In the front seat of the Système Vipère team car, Fabian Ducasse is pugnaciously silent and aggressively focused. Jules Le Grand is driving him down L’Alpe D’Huez, down the very mountain which the day before Fabian had ascended in his own funeral cortège. He stares straight ahead, not looking at the road, the gradient, the debris from yesterday. His eyes, today the colour of graphite and as seemingly insensate as the rock of the fearsome Alp itself, give nothing away. Fabian’s aquiline features are as sharp as the boulders. A scar scores through his soul in much the same way as the road slices into the mountain. Behind closed lips, his teeth are clenched. However, the external manifestation of his inner turmoil is one of brooding steady focus; he resolutely refuses to allow any hint of emotional turbulence to be visible. It’s strategy. The media must not know. Nor must any rider in the peloton. Nor, he thinks somewhat deludedly, must his directeur.

But it is Jules’s job to be in tune with his riders; though he has read Fabian’s condition in a glance, he knows that diplomacy is crucial if the great rider is to race well today. Personally, Jules detests seeing his team leader back in regular Système Vipère colours; Fabian looks wrong somehow, like he’s in mufti after eight days wearing the yellow jersey. Though his primary concern is for Fabian’s physical and mental recovery, Jules is also thinking of the Système Vipère sponsors, intending to phone them, reassure them, flatter them, once the Stage is under way. Jules has hardly spoken to Fabian because he knows there is little the rider wants to hear. When Fabian finished the Stage yesterday, Jules had grasped his shoulders, shaken him until eye contact was established and said, ‘Bien, Fabian, bien.’ Jules curses the fact that the only way to today’s start is down the very route that decimated his rider the day before, stripping him of his maillot jaune. Jules is painfully aware of the irony that L’Alpe D’Huez, in glorious sunshine, looks positively Sound of Music this morning.

‘Can he reclaim the maillot jaune?’ was a question posed to Jules by fans, by TV, by phone and in the press conference yesterday.

‘Tomorrow is another high mountain Stage,’ Jules had replied nonchalantly, ‘and there is of course another Time Trial to go.’

He had not said this to Fabian. There was nothing that could be said to Fabian that Fabian wouldn’t have told himself already, time and again.

Fen and Pip caught a ride to the Col de la Madeleine with another Zucca MV soigneur, a quietly spoken man with whom they conversed sparingly in pidgin Anglo-Franco-Italian. He felt it his greater duty to consolidate his passengers’ burgeoning passion for the sport by driving them along the race route than to go direct to the hotel to unpack for the riders. From Vizille, the summer seat of many a French president, through the Chatreuse Massif, they journeyed on a road laid down by Napoleon, unaware that the day was to bring a French revolution in the form of Fabian Ducasse’s comeback. Pip and Fen were seduced by pretty chalets in sleepy mountain villages where, in July, the Christmas lights were still up because the ski season alone defined such places’ existence.