hard — "only to keep warm', Pélissier said—and caught a group which turned out to be the leaders. "I thought to myself, now I may as well win," he said afterwards and he did. He won the stage the next day as well and then pulled out on the fifth. "Henri Pélissier is saturated with class but he does not know how to suffer," Desgrange wrote in L'Auto. Pélissier started a cyclists' trade union but it had only lukewarm support. Riders close to Pélissier joined it but other French riders and most foreigners stayed away, unsure they wanted to be led by a man already at war with sponsors and organisers across Europe. Les Forçats de la route Pélissier, Francis and another rider, Maurice Ville, abandoned the Tour at Coutances in 1924 after Desgrange had not let Pélissier remove a jersey as the sun came up. They were met in the station café by the journalist Albert Londres, who normally wrote about social and international affairs but was following the Tour for Le Petit Parisien. Londres' piece, reproduced largely as a dialogue, appeared under the headline Les Forçats de la Route. "You wouldn't believe that all this is about nothing more than a few jerseys. This morning, in Cherbourg, a race official came up to me and without a word, he pulled up my jersey to check that I'm not wearing two. What would you say if I pulled open your waistcoat to see if your shirt was clean? That's the way these people behave and I won't stand for it. That's what this is all about." "But what if you were wearing two jerseys?" "That's the point. If I want to, I can wear 15. What I can't do is start with two and finish with only one." "Why not?" "Because that's the rule. We don't only have to work like donkeys, we have to freeze or suffocate as well. Apparently that's an important part of the sport. So I went off to find Desgrange. 'I can't throw my jersey on the road, then?' 'No,' he said, 'you can't throw away anything provided by the organisation.' 'But this isn't the organisation's—it's mine.' "'I don't conduct arguments in the street,' he said. 'OK,' I said, 'if you're not prepared to talk about it in the street, I'm going back to bed.' "'We'll sort it all out in Brest', he said.