, showing surprise when I said that that was exactly the reputation that Dutch drivers had in France.
Not that she has much time for Dutch drivers, either. Or, more precisely, for Dutch people in general. Everywhere she goes, other Dutch people have got there before her. I think that's a common experience. Once abroad, you'll defend your country's honour but you have no wish to meet your fellow countrymen.
Anyway, quickly persuaded that our route was unlikely to send her to her grave, and above all that it was flatter, she and Oskar set off with us.
"One thing I've noticed in France is that nobody minds if something is old or not immediately repaired," she observed. "There are so many people in Holland and so little space that anything that's not useful is replaced by something that is. Here, there's more space and if there's an old barn that's falling down, nobody bothers if it's not a nuisance to anybody."
We left Charolles this morning in what passes there for a rush hour and immediately started a succession of hills that lifted us between trees from one valley and dropped us into the next.
The very first village was a treat, a living picture of a place. The few people of Champlécy had taken a lot of trouble, whatever Kiki said, to make the most of where they lived, their pride extending to creating a one-room exhibition of the village and its local heroine.
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Anne-Charlotte came into good luck. Things weren't good at the start because she became an orphan when she was one and was brought up by uncles. They did the job well and she became a woman of refined taste and appearance. And it was that that made her the lover of a dashing chap with the equally dashing name of Charles de Batz-Castelmore d'Artagnan.
And who was he?
He was one of the Three Musketeers in the novel by Alexandre Dumas.
But being a musketeer's wife isn't all it's cracked up to be. They were married for six years, of which d'Artagnan was absent for five. That more than tried her patience and devotion and in 1665 she knocked on a lawyer's door and said she wanted a divorce. She died in 1683, remembered only by the people of Champlécy.
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With comic novelty, someone had turned fire hydrants and balanced flowerpots into comic figures. Not the upper echelon of taste but worthy of a smile.
The countryside was easier now, not flat but gentle, through fields of slowly chewing Charollais. Life was good, although that didn't stop my whining for a drink and a sticky bun that wasn't satisfied until Palinges. It was there, at a metal table outside the shop, that we met Kiki and Oskar.
They're riding just 50km a day because a crash landed Oskar in hospital earlier in the year and he hasn't recovered. How it happened, he doesn't know.
"Maybe I rode into something or into a drain," he said. "Whatever it was, the whole front of the bike was folded back on itself."
Kiki said he had sent a text message that he was in bits. In colloquial Dutch, that could mean he was exhausted and that's how she took it. It was soon afterwards that she realised the message was more serious.
We ate lunch by the road, on shaded grass, and rode on to Montceau-les-Mines. There were still hints of where the mines had been. Two hundred years ago, one person in four here was a miner, starting work there at the age of 12. Explosions weren't infrequent, killing 400 people.
The last mine closed 30 years ago and where pit wheels and coal heaps stood has become parkland. It was through one of those that we rode on for another half an hour or so before the grass widened and dropped gently to the river.
That's our home for the night. A few people are fishing but we don't care that that they're there and they show no sign of caring about us.
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