Not encouragingly, Molsheim is resorting to some lowly car-selling tricks to move the sheet metal. Namely, special-edition Veyrons (see the Dale Earnhardt–edition Chevy Monte Carlo). The Pur Sang, for example, is essentially an unpainted Veyron. This limited edition of just five cars — about $2 million apiece — leaves the stygian carbon weave and shimmering aluminum of the body panels beautifully exposed. Want something a little dressier? At the recent Geneva Auto Show, the company unveiled the Veyron Fbg par Hermès, a collaboration with the famed saddler featuring matching calfskin upholstery and wallet as well as Hermès badging on the wheels and exterior. That will be $2.3 million, please. (Undercoating is extra.)

Meanwhile, the Veyron's marquee billing as the fastest car in the world is being challenged, and from a most unlikely quarter. Shelby SSC in West Richland, Washington — a veritable fruit stand compared to the VW Group — claims to have built the fastest production car in the world, the 1,183-horsepower Ultimate Aero. Last October, with officials from Guinness World Records looking on, Shelby SSC's test driver — 71-year-old Chuck Bigelow — made two passes up and down a two-lane road in rural Washington, at an average speed of 256.18 mph.

"We look forward to defending our title as the fastest car in the world," says Dr. Paefgen, with the air of someone who's just been asked to wrestle with a hobo. "We know what it took to build the Veyron, and I don't think anyone can match it."

Julius Kruta, the Bugatti company historian, picks me up from the Grand Hôtel Strasbourg. We're going to the National Auto Museum of France, in nearby Mulhouse. Kruta is owlish and a touch déshabillé, more IT guy than legend-keeper, but he's arguably the company's most important employee, its in-house Thucydides. Kruta was the first employee to be posted in the restored Château St. Jean in 2001, which served as Bugatti's salon for wining and dining prospective buyers starting in 1928. And, Kruta speculates, if the company should ever have to wind down, he'll be the one to turn off the lights.

In his lovely British-inflected English, and with the ease of a man sure of his facts, Kruta proceeds to relate the history of the company — while keeping his VW Golf's accelerator pegged to the floor.

There is a stone monument a few miles outside Molsheim marking the place and date — August 11, 1939 — where Jean Bugatti, 30-year-old son of founder Ettore Bugatti, swerved to miss a drunk bicyclist and crashed through the gates of the pearly hereafter. According to legend, the bicyclist was the local postal deliveryman, who became so despondent over the incident he later killed himself. Mail delivery in the area afterward was much improved.

At that moment, the 29-year-old Bugatti company ceased to exist in any plausible sense. Ettore had some time earlier abandoned Jean to the business's dwindling finances while he went off to hold court in some of the better brothels of Paris. "Jean was a much finer artist than his father," Kruta says as we pass by. "He died too young." Eight years later, Ettore died with plans for new cars on his drawing board. In the fifties, his younger son, Roland, made a game attempt to revive the company, building a race car and entering the 1956 French Grand Prix, but the car retired after 17 laps.

With that, the House of Bugatti — responsible for many of the most successful race cars in prewar Europe, creators of art-moderne triumphs like the Type 57SC Atlantic — was swept into history's glamorous dustbin of très luxe French car companies: Delage, Delahaye, Talbot-Lago, Avions Voisin. Adieu, adieu.

Ettore came from a family of well-known and eccentric Milanese artists. His younger brother, Rembrandt, a sculptor, committed suicide — the elephant that adorns the radiator cap of the Type 41 Royale was his creation. (His works now sell for millions.) Self-taught and stubbornly anti-mathematical in a field and time that required huge sums of pencil work, Ettore relied on an uncanny intuition about machinery. If you accept the common wisdom that Ettore, like his brother, was more artist than engineer, he was more Brancusi than Henry Moore. The company's cars were noted for their lightness, their fineness, and these qualities served them well in grand prix competition. Bugatti cars — particularly the Type 35 — dominated racing in the twenties and thirties, the glamorous apogee of motoring.

But it was Jean Bugatti, the long-suffering son, who created the marque's most beautiful cars, including the Type 41 Royale and Type 57SC Atlantic. The Atlantic is regarded as the summary achievement of prewar coach building. Only two of the three scroll-fendered Type 57SC Atlantics survive, one owned by Ralph Lauren and the other by collector Peter D. Williamson. The Type 41 Royale, of course, is famous for being the most expensive car ever sold at auction: In 1987, a Swedish collector bought one for $18 million.