Robert V. Camuto

Special to the Washington Post

I should have listened to the lady behind the rental car counter. She warned me that there was no sense -- and too much traffic -- in taking Route Nationale 7 through the Paris suburbs.

But I was on a mission to drive almost every inch of France's mythic road, which connects the capital to the Cote d'Azur by nearly 600 miles of what's now largely a back road through La France Profonde, or deep France.

So on a morning in the first week of spring, I drove from the N7's starting point at the Porte d'Italie and headed southeast through a jungle of concrete apartment buildings, industrial zones, McDonald's franchises and lots of red lights. About 40 minutes into my trip, at one particularly long light, I was cursing my own orthodoxy when I heard a loud scraping and crushing noise. It was as though the cute Renault Twingo I was driving was a beer can being squeezed in a giant fist.

The driver's door crumpled slightly, and the side-view mirror popped out of its socket. I leaned into the car horn as I realized what was happening: A flatbed truck slowly pulling up in the next lane was scraping the side of the car.

An hour later, after numerous apologies from the truck driver and an accident report filled out in French, I was on the road again with a door that would not open and a window that would not shut. I got on the fast-moving autoroute and hightailed it out of the 'burbs, merging back onto the N7 only after the concrete yielded to countryside.

Soon I was in the Fontainebleau Forest, more than 80,000 acres of dense oak, pine, beech, chestnut, maple and birch trees; wildlife; evocative rock formations; and lakes -- all prized by centuries of French kings and scores of artists, including Renoir and Monet. I took a small detour to Barbizon, the village about 35 miles from the center of Paris that gave its name to the romantic school of painters who congregated there in the 19th century.

Here I found a relaxed finish to a harrowing morning. The tree-lined streets, the birds that chirp as if on cue, the weathered tile roofs on the stately homes, the gravel sidewalks and the tiny tasteful shops are a picture from storybook France. It was a brilliant sunny day, and as I sat in a garden courtyard basking, eating and sipping cider, my pilgrimage began to make sense.

France's Main Street

Route Nationale 7 was assembled in the late 19th century from pieces of road that dated to antiquity, but it wasn't until the post-World War II era of paid vacations and family automobiles that it became legendary. In the 1950s and '60s, Parisians and other northerners headed south to soak up the Mediterranean sun and sea.

Just as Route 66 became the Main Street of America, N7 became France's main vacation road, memorialized in French popular culture, notably by French singing legend Charles Trenet in 1955. And like Route 66, the N7 went into decline with the construction of larger highways at the end of the '60s.

In this electronic age of speed and efficiency, I figured that the N7 would be the ultimate slow-travel road trip, providing a way to see France as it is today, from its back yard. With my son in school and my wife too busy to accompany me, I set out alone across France at a leisurely pace to spend about four days on the N7.

The first order of business after lunch on Day One was to trade in the wreck of a car for a new one (glad I opted for the supplemental insurance) in Fontainebleau, the city built from about the 12th to the 19th centuries around the sprawling royal chateau. I headed south through the area known as the Loiret, where three things surprised me.

The first was just how tricky it can be to follow the N7, much of which has been downgraded to local roads. Road signs for the N7 mysteriously disappear and reappear as the road picks up new names and at times merges with the modern highway A7. A navigator with a detailed map is a good idea.

The second surprise was an odd, faded chapel, its doors open to the road. I stopped to look inside this tiny roadside shrine filled with flowers and candles. Above the chipped wooden door and stained-glass windows on the outside was a painted sign that bore the inscription Notre Dame de La Route Guidez-Nous (Our Lady of the Road, Guide Us).

Farther on came the third surprise. I'd assumed that I was driving through desolate forests. Yet oddly, women wearing extremely short skirts and high boots materialized from the woods, waving at passing trucks and cars. There were no red lights along this stretch of road, but it seemed that I was driving through some sort of rural red-light district.

The road continued into western Burgundy, where I made a detour for the night amid dense forests, flowing streams and hillsides where sheep and cream-colored Charolais cattle grazed on thick carpets of meadow flowers. My destination was the home of writer and friend (and former French squash champion) Denis Grozdanovitch, a reflective man whose book titles include "L'art Difficile de ne Presque Rien Faire" ("The Difficult Art of Doing Almost Nothing").

After a good meal and good wine and conversation that evening, Grozdonavitch spoke melancholically the next morning about the N7 and what had become of much of rural France.

"Now when you travel anywhere, you go from one point to the next, but in between it's the modern consumerist world," he said. "The roads have become like big American suburbs. It's frightening!"

