Beynat and the quiet corridor

Antoine Blondin¹ covered the Tour de France for L'Équipe, the Paris sports daily, across twenty-seven editions between 1954 and 1982. He made a career out of the segments nobody else wrote about. The corridors between climbs, the stretches where breakaways had already gone or had yet to form, the flat fields where the television cut to advertising: Blondin's columns lived there. He would have recognised the road between kilometre thirty-six and kilometre forty-two.

Last week's entry ended at the invisible commune line; the road picks up on the Beynat side of it, rises for a short while, crosses the commune along its northern reach, and continues. The village itself sits three kilometres east of where segment six ends; the stage will reach it in the next entry. There is no categorised climb, no hilltop village on the skyline, no cathedral. The road asks nothing much of the rider and the map asks nothing much of the stage-watcher.

A rider forty kilometres into the stage knows what this stretch is for. Between the climb that was and the climb that is coming, the peloton spreads out across the road in a way it does not when the stage is being won or lost. Breakaways have gone or not gone. Sprinters' teams ride tempo. The quiet cyclist, the one who is neither winning nor losing this stage on this stretch, has space to look. To the west, low on the horizon, the limestone country of the causse corrézien is still there, ridden through the Sunday before last, the light off the plateaus lighter than the light over Beynat. The country is the country you left. The road does not return to it; the road crosses the red-sandstone line the Meyssac fault drew last Wednesday and stays east of that line now, in the country of the Tourmente valley and the softer fields that lead up to the Monédières still some hours away.

Beynat, when it arrives, is Beinat in the Occitan that spoke this country before French did. A single word to register, then the road moves on.

The village sits on the Roanne river, in a dispersed rural habitat of roughly thirteen hundred inhabitants, and has done the unobvious thing of being known for a specific small industry for the better part of three hundred years. Since the mid-eighteenth century Beynat has made cabas en paille, the rye-straw baskets shoppers carried to market when shoppers carried baskets to market, and which in France still connote, for anyone old enough to remember them, a particular kind of unhurried weekly errand. Whether any workshop is still active is the kind of question a half-day visit could answer and a blog cannot. What the road sees of Beynat, on the July day the Tour passes, is none of this: the church of Saint-Pierre-ès-Liens, twelfth-century in its bones and fifteenth in its rebuild; a village square called the Place du Champ de Foire; a bar-tabac or two, the mairie, the tree-shade that small rural communes keep in the centre by habit and by law.

Between kilometre thirty-seven point five seven and kilometre thirty-eight point two six, for six hundred and ninety metres, the road clips the northeast corner of a second commune, Lanteuil, and leaves it again. Lantòl in Occitan. Five hundred and seventeen inhabitants. A church to Saints Côme and Damien. The fifteenth-century core of a village the road does not pass through, a lordship of the Faucault family from the eleventh century on, held for most of its history inside the castellany of Turenne, the same Turenne whose vicomtes shaped most of this country for a thousand years, and whose hilltop the road climbed toward ten days ago. Two Sundays back, the stage was inside Turenne territory without the commune knowing. Today it touches that same old polity at a corner, and leaves without the commune knowing.

Four kilometres north of the road, invisible behind the hedgerows, Aubazine keeps its twelfth-century silence. The Cistercian abbey, founded in 1135 by Étienne de Vielzot, took in a twelve-year-old orphan named Gabrielle Chanel in 1895. She spent six years under its geometric vaults; later, as a cabaret singer in Moulins, she would call herself Coco. Her biographers have long held that the intertwined lines and crosses of the abbey's stained glass found their way into the monogram she would make the most-reproduced signature of twentieth-century fashion. The stage will not pass it.

Our four riders will not see Beynat or Lanteuil either. The ledger of their walking, capped at two kilometres a day, does not know commune lines or castellanies. They make their road by walking it.

The phrase is Antonio Machado's.² Machado, the Castilian poet of the Generation of '98 who wrote Spain's plateaus into the national imagination, died in 1939 on this side of the Pyrenees, fleeing. Caminante, no hay camino; se hace camino al andar. You make the road by walking it. The line is from Campos de Castilla, added to the 1917 edition. I come back to it on quiet stretches of road, which is most of them. The Tour passes through country that, most of the time, is just country. What makes the country into a route is the passing.

Roland Barthes argued, in an essay³ first published in Les Lettres nouvelles in the summer of 1955 and later collected in Mythologies, that the Tour de France is modern epic: the riders heroes, the terrain antagonist, the race a contest of named forces. The argument comes alive where the terrain is making demands. Here the terrain is asking nothing. The epic waits.

The road rises toward kilometre forty-two. Ahead, the first of the climbs that make up the back half of the stage. The mind gathers, and the riding gets louder again. Corridors end. Most of them end with a climb starting.

Sources

• Beynat commune history, population, church, and cabas en paille: Beynat (Wikipedia, French), Église Saint-Pierre-ès-Liens de Beynat
• Lanteuil commune history and population: Lanteuil (Wikipedia, French)
• Causse corrézien geology: Causse corrézien (Wikipedia, French)
• Aubazine Abbey history (founded 1135 by Étienne de Vielzot) and Coco Chanel's six years there (1895-1901): Obazine Abbey (Wikipedia), Abbey of Aubazine, Coco Chanel's historical refuge (National Catholic Register). The interlocking-C logo attribution is a widely repeated biographer's claim rather than an established fact; the abbey curator describes it as a probable unconscious influence.
• Occitan forms (Beinat, Lantòl) are taken from the Wikipedia infoboxes of the respective commune pages; these are generally reliable but not a scholarly toponymic source.