Paris:- Wednesday, 12. February 1997:- The sky is gloom from edge to edge and more packets of weather are shifting our way from the Atlantic. A day to be under cover.

Where I live and in Paris, it seems like half the population has left or is home in bed with a virus. The posters in the métro are uninspiring; it looks like this is a week without a good one. The one for Beaubourg's anniversary was good, but I saw it too late to get it before the event a couple of weeks ago.

The salon 'Retromobile' is in the middle of its run down at Paris-Expo at the Porte de Versailles and I am on my way down there without knowing what to expect. I haven't read anything about it or heard of it before.

At Paris-Expo, usually clogged with salons and exhibitions, there seem to be only two: this 'Retromobile' and one for 'Theatre,' which is not even in the official program. 'Retromobile' is in the big, multi-story Hall Seven, all the way to the back of the lot but since it is not raining I take the surface instead of the covered 'tube' - with is like an above-ground métro tunnel, which I see enough of as it is.

No big crowd is waiting to get in - and the press person is off at lunch, so I begin without a guide or map. My first impression is that it is a big salon; it fills all of the ground-floor of the hall. I walk straight to the back.

The place is chock-full of old car stuff. It is not just a 'salon of elegance' like an old-car showroom, but an incredible hodge-podge of the eccentric and even the bizarre. Here is a canary-yellow and signal-orange Citroen DS break, with an extended snoot and widened fenders - to hold two sets of front wheels. At the back there are also four wheels. Inside - inside! - there are one or two very huge wheels. It is a Michelin tire-test car.

In all there are more than 250 exhibitors and between them they are showing off about 300 old cars, trucks, motorcycles and some boats, but I didn't see any of these. It is, in fact, the 22nd salon of this type, and the 2nd of its sub-name: 'Retronautique.'

On just about every stand or booth there is something remarkable; what is here are collector's items, or parts of entire collections, or the pieces necessary to add to or complete a collection. There are also the stands of major car collector's clubs in France, plus manufacturer's stands with models from their company collections. BMW had a 3200 V-8 coupe that they were making when I worked there in 1964.

The show also has its 'stars' - as I read later in the tiny press release. I saw the armored Roll-Royce 'combat car,' possibly the one used in 'Lawrence of Arabia;' you know the one - with the turret and the cannon. I didn't see the Volvo P1800 coupe driven by Roger Moore in the TV-series, 'The Saint.' I didn't see the 1921 Rumpler and I'm really sorry about it, nor did I see the stainless De Loren. But I'm thinking of killing myself for not seeing the 1902 Serpollet steam-powered racer, nicknamed, the 'Easter-egg.'

I came around a corner and there was this really huge, light yellow, two seater - looking like King Kong's runabout, and it was the 'Mormon Meteor,' a 1935 Dusenberg. This monster ran at 244.8 kph in 1935. It was driven, I think, by A. B. Jenkins; and was later converted for street cruising. Straight-eight, 6.8 litres, and 390 euro-hp was all it took to break records in those days.

There are a lot of booths for the collector's car magazines and also a lot for the collectors of miniature cars and models cars. Near these I come across two stands that are selling kits to convert Deux-chevaux - the '2CV' - into true convertibles.

The Léman four-seat version - see the photo here - has a fibreglass trunk lid and rear fenders that reach to the rear of the front door, plus a steel cage to install in the interior which provides anchor points for the front seat-belts and adds lateral rigidity, plus a couple of extra plastic pieces to finish off the rear surrounding the back seat. The similar Azelle version, made by another company, is a two-seater, and if you add a certain type of Citroen Visa folding front-seat, you can easily sleep in it as the trunk is quite huge without the back seats. Both kits come with a soft convertible top.

The Azelle's maker is a Peugeot engineer and he tells me that the 2CV was originally built on a platform and its rigidity is there; the extra steel braces are mainly to keep the sides and the door-frames firm. His kit requires no welding as it bolts in. You just need a saw to cut off the roof. The conversion takes about 30 hours, not including the painting and detail-work. Léman estimated installation of its kit at 10 hours of work, but also proposes to do the actual conversion as well; the kit itself is 19,500 francs. The Azelle kit is 22,500 francs. Both cars looked very neat.

On the way back to the press office I pass a long wall that is covered with 'for sale - trade - seeking' notices and there are a fair number of browsers, looking and reading them very carefully.

Behind the monster Dusenberg I come across a very zoomy 1938 Delahaye 135 M. The body was done by Aigoni and Falaschi and they did about five in this body-style, but each slightly different. They had their shop in Boulogne, where there was so much industrial and artistic activity.

The car is on the stand of the Club Delahaye and the general secretary, Mr. Gérard Claverie, tells me a bit about the car and the club.

