When we made the trip we only passed a handful of cars the whole way, which is just as well as it’s hard to keep your eyes on the road when every corner brings another breathtaking view.

Also, it’s uphill and down dale, so the thought of cycling in this terrain wasn’t very appealing – but more of that and the wartime heroines who did later.

The star of the drive is the emptiness of the countryside here, said to be one of the least-populated areas of France; that means that wild flowers flourish, the abundant rivers and streams are sparkling clean, and everything looks like it has lived undisturbed for ever. That’s far from the case, as I found when we reached Florac just in time to miss lunch.

The village is lovely, but what grabbed my attention was a wall mural at the school of two women with bicycles. The faces looked like real people, and they certainly were – two local heroines of the French Resistance in World War Two, who both lived to be honoured by their country and their village.

Suzette Agulhon worked at the sub-prefecture (the local government admin office) in the war and courageously provided valuable information to the Resistance.  She was arrested on November 18, 1943. After being interrogated in Montpellier, she was interned at the Brens camp in the Tarn, then transferred to Gurs camp, from where she escaped. In October 1944 she went back to Florac and back to her old job.

Simone Serrière was the headmistress of Florac’s public school and hid Jews in the village of La Salle Prunet throughout the war. Among them was artist Jacob Barosin and his wife, Sonia. They had fled to Paris from the Nazi regime in Germany, and then to Florac where he worked on a farm and Sonia worked as a seamstress.

In 1943 he was arrested and sent to Gurs Camp, then Gignac Camp. It was when he escaped from Gignac that Simone Serrière entered their story. Simone hid Jacob and Sonia in a school attic, keeping them fed and safe until the hideaway was discovered in August 1943. The couple went back to Paris on forged papers, emigrated to the United States in 1947, and Jacob worked for NBC TV and as an artist. He died in 2001.

He sketched and painted throughout the war years, and his extraordinary work, A Remnant, was published as a book in 1988. Many of his sketches are in the Collection of the Yad Vashem Art Museum, at Jerusalem’s World Holocaust Remembrance Centre. The faces in his works are so real you could imagine his subjects walking past you in the street. Many remain unidentified.

On the back cover of his book, Jacob is quoted as saying: “Be faithful to your duty. Not only for your own good, [but] so that there will be a memory, if only a tiny one…”

In 1985, Simone received the title of “Righteous Among the Nations” from Israel, the highest honour the country can give to non-Jews.

The village senior school is now named after Simone, and the primary school after Suzette, with the mural of these wartime heroines with their bikes because that’s how they got around during the war.

After such humbling stories, the fact that no restaurant in the village could feed us because it was coming up to their closing time seemed of no importance whatsoever, and we headed for the open road and another spellbinding downhill journey back to Anduze.

Verdict: Gorgeous drive with endless photo opps.

Top tips: French restaurants have their opening hours set by the local mayor’s office and can’t change them, so get to Florac by about 1pm and you’ll be able to eat. Check that no event is going on when you want to make the journey; we had to abandon our first attempt because there was an annual car rally on the road and it was closed to non-racers.

Top photo: Mural of the ladies on Florac’s school wall. Pictures of the ladies supplied by Gorges du Tarn, Causses and Cévennes tourism office.

Sketch: Mr Landau and Inmate with Russian Uniform, Gurs Camp 1943. Collection of the Yad Vashem Art Museum, World Holocaust Remembrance Centre, Jerusalem.