Quote of the week
Sam Smith of Automobile crosses America in one of those inscrutable Frenchmobiles — specifically, a 1966 Citroën DS21 Chapron Décapotable — and discovers its emotional content:
Inescapably, the Citroën evokes a feeling. It makes you ache for the comfort of a dark, smoke-filled room, even if you don’t smoke. You hover down the highway in a kind of glissade, floating like a Detroit sled of yore but without any of the attendant wallowing, and you think of women in flowing evening dresses. The mood even permeates the act of shifting — the reach from second to third is a distinctly dismissive gesture, as if you are waving the bellboy to take your luggage up to your room at Le Meurice and you are tired of boring people and their boring cars and mon Dieu, you want a glass of wine.
Speaking of shifting, this DS21 has a four-speed manual — on the column, an easy reach from the one-spoke (!) steering wheel. If you’ve never seen a DS (and I’ve only seen a couple of them in a lifetime), it looks something like this.
