The New York Times International - 02.08.2019

T HE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION FRIDAY, AUGUST 2, 2019| 19

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In 1878, on something of a whim, the

novelist and travel writer Robert Louis

Stevenson crossed southern France’s

Cévennes mountains, one of the wildest

and most sparsely populated parts of

the country, in the company of a slow-

moving donkey named Modestine. In

May, also on something of a whim, my

wife and I crossed the Cévennes moun-

tains, still one of the wildest and most

sparsely populated parts of the country,

in the company of a slow-moving auto-

mobile called a Citroën 2CV.

Stevenson described Modestine as re-

calcitrant and moody, as well as “cheap

and small and hardy, and of a stolid and

peaceful temper.” This also happens to

be a pretty accurate description of our

car, which was mint green, shaped like

an umbrella and equipped with flip-up

windows, tube-frame bench seats, a can-

vas sunroof canopy, a squeaky single-

spoke steering wheel, and stalk-

mounted headlights that reminded me

of the eyes of an overeager dog. The

car’s noisy two-cylinder engine could,

with a tailwind, comfortably achieve a

top speed of around 60 miles an hour on

the open highway.

As it happens, there are no open high-

ways in the Cévennes, and really not

many more roads than there were in

Stevenson’s day. Which I suppose is to

be expected in a stupefyingly stark and

lush landscape rived by deep river

gorges and narrow valleys butting up

against 5,000-foot granite mountains

and wind-scoured limestone plateaus.

The fact that all of these striking natural

features, each worthy of its own coffee

table book, are packed cheek-by-jowl in-

side a single 360-square-mile national

park just a three-and-a-half-hour drive

from Lyon convinced me that the

Cévennes — an area I’d scarcely heard

of until recently, despite years of trav-

eling in France and the fact that it’s a Un-

esco World Heritage Site — would be an

inspired choice for a weeklong road trip

with my wife, Michele.

And, I thought, why not do it in a Deux

Chevaux — as the model is universally

known — the beloved “people’s car” of

postwar France, a vehicle referred to by

the British automotive journalist L.J.K.

Setright as “the most intelligent applica-

tion of minimalism ever to succeed as a

car.” A road trip in a vintage 2CV would

be the fulfillment of a long-held dream of

mine, and thus when I found out you

could rent one on Drivy.com — basically

an Airbnb for cars — my plan was

hatched. I clicked around and located an

owner in Lyon who’d rent me his fully re-

habbed 1976 2CV-6 Club for $70 a day, in-

cluding supplemental insurance and

24/7 roadside assistance.

Shortly after our arrival in Lyon, Mi-

chele and I met the owner, a soft-spoken

retiree, at his house, signed some pa-

pers in his cluttered den, took a five-

minute test-drive and were off. Before

we pulled away, he solemnly handed me

a binder of laminated laser-printed

pages that he referred to as the “Bible”

— a hefty list of dos and don’ts for oper-

ating the vehicle — and then bade us

bonne route.

As is the case with many plans based

more on a dream than, well, planning,

mine was sorely tested on the first day of

our five-day journey.

But the moment that really exposed

the creaky foundations of my grand plan

occurred just as night was falling. I’d

eased the car onto a muddy pullout and

killed the engine so that I could rest for a

minute — my arms ached from

wrestling with the manual steering and

the balky L-shaped gearstick — and so

that we could study the map to find the

best route back to our hotel, a charming

if slightly gone-to-seed establishment

outside the village of Anduze.

Now, as any horror-movie screenwrit-

er will attest, was the moment to write in

the rasp of a car failing to start. When

our 2CV’s engine refused to turn over af-

ter repeated turns of the key, I instinc-

tively got out my phone to call Drivy’s

roadside assistance number, but could-

n’t get a signal. I bit my lower lip and

looked at Michele, as if she might some-

how have a suggestion for getting us out

of this unpleasant situation, but she was

simply looking back at me with the same

lip-biting expression.

And so I did what one does in times of

need: I consulted the Bible. A distinct

smell of gasoline suggested I’d flooded

the engine — “drowned,” in the more

blame-y French locution — and appar-

ently we merely had to let the car rest “a

short while.” Michele and I debated the

meaning of that phrase, then decided to

wait 10 minutes, during which we sat

without saying much, listening to rain

drum on the car’s canopy. Finally, I took

a deep breath and turned the key. The

engine coughed to life. We had heeded

the Bible’s words and, lo, its prophecy

had come to pass.

PUSHING THE LIMITS

The next morning brought dry weather

and a stiff wind that herded the clouds

across the sky so fast I felt like I was

watching a sped-up film. The landscape

that had emerged from last night’s

frightful darkness was every bit as

beautiful as I’d imagined: terraced foot-

hills backed by craggy, sun-dappled

mountains, with residual pockets of mist

nestling in between, wisps of it being

teased away by eddying currents of air.

If the sight of this didn’t fully redeem

my decision to take a road trip in a su-

perannuated automobile across the

Cévennes’ forbidding topography, it at

least put Michele and me in a bright

enough mood that we could chuckle

over breakfast at the half-dozen French

tourists so laden with expensive-looking

trekking gear as to give the impression

that they’d stepped out of a Patagonia

ad. They were likely hiking the Chemin

de Stevenson, a popular 170-mile trail

that retraces the footsteps of the Scots-

man and his donkey.

