At first, I couldn't work out why the old Frenchman was waving at me. There we were, waiting for a traffic light to change somewhere in the Parisian suburbs between the brutalism of La Defense and the Louis XV glory of Maison Lafitte, and there he was, alongside us in a battered Renault 14, flat cap set firmly on a head that had seen better days, waving furiously.
I made a vague, perfunctory hand signal back and looked away. It was the final Sunday of last year's Tour de France and I was knackered and lost, as I had been for much of the past month. I hadn't scratched what remained of his paintwork, I hadn't even cut him up. He was clearly a madman, who had probably seen the Tour de France sticker on my windscreen and wanted to discuss Lance Armstrong's non-use of performance-enhancing drugs.
Come the next feu rouge , there he was again, hand palpitating furiously. But now he had the window down. Oh no, maybe I'd left my computer on the roof, or run over his dog...
'Bonjour,' he said with a beatific smile. 'Tres belle voiture, monsieur.' The C5 had cast its spell again, as it had from its first night on home soil, when the hotel owner at the Belgian border looked at it wistfully and said, 'Moi, j'ai une Xantia.'
Driving Citroën's new estate through France for four weeks led to three conclusions. One, no one in France had seen it before. Two, all Frenchmen of a certain age fall in love with it at first sight. Three, the C5 appealed to their idea of what was quintessentially Citroën, quintessentially French.
Just as every farm backyard has its 2CV rusting in a clump of nettles, somewhere in every Frenchman's heart there is an idealised image of a svelte Citroën, probably the legendary DS, definitely with those rangy, fighter-plane curves - either his father drove it, or his father's patron.
The C5's low-slung sleekness seems to have the same effect on the French as the Madeleine did on Marcel Proust, conjuring up visions of a less uncertain past: de Gaulle, Catherine Deneuve, and the days when Frenchmen actually won the Tour de France. When I started covering this race a decade ago, one of the things about it which was most French was the squat Citroën estate which acted as the police's mobile command centre. The pilote was replaced recently by an MPV, far more comfortable no doubt, but it could have come from anywhere.
The wave of affection was not misplaced: the C5 is a lovable beast. Outside it's huge, inside it's vast. The cavernous load space at the rear gobbled up two bikes and five bags, with never a hiccup. More bags and three journalists went into the rest. We didn't check the payload, so as not to scare ourselves: we were probably over it. The leg room is designed for human beings with long legs, and not midgets as is often the case.
The suspension was in the best Citroën tradition. When you pressed the remote unlocking key, the C5 'sat up and begged like a dog' as one of us put it. There was a harder 'sport' setting, which took us through the Alps and Pyrenees fully loaded with barely a squeal of the tyres. It could be ramped up if you wanted to wallow across a field, lowered itself to improve the aerodynamics on the autoroute, and set itself automatically depending on the load, so it felt the same with one person and some luggage or three and a full complement.
For all the vast load it was carrying, the C5 handled well, with one word of warning: the man in the middle often complained of vague nausea due to a certain amount of 'float', so parents with offspring with sensitive stomachs would do well to test the C5 with a sickbag just in case. Up an Alp or a Pyrenee, there was grunt enough in the 2.2 litre diesel engine; on the autoroute it never felt extended.
This was the automatic version, so there was little to do other than drive, apart from in the mountains where the semi-automatic gearbox came into its own. The C5 was full of gadgets which do the work for you: automatic lights, an automatic windscreen wiper which floated slowly across in torrential rain, and slapped wildly in light drizzle, the usual computer which avoids the need for map reading as long as you are in an area covered by the GPS.
Even for an automatic, fully loaded and being driven up and down mountains, the C5 never seemed thirsty, turning in around 32-35mpg depending on the terrain. Three quarters of a tank took us from Paris to Stevenage.
All round, it is an economical beast: the 1.8 petrol version starts at £15,595, indicating perhaps that the nostalgic yearnings of a million Frenchmen are not misplaced.
· The Observer travelled to the Tour de France with Hoverspeed (08705 240 241).
