I bought a tabac sign at a brocante on the edge of Nogent-le-Rotrou. It was marked at two hundred and fifty euros, I paid two hundred, and I had decided I was buying it about four seconds after I saw it.

It is worth explaining why, because on paper it makes no sense. It was not a bargain and it is not rare. I did not need it. It is faded, and the red has gone the particular chalky orange that red goes after twenty or thirty years of facing south.

The sign

If you grew up being driven through France, you know this object even if you have never once looked at it directly.

Every small town had one. You would come off a long road, slow down for the first houses, and there it would be on a bracket above a doorway, sticking out into the street at head height so you could read it coming from either direction. Red, lit or unlit, usually with the tobacconist's name in a smaller line underneath. The rest of the town could be shut, shuttered, or apparently uninhabited, and the tabac sign would still be hanging there telling you that this was a place where people lived.

We never stopped. That was not the point. You drove the routes nationales because that was simply how you got anywhere, town after town after town, and the tabac sign was the thing that announced a town had started. Slow for the first houses, red sign, a few streets of it, then fields again, and twenty minutes later another one.

Those towns were busier then, and there were far more of them in business. More open, more of it lit, more people on the pavement at whatever hour you happened to pass. The signs are what I remember because they were the punctuation. They coloured the day. Each one meant the empty stretch was over and something was going on, even if we were through it in ninety seconds and I never once learned its name.

That is the whole reason it came home. Not because it is a good example, and not because I have a plan for it. Because it is the object I associate with the drive itself, back when the drive still went through places instead of past them.

I am aware this is a slightly ridiculous basis on which to buy a large old sign. I would do it again.

The road

Which brings me to where I actually found it, which is one of those same roads.

Nogent-le-Rotrou sits on what was the Route Nationale 23, the old Paris to Nantes road. It has been declassified and renumbered, and the stretch running west out of town is now the D923. It follows the valley of the Huisne through La Ferté-Bernard and Connerré, and after about sixty-five kilometres it delivers you to the edge of Le Mans.

You do not need to drive all of it. The good part starts before you have properly left Nogent.

At the lieu-dit Chiot, on the western edge of town, there is Guenatone, which is where the sign came from. It is a large shed rather than a boutique, and it works as a groupement, a dozen or so dealers each with their own patch under one roof. That structure is the reason to go. A single dealer has a taste, and once you have understood it you have seen the shop. A dozen dealers under one roof have twelve tastes, and the stand you would never have walked into on its own is four metres from the one you came for.

Next door, at the same lieu-dit, is Carré 28, and this is the detail that made me like the whole place: it is in an old petrol station. The canopy is still standing. The stock sits where the pumps were.

Two shops, one address, and you can walk between them. That is the entire case for pointing the car at Nogent-le-Rotrou on a Saturday morning.

Then the road carries on west and so do the shops. Roadside brocantes, dépôts-vente in old commercial units, the occasional proper antiquaire with a lit window and firm ideas about price. This is not a coincidence of the local character. Before the A11 took the through traffic, everything between Paris and Le Mans moved along this road, which is why the buildings are here at all: sheds, forecourts, and roadhouses built for a volume of passing trade that stopped coming decades ago. Cheap square metres on a road people still drive is precisely what the antiques trade needs, and it moved in.

Some of it is junk. That is not a complaint, it is the mechanism. You need the junk in order for the good things to be mispriced.

We drive it when there is nothing on. That is the real argument for it. The vide-grenier calendar in Le Perche is generous from April to October, but it is a calendar, which means it has gaps, and it stops almost entirely in winter. The shops on the D923 do not. They are open on an ordinary Saturday in February when the fields are grey and there is not a trestle table for forty kilometres.

It is also a completely different kind of day. A vide-grenier is a rush: you are there at eight, you are competing, and the thing you want is gone by nine. A road full of shops is the opposite. Nobody is going to buy the sideboard out from under you while you think about it over lunch. You wander, you look, you go back to the second place because the thing in the second place was better.

If you want the how-to for the events themselves, the difference between a brocante and a vide-grenier and what to look for in this region, we covered that in Your First Brocante in Le Perche. A good day out at a proper vide-grenier looks like this Sunday in Bellou-sur-Huisne. This is the other mode, and the one that works all year.

How to do it

Start at Chiot and go west. Guenatone and Carré 28 are the anchor, they are next door to each other, and they are close enough to Nogent-le-Rotrou that the trip is worth it even if you do nothing else. Everything after that is upside, and you finish somewhere with lunch options rather than in a lay-by.

Do not go on a Monday. A great many independent shops in France close Monday, and a fair number take Tuesday as well. Saturday is the reliable day. Sunday is a gamble that sometimes pays. Ring ahead if you are driving any distance for one specific place.

Respect the lunch hour. Twelve to two, and in the smaller places closer to twelve to half past two. This is not negotiable and it is not a sign of a badly run business. Plan to eat at the same time as everyone else.

Ask the price down. The marked price is an opening position, not a verdict, and in a groupement the person on the till will usually ring the dealer to check. Fifty euros came off the tabac sign because I asked once, politely, and then stopped talking. Take cash while you are at it: most places take a card now, but the ones that do not are frequently the interesting ones.

Bring the car you actually need. The single most common mistake is arriving in a small car on the day you find the armoire.

Look at the mounting, not just the object. For signs specifically, half the value is in the bracket. A sign with its original bracket has somewhere to go on your wall. A sign without one is a project. And if it is a lit sign, find out whether it still lights before you pay rather than after.

The tabac sign is up now, indoors, out of the sun that would finish off what is left of the red. The lights work.

It tells you nothing about Le Perche. It is not local, it is not rare, and any dealer would price it in about a second.

It does mean that when I come down the stairs I get a very short version of being eleven years old in the back of a car on a route nationale, watching a town arrive and then go past. Two hundred euros of anything else would not do that.

Go and find your own. The road west is full of them.