Beauty on a bicycle? Much more than that. Fascinating, seductive, enchanting, she had become the symbol of grace and beauty, the icon of splendor and attraction. In other times, they would have called her Aphrodite or Venus. The perfect color for her would seem to be a non-color, white, a symbol of purity and freshness, "a contemporary myth" Roland Barthes would have written about her.

Beauty on a bicycle? Infinitely more. Because hers was an unreachable beauty: she seemed beyond any passion or desire, beyond any comparison or confrontation, out of league, out of category, perhaps even out of time limit.

Brigitte Bardot was 91 years old. Her beauty had been scarred and usurped by time, but remains indelible and immortal in films and photos, in memories and thoughts. She died at La Madrague, her villa in St. Tropez, inaccessible even to imagination, and will be buried here, queen of that Mediterranean corner between sky and sea. She was BB – Brigitte Bardot but also beauty bicycle – unlike Marilyn Monroe who was not MM. She was infatuations and loves, marriages and divorces, relationships and scandals, flirts and paparazzi. She was the song "Je t'aime... moi non plus" and the song and film "Et Dieu créa... la femme", often not just exclamation and question marks, but also ellipses. She was controversies and provocations, before protecting herself in privacy. She was the bikini (and also the monokini) and the honeycomb (the "choucroute"), an Andy Warhol portrait and – why not – many bicycles.

Beauty on a bicycle, on any bicycle. There's a photo of BB on a Graziella, perhaps in Paris in the Bois de Boulogne, where even a Rolls Royce behind her seems to lose prestige and importance. There's a photo of BB on a women's bike, blonde hair (even if, it would be known, bleached) in the wind. There's a photo of BB on another women's bike, this time her hair imprisoned in a straw hat. There's a photo of BB with a women's bike but feet on the ground, one hand on the handlebar grip, the other along her side. There's a photo of BB on a Solex, the first motorized bicycle, which went so slowly it would be overtaken by muscle-powered bicycles, perhaps to give everyone the chance to admire a pedal-powered divinity.