The 30 year-old Club Delahaye has about 250 members worldwide with about two-thirds of them in France. They have a list of about 1,200 Delahayes; mostly cars, but also trucks and fire-engines and even some army jeeps. The club either has parts, knows where to find them, or can have them made for members. In Paris, the club has a dinner every month and member's wives are warmly welcome. The club also organizes two rallyes a year for members and participates in the general 'Clubs de la Marque' rallye, held in October.

The club puts out four bilingual bulletins a year and maintains a serious collection of documents concerning Delahaye. Once every two years the club organizes a trip to the United States to meet its members there.

Although it is the car itself that has caught my eye, I include this information about the club because it is probably representative of the other collector's clubs in France. If you have an old French car, the club for it can probably be found here, through the French Federation of 'Véhicules d'Epoque.'

There are too many amazing cars here, too many to describe in 25 words or less. Some are curious, some are beautiful and most of them are shiny. The French manufacturers have their stands, with cars from their own collections, and I already mentioned that some foreign manufacturers have stands.

There are stand-alone displays featuring historic and famous cars, racing and prestigious cars, and unusual cars. The all- aluminium 1993 Audi Quattro Avus is on the 'Unusual' car stand. They should have put it and the Dusenberg on a 'muscle' car stand instead.

A little more modestly, the French Mustang Club, which has about 250 members, has a two-time winner on its stand. Europeans fell in love with Mustangs and I remember seeing my first one on a bumpy Barcelona street, running under-sprung, in June of 1964.

The white Mustang 289 GT, with solid lifters and 271 hp, came to France in December of 1965 and was put into the 1966 Rallye Monte Carlo in January with the number 145, which it still carries. After coming in second, the leading Mini-Cooper was disqualified, so this car won that year.

After the ice, snow and salt of the 'Monte,' in the spring the car became a movie star by appearing in Claude Lelouche's classic film, 'Un Homme et un Femme' with Anouk Amiée and Jean-Louis Trintignant, who drove the car through the waters of the Atlantic off the beach at Deauville. The film won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1966.

This car has passed the technical inspection for street cars in France and this 30-year-old set of wheels is insured for 1997 - so I don't doubt it runs, but doubt it is for sale. The car is in very good shape and has the original 'Monte' plaques at front and rear.

Around a corner and a couple of stands later I am in new and used spare parts territory and this is where I run into Mike Rubin, from California. He sells special wheel covers for old cars; the kinds that need 17 or 18-inch steel or aluminium disks or caps.

With a banged-up Citroen BX I am not in the market for this sort of thing, but I am curious why an old-car show in Paris can attract a dealer from California's car heaven. According to Mike, there are still a lot of old cars yet to be 'unearthed' in Europe, so there are constant 'new finds' all the time as children inherit family garages and barns and find rare sets of old iron hidden under rubbish and old hay.

As I've seen as I walked around, there are a lot of 'one-off' cars that were the result of small custom coach builders in the 1920's and '30's. What may be under that junk pile may be a one-only car. For collectors, 'one-onlys' are the top of the pyramid, and it is impossible to get a thing more rare than a unique example.

Besides being a fund of old-car arcana, Mike Rubin held a few records. He had a set of brass 'timing' plaques that he picked up while racing class 'C' Ford roadsters at El Mirage in the late '40's. One was punch-dated 19. November 1949 and the flying mile time was 105.63 mph, done with a Ford 'flat-head' V8 motor - with, of course - 'Moon' wheel disks.

After this uplifting conversation I wander by many booths and stalls of used and new parts; motor parts, decor parts, steering wheels, ashtrays, old radios, headlights, re-chromers, entire motor blocks, specialty dealers for specific models, plus gadgets, period gas pumps and 2834 other odds and ends, and I get dizzy from the variety. Visitors are picking through bins and they are walking out with re-chromed Fregate bumpers.

There are niches within niches, and I am not going to look at major areas like motorcycles or the motorboats at all, not even to see the 'rescued' Ferrari-powered 'San Marco,' another unique piece, but of boat.

I am mentally on the métro when I am stopped by the display of a 'Nautica Boano,' a Fiat based on one of their '50's 'Multiplas.' These were stretched Fiat 600's that were Europe's answer to 'vans' before the VW model was 'discovered' by America.

Despite its name the 'Nautica Boano' is not amphibious. It is a 'Multipla' with the roof cut off, and lengthwise wicker seats for three on each side in the rear, two cut-down doors in the front, and fake wood-grain on the bumpers. It looks like a bathtub with a windshield, wood-rimmed steering wheel and four little Fiat 600 wheels.

The Italians must have had only sunny weather in those days - La Dolce Vita! - because the 'Nautica Boano' has no roof of any kind, unlike the soft-tops of the converted 2CVs seen at the beginning.