THE TOUR OF FRANCE

On the cobblestones of the North, through the sun and the dust, the road cyclists paraded in a crowd of cars and amateur cycles.

Goethals won the stage

DUNKERQUE, July 20: — The Metz-Dunkirk stage — it was from Metz that we took leave for the last time, and by the way, is it good this morning ? After nineteen hours of watching legs turn without respite, you no longer know exactly where you've come from or when you left. The fourteenth stage in any case, and the penultimate of the Tour de France (that's even safer) is renowned for its monotony, its length and his treachery.

It doesn't look like much and, in fact, it was uneventful as long as it took place through verdant Lorraine and knew no other terrain than the childish ups and downs in which the Ardennes soil is engaged.

The torture began with the North and its paving. It's a country of heavy cartage and which does not like the forks of bicycles, any more than the boils on which the poor runners are too often seated, when they have been in almost uninterrupted relation with their saddle for twenty-eight days and five thousand kilometers.

The pitchforks, which in advance were given for dead, behaved quite well ; but from Maubeuge, where Jacquinot was already missing in distress, no one knew where, the platoon of thirty "couriers", which held from Metz, began to hop cruelly on the sole of fatigue with which this damned road is roughly shod.

There were indeed sidewalks, but they are, to put it better, side-aisles bounded by a badly planted sandstone ridge, occupied by a railroad between two ribbons of that rough scoria which in the North is called grouache...