It started off as an unconventional way to chart an itinerary for a months-long, post-retirement cycling trip, with Vincent Berthelot offering to personally deliver letters across France and see where the whims of the writers would take him.
What swiftly became clear was the transformative power of hand-delivered letters, at times reuniting family members and long-lost friends. Eight years on, his idea has swelled into a movement, with more than 100 people now crossing continents to make offline connections in a virtual world.
“All the letters that are written have a profound impact,” says Berthelot, 64. “Every person is a novel. Everyone carries a story, and they’re beautiful stories, even when they’re terrible or sad.”
He began laying the groundwork for his singular service before his retirement from teaching in 2015, canvassing those around him for letters. “A few people looked at me as if I was an alien,” he says. “But after their initial astonishment wore off, most people had something they wanted to say to someone.”
The route for his first trip was determined by the 80 letters he received, which sent 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 tempered by his first delivery to a stranger. “It was really, really awkward,” he says of his arrival at a clothing store in Brittany with a letter for one of the employees. As he stood there, helmet in hand, the recipient eyed him warily, insisting that she would only open the letter when her shift was over.
“I left without any real interaction with her,” he says. With a laugh, he adds: “And thought: ‘Oh la la, I’ve got 80 letters – this is going to be really hard if every delivery is like this.’”
He soon realised where he had gone wrong. He had not mentioned their common link – the person who had cared enough to write the letter and task him with delivering it. “That’s the key,” he says. “The person who gives me the letter is the key to connecting with the recipient.”
As word of mouth began to spread about what Berthelot was doing, letters came pouring in. He stopped keeping count years ago – describing it as antithetical to the project’s aims – but he estimates he has now delivered more than 300 letters and racked up about 19,000 miles (30,000km).
While he is often welcomed by recipients and invited inside their homes, he has had a handful of deliveries that have gone off the rails. Once he showed up just as a divorce was playing out; another time, he arrived to find the recipient in mourning.
Over the years, Berthelot has learned to allow a bit of time for recipients to take in his arrival. “People are usually stunned for quite a long time before they understand. It seems improbable to them that I’m bringing them a letter that has done half the Tour of France,” he says. “So astonishment is the first reaction, but after that it’s the stories, the laughs, the tears –it’s all that.”
The idea has since caught on, with about 110 people signing up to join him in personally delivering letters. Some stay within a 15-mile radius of their homes; others have carried letters as far as Iceland, Colombia and Cuba.
Some of the letters have had a deep impact, such as the one that helped to bridge the gap between two sisters who hadn’t exchanged more than pleasantries for 20 years, or others that arrived just before the death of the sender. “There’s a lot of stories like that,” Berthelot says.
In 2019, he was joined on the road by Alexandre Lachavanne, a Swiss film-maker intent on documenting what he described as a “letter carrier like no other”.
Lachavanne says he was drawn to Berthelot’s “contrarian” approach: “cycling slowly to deliver important, but not urgent, mail”. For weeks, he joined Berthelot as he crisscrossed France and Switzerland, watching as people reacted with shock to Berthelot’s arrival.
“Then comes the moment of reading,” Lachavanne says. His camera homed in as recipients opened letters from friends or loved ones who had seized the chance to put their love to paper. “The reactions are extremely touching,” he says. “Tears of happiness are often in the corners of eyes.”
For Berthelot, his post-retirement cycling trip has swelled into a tremendous adventure – these days consuming a substantial chunk of his time – fuelled by a desire to keep forging connections.
“It’s really incredible,” Berthelot says. “People today are in need of real, human relationships. We’re connected to systems that are a bit virtual, or numeric, but there’s a void. There’s a lack of blood, sweat and tears – and there’s a real demand for this.”
