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 mountains, still one of the wildest and most sparsely populated parts of the country, in the company of a slow-moving automobile called a Citroën 2CV.

Stevenson described Modestine as recalcitrant 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 canvas 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 highways 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 inside 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 traveling in France and the fact that it’s a Unesco World Heritage Site — would be an inspired choice for a weeklong road trip with my wife, Michele.