Maybe it was because I’d taken to

reading the chronicle of Stevenson’s

journey — which he rather prosaically

titled “Travels with a Donkey in the

Cévennes” — before bed, but increas-

ingly I found myself thinking of our tem-

peramental 2CV as an animate being.

In fact, as we got to know our car’s

quirks and peccadilloes, the parallels

between it and Modestine began to

seem somehow foreordained. Steven-

son devoted many pages to his strug-

gles to goad his “she-ass,” using the parl-

ance of the day, to walk faster. “God for-

bid, thought I, that I should brutalise

this innocent creature; let her go at her

own pace, and let me patiently follow,”

he wrote. Eventually, though, he re-

sorted to whipping the animal, only to be

wracked with guilt afterward.

Over the next several days of driving

over and through the Cévennes’ ravines,

mountain passes, and tablelands —

known here as causses — I similarly

feared I was pushing our beast of bur-

den beyond its operational limits. The

Citroën struggled noisily during steep

climbs and descents, invariably acquir-

ing a tail of impatient drivers unable to

pass us on the twisting, narrow roads.

Occasionally it produced burning smells

and grinding sounds whose source I

couldn’t pinpoint. Clutch? Brakes? Mo-

tor? And yet our ride did not fail us, de-

livering us safely to our destination each

night.

BEST LAID PLANS

The last leg of our journey took us across

the beautifully bleak uplands of the

Causse Méjean and into the Gorges du

Tarn. This spectacular, cave-pocked

river canyon is edged by a sinuous route

hemmed in by soaring walls of karst on

one side and a low stone parapet on the

other. It’s a favorite of French motorcy-

clists, who roared past us in great num-

bers as we approached Saint Enimie,

the riverside village where we’d spend

our final night.

Over a midday meal of grilled lamb at

an auberge in the center of town, Mi-

chele and I made a decision: We’d give

the 2CV the rest of the day off. We’d al-

ready demanded so much of it, and we

didn’t want to push our luck. And so Mi-

chele and I drank wine freely with lunch

and loosened our limbs by strolling

alongside the Tarn and then into the

leafy heights above the village, pausing

to admire the abundant wildflowers and

other delicate things of the kind that you

tend to miss when traveling by car, even

one as slow-moving as a Deux Chevaux.

We planned to get up the next morning

and drive to Lyon, reunite car and

owner, and then catch the fast train to

Paris for our flight home.

We arose at dawn, and the owner of

our hotel, a jocular man in his early 60s

named Monsieur Lopez, helped us load

our bags.

When the car failed to start, Michele

and I were annoyed but not unduly con-

cerned — giving the motor a 10-minute

rest wasn’t going to dent our schedule

fatally. When 10 minutes elapsed and the

engine still wouldn’t turn over, Michele

and I did our worried lip-biting thing.

When I failed to reach the car’s owner at

this early hour on a Sunday and was told

by Drivy’s roadside assistance operator

that they would try to locate the nearest

garage and get back to me, Monsieur

Lopez laughed, assuring me that we

would have a long wait indeed, a full day

at least, as every mechanic for miles

around was asleep or getting ready for

church. When a passer-by offered to

push the car so we could pop the clutch,

we made the discovery that this particu-

lar run of 2CVs had a centrifugal model

that could not be engaged to a dead mo-

tor. And when, finally, this same strang-

er had no success trying to jump-start

our engine using his own vintage auto-

mobile — a cherry red Renault 4 that, I

have to say, looked really handsome

next to our Citroën — I came to an unpal-

atable conclusion: We’d have to aban-

don the 2CV and very hastily revise our

plans.

One cadged lift, a four-hour bus jour-

ney, and an interminably slow intercity

train ride later, Michele and I were

seated across from each other at a bistro

in Paris’s 10th Arrondissement making

quick work of a carafe of Morgon. We’d

managed to get a partial refund on our

Lyon-to-Paris train tickets, and I’d fi-

nally reached the 2CV’s owner, who

apologized for our troubles and told us

not to worry; he would arrange to re-

trieve the car with a friend later that

week. (Later, I learned that the culprit

was an overheated ignition coil — “a

classic problem,” the car’s owner told

me.)

Michele expressed relief when I told

her the 2CV would soon be safely back in

Lyon. “I just felt so bad leaving it there,”

she said, her voice pinched with emo-

tion. She could easily have been talking

about a child or a beloved pet.

Stevenson evinced a similar senti-

mentality after he sold Modestine at the

end of his walk and boarded a coach to

begin his journey home. “It was not until

I was fairly seated by the driver... that

I became aware of my bereavement,” he

wrote. “I had lost Modestine. Up to that

moment I had thought I hated her; but

now she was gone.”

A French adventure in a squeaky car

The Citroën 2CV seemed

like an inspired choice

for a trip in the Cévennes

BY DAVID MCANINCH

On the Causse Méjean in a Citroën 2CV, the beloved “people’s car” of postwar France. The Cévennes mountain region is one of the most sparsely populated parts of the country.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY GABRIELLE VOINOT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

A farmstead that’s been converted into a homestay, near the village of Génolhac.

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