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month before the due date. I was supposed to appear in mid-September, it was mid-August. My parents didn’t know that the cycling calendar isn’t very full at that time of year.
    It seems that I was an active child, very active; dynamic, it could be said. ‘As soon as you could stand you didn’t just walk, you ran, my parents have always said to me, time and again. Even today I still move all the time; I start doing this or that, I wave my arms about. I’m incapable of keeping fixed in one place, on a sofa or an armchair. As a kid, the mere idea of doing nothing left me in hysterics. I was afraid of inactivity, afraid of the emptiness. The more energy I used up, the less tired I was. I manage to relax only when I’m busy. My teachers didn’t know how to deal with me: they just shouted at me all the time. Let’s get one thing clear: it wasn’t that I didn’t like school, quite the opposite. I’ve always liked going to school and at one point in my teenage years I was even enthusiastic about it.
    I don’t remember my first three years in Paris, in rue Davy in the 13 th arrondissement, but in 1963 my parents moved to Tournan-en-Brie in the Seine-et-Marne. We lived thirty-five kilometres east of the capital in the heart of what is now known as la grande banlieue – the ’burbs. But you have to think back to the 1960s: the Seine-et-Marne was the countryside. The real thing.
    My parents rented an apartment in a four-storey block. We lived on the third floor, with no lift. All I had to do was go down the stairs to be in the middle of the wilds. A hundred metres away, the woods and the fields were beckoning. My mates and I built huts, knocked them down and built them up again. The days seemed to last for ever. When dinner time came, my mother had only to shout through the window. Most of the time she had to be patient; I had better things to do. I could never be found. I got to know every last metre of the forest. I loved to be outside; I wanted adventures and independence.
    There was no one in the family who did any sport. My father did have a racing bike that he had used for riding about when he was young. So sport was my personal thing; mine and no one else’s. At school I tried everything: football, handball, athletics, volleyball, and so on. I did whatever I could without holding back. I was the perfect pupil for the PE teachers.
    But I only did sport on Thursdays, as part of the school timetable. Every weekend I had to get through a real trauma: family meals. They took place on Sundays in particular, at my uncles’, my aunts’ and also at my grandmother’s in Paris, in her dark three-room flat where I couldn’t move without walloping the furniture. It was simply horrendous and it’s left its mark; I’m still not all that keen on family things. My brother who is three years younger than me is completely the opposite.
    As a ‘housewife’ my mother didn’t have a driving licence which meant we weren’t as self-sufficient as we might have been. As for my father, he was a foreman in a metalworks. From working-class stock, he was now earning a decent living and was the embodiment of all the values that might be expected in a family of modest means: a strong work ethic, a sense of self-denial, and a bit of a hard attitude towards himself and other people. Simple values that didn’t sanctify anything but ensured the key things you need to hand down to children, even if his methods were a bit clumsy.
    He would leave for work early, about six, and never came home before eight in the evening. Like a lot of fathers, he wasn’t about much. But when he was there, he was a disciplinarian. His hand fell flat, and so did many of my pranks. I got a lot of slaps, and pretty hard ones at that. My only goal was to be myself at every instant, without any limits. Wild and hyperactive, I wanted to discover how far I could go. I had such a penchant for playing with fire you could say I was a pyromaniac. But it took only the