CQ26_FINAL_Spreads_Digital

the drève was a place to meet
and relax on the weekend,
hunt and fish in the lake left
by the collapse of one of the
old galleries. Maybe Stab
would play a tune or two on
the accordion he loved. On a
weekday, mopeds bounced
across the cobbles as les
gueules noires made their way
to and from work.
“It scared me,” Bouvet
recalled. “I wondered if the
riders could face up to it. To
reassure me, Jean rode it on
his bike. Finally, in 1968 we
took the risk.” It was a decision
that saved Paris-Roubaix.
When you went down in the
cage, five hundred metres, you
never knew for sure whether
you would be coming up again.
Arenberg is like a descent into
the coal mine. If you start to
think of the danger you won’t
even go there. – Jean Stablinski
Emile Zola’s incendiary
Germinal wasn’t actually set
in Wallers – the action takes
place in the entirely fictionalised
Montsou, based on the town
of Marchiennes twenty minutes
down the road. But it was the
lowering pit head at Wallers-
Arenberg that dominates the
1993 film, casting its implacable
shadow over the stunted lives of
the mining community.
That version of Germinal marked
the long conversion of the
region from the industrial to the
digital. Now the immaculate
brick buildings at the pit head
house the Arenberg Creative
Mine, and the entire area
was listed as a Unesco World
Heritage Site in 2012. You can
take a guided tour to discover
the cobbles the way the miners
knew them – as a quick way
to work through the poetically
named Drève des Boules
d’Hérin, a stately drive through
the forest, the limit of which was
marked by two stone pillars,
atop which sat a pair of brass
balls. Insert your own pun here.
It was Pierre Chany, the fabulist
and chronicler of French cycling,
who dubbed it the trouée,
the trench. The nickname was
well earned – throughout the
long years of the war, Wallers-
Arenberg was the front line,
occupied by the Germans then
liberated by the Canadians in
1918 in a final bloody battle.
And it was Stablinski who
recalled the dark and dirty
gallery beneath the cobbles
when he remarked “I’m the only
rider to have passed above and
below the Arenberg.”
The earth is ancient here, the
millennial forest rising out of
damp loam and lichen. In 1966,
Jean-Marie Léger – a pupil at
the local lycée in Arenberg –
discovered the remains of a
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