Finding lost France

There was nothing resembling a suburban nightmare in Grozdanovitch's part of the world. That would come later. I left Burgundy through what is, on the contrary, one of the more compelling images of civilized motoring: miles of road lined by single columns of platane trees.

My midday destination was the town of Moulins in the Auvergne region. With a population of more than 20,000, Moulins, along the Allier River, is one of central France's most elegant towns. I walked the cobblestone streets and found stone and brick buildings dating from Moulins's days as a medieval duchy, half-timbered houses, a handsome belltower and an impressive 15th-century cathedral. But Moulins is more than an open museum; it's a lively place with sidewalk cafes, wood-front shops and an impressive collection of artisanal chocolate makers that seemed to beckon from every corner.

Lunch at Le Grand Cafe, a more-than-a-century-old art nouveau brasserie, where the specialty is Charolais beef, was both civilized and a bargain. Under the ceiling frescoes and elaborate white plasterwork, I found the last available table and ate a trio of steak tartares (about $18), mini patties of raw chopped steak prepared three ways: one a classic tartare (with capers, onion and egg yolks), a second prepared with olive tapenade and a third whose exterior seemed as if it had been grilled for about a half-second.

That afternoon, I headed east out of the high plateaus and mountains of France's Massif Central as it dropped toward the Rhone Valley north of Lyon. There I found that through much of the Rhone Valley, the old N7 has become a mixed bag, a place where the beauty of long platane alleys and apricot and almond orchards is interrupted by go-kart tracks, truck lots, Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets and junkyards. Few other places show such a stark contrast between la belle France and the France that at one point developed bad taste.

Though I love Lyon, on this road trip I wanted to avoid the big cities and stay on the back roads. I spent the night in Tain L'Hermitage (more than 50 miles south of Lyon), at the base of steep vineyard-covered hills. The next morning, I made the short 12-mile drive along the N7 to Valence, a pretty city perched on a plateau over the Rhone that is also home to one of France's most gifted chefs. Anne-Sophie Pic, the only Frenchwoman with three Michelin stars, has grown her family's Maison Pic, founded in 1936 on the N7, into a culinary duchy with a school, a luxury hotel, two restaurants and a wine shop.

Pic's casual modern alternative to the fancy Maison Pic, called 7 par Anne-Sophie Pic, is a fun, delicious tribute to the road: Menus fold out like maps, baguettes are served in paper to-go bags, and the check comes in a basket made from recycled tires. The three-course meal that started with a sense-altering combination of frothy cream of mushroom soup flavored with Arabica coffee cost me about half a tank of gas.

To the Med

South of Valence, the world changes. Olive trees and Mediterranean brush plants known as garrigue, including wild lavender, thyme, sage and rosemary, take over a landscape that turns rugged, arid. You can see Provence begin in the colors of the pastel pink and yellow buildings with their sky-blue and pistachio window shutters.

In the otherwise ancient town of Piolenc, situated in the Vaucluse just north of Orange, I stopped in an old garage that serves as a collection point of nostalgia from another era of French motoring. The Musee Memoire de la Nationale 7 (literally: Memory Museum of the National 7) is a collection of cars, campers, motorized bicycles, photos, posters and paraphernalia run by a group of retirees.

"There are two kinds of people," Raymond Rolland, the president of the museum association, told me. "There are the people who are in a hurry, and there are the people who take their time to see things."

Of course, Rolland, who sees the world as being in a big hurry, longs for the days when families took picnics and camped along the side of the road as they departed for languorous summer breaks.

As afternoon faded, I drove past the Roman arc de triomphe in Orange, skirted Avignon and followed the road through bustling Aix-en-Provence. This stretch was one of the most nourishing, with its miles of platane alleys and fruit orchards backed by the dramatic silhouette of the nearby Luberon Mountains.

Continuing past Aix through stands of Mediterranean pines rooted in red soil, I watched Mont Sainte-Victoire, Cézanne's favorite landscape subject, loom with a violet glow.

I stopped for the night in Saint-Maximin-La-Sainte-Baume to continue the next morning through the vineyards and hilly landscapes of Provence's Var. At Frejus, with its massive Roman arena now used for bullfights and concerts, I saw the first strip of blue Mediterranean Sea through a line of modern condos. I drove toward it, leaving the N7 to make my way along the coast.

Here at land's end, I felt I had arrived -- just like all the people in those buildings, who I imagined had taken that same road and never turned back.

Camuto is a writer based in France. His next book, "Palmento: A Sicilian Wine Odyssey," is to be published in September.