‘It’s the stories, the laughs, the tears’: the retired teacher cycling across France delivering letters to loved ones

IIt started as an unconventional way of plotting a route for a months-long post-retirement bike ride, with Vincent Berthelot offering to personally deliver letters across France and see where the whims of the writers would take him.

What soon became apparent was the transformative power of personally delivered letters, sometimes reuniting family members and long-lost friends. Eight years later, his idea has grown into a movement, with more than a hundred people now crossing continents to make offline connections in a virtual world.

“All letters written have a profound impact,” says Berthelot, 64. “Every person is a novel. Everyone has a story, and they are beautiful stories, even if they are terrible or sad.”

Before retiring from teaching in 2015, he began laying the foundation for his unique service, reaching out to those around him for letters. “A few people looked at me like I was an alien,” he says. “But after their initial surprise wore off, most people had something they wanted to say to someone.”

The route for his first journey was determined by the 80 letters he received, taking him on a winding journey on his recumbent bicycle from his home in Redon to Lille, Marseille, Strasbourg and the Pyrenees.

His excitement was quickly dampened by his first delivery to a stranger. “It was really uncomfortable,” he says of arriving at a clothing store in Brittany with a letter for one of the employees. As he stood there, helmet in hand, the recipient looked at him warily and emphasized that she would not open the letter until her shift was over.

“I left without any real interaction with her,” he says. He adds with a laugh: “And thought, 'Oh la la, I have 80 letters – this is going to be very difficult if every delivery is like this.'”

He soon realized where he had gone wrong. He hadn't mentioned their common bond: the person who had cared enough about him to write the letter and order him to deliver it. “That's the key,” he says. “The person who gives me the letter is the key to connecting with the recipient.”

When word of mouth started to spread about what Berthelot was doing, the letters started pouring in. He stopped keeping count years ago — describing it as contrary to the project's goals — but he estimates he has now delivered more than 300 letters and collected about 19,000 letters. miles (30,000 km).

Although he is often welcomed by recipients and invited into their homes, he has had a handful of deliveries that have gone off the rails. Once he showed up just as a divorce was in progress; another time he arrived to find the recipient in mourning.

Over the years, Berthelot has learned to give the recipients some time to process his arrival. “People are usually baffled for a long time before they understand. It seems unlikely to them that I bring them a letter that has completed half the Tour de France,” he says. “So surprise is the first reaction, but then it's the stories, the laughter, the tears – that's it.”

The idea has since caught on with about 110 people to enrol to personally deliver letters with him. Some stay within 15 miles of their home; others have carried letters as far as Iceland, Colombia and Cuba.

Some letters have had a deep impact, such as the one that helped bridge the gap between two sisters who had exchanged little more than pleasantries for twenty years, or the others that arrived just before the sender's death. “There are many stories like that,” says Berthelot.

In 2019 he was joined by Alexandre Lachavanne, a Swiss filmmaker the intention to document what he described as a “letterman like no other”.

Lachavanne says he was attracted to Berthelot's “contrarian” approach: “cycling slowly to deliver important but not urgent mail.” For weeks he accompanied Berthelot as he traveled through France and Switzerland, watching as people reacted in shock to Berthelot's arrival.

“Then comes the moment of reading,” says Lachavanne. His camera watched as the recipients opened letters from friends or lovers who had taken the opportunity to put their love on paper. “The reactions are extremely moving,” he says. “Tears of happiness are often in the corners of the eyes.”

For Berthelot, his post-retirement cycling journey has turned into an amazing adventure – which now takes up a significant part of his time – fueled by a desire to continue forging connections.

“It's really incredible,” says Berthelot. “People today need real, human relationships. We are connected to systems that are somewhat virtual or numerical, but there is a void. There is a lack of blood, sweat and tears – and there is a real demand for that.”