"With the broad and powerful swing of the hand which Zola in The Earth gave to his ploughman, L'Auto, journal of ideas and action, is going to fling across France today those reckless and uncouth sowers of energy who are the great professional riders of the world... From Paris to the blue waves of the Mediterranean, from Marseille to Bordeaux, passing along the roseate and dreaming roads sleeping under the sun, across the calm of the fields of the Vendée, following the Loire, which flows on still and silent, our men are going to race madly, unflaggingly."