The Tour de France is a contest of civic pride, writes Alva MacSherry in Cahuzac sur Vère.
The nearby village of Cahuzac sur Vère is where we arrange to meet our first-time visitors. Situated, as it is, midway on the road between Gaillac - as in the famous wine - and the iconic bastide (walled) town of Cordes-sur-Ciel, it's a good place for them to sit over a coffee and watch not very much go by while they wait for us to come and collect them.
With a little more than 1,000 inhabitants, Cahuzac boasts the best boulangerie (bakery) this side of Paris, a tiny auberge (where a three-course lunch with wine sets you back €10), two doctors, a pharmacy and about 16 social committees.
These committees are ferociously active: this year's achievements have included the festival of duck carcasses (no, really) and a world-record chestnut roast, as well as a six-foot omelette. More recently, the other week saw the Fête de Cahuzac, with a jumble sale, a ball, a communal meal (main course, ostrich), a mountain- bike rally and fireworks which, predictably, nearly set the whole place on fire - it hasn't rained since May.
This year, the committee was the one for the Tour de France - for the Tour's toughest time trial, a 47-kilometre slog in baking sunshine, went through the village last week.
The French phrase "il faut profiter" (repeated a million times on such occasions) should not, as you may think, be translated as "you must make as much money as possible out of this". Rather, the spirit of the phrase is: "You must get out there and join in."
Thus, the committee was in charge of joining us in. Preparations started weeks ago, when flyers went up asking us to dig out our old bikes and donate them to a project marking 100 years of the race. "Cahuzac sur Vère, 100 Vélos pour 100 ans", it says in six-foot letters on a plastic-covered haystack on the road into town. (And "Cahuzac sur Vère, twinned with Maar in Germany", it says on a huge banner opposite the school.) The 100-bike display was our entry into the Tour's informal inter-village competition. It's not the most challenging of concepts - gather together 100 bikes and paint half of them green, half of them white - but you can't look at the mixed ranks of high nellies, kids' choppers and ancient racers without seeing the old people, the children and the men who once rode them. Each bike has a year and the name of that year's Tour winner pinned to it, so the display is a kind of quiet history of cycling heroes.
There's nothing so muted about the centrepiece of the display, a gigantic pink-skinned rider on a papier-mâché racing bike, towering over the war memorial in the small square: there's no doubt that people from Poland to Paris, Texas will be going home with snaps of themselves by this edifice.
And there's nothing muted about the tour itself, as we Irish know well.
The first sign of activity here was €600,000-worth of road resurfacing. Before the tarmac was fully hardened, the camper vans started to roll in, parking at the best vantage-points along the route. The village camping- ground brimmed. The municipal swimming-pool threw open its gates a month early. The baker, the deliciously named François Caramel, had all five decks of his bread-oven roaring all day, his giant shovel shuffling round after round of crusty pain de campagne.
On the morning the tour rolled in, the roads shut at 6 a.m. This closed off an entire section of the departement and was inconvenient for lots of people, but the passion of the Tour runs deep and to grumble would be inconceivable.
The publicity caravan arrived first, showering dross into the crowd. The French are inveterate collectors, and frenzidly scrabble for hats, key-rings and lollipops. It would take a braver heart than mine to join the scrum. Some of them brought booty sacks.
A lull, and then a roar, as the first of the riders raced through, at breakneck speed on the downhill into the village, over the insignificant trickle that is the River Vère, and up out of the saddle to start the long, long climb towards Cap Découverte, the end of the trial and a magnificent amenity carved out of a disused open-cast coalmine.
And then they're gone. The pink rider continues his enormous wheelie over the village square; the sunflowers droop in the heat.
An air of quiet celebration remains, committee members pat each other happily on the back and enjoy beers in the café. This year's Gaillac wine promises to be the best for many years, there are tourists everywhere and we've been part of the hallowed centenary Tour. It's been a good summer, and it's not even August yet.