Hubert and his wife had taken a villa at Deauville, and in the morning papers Undine followed the chronicle of Hubert’s polo scores and of the Countess Hubert’s racing toilets.
Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country
In the waning days of summer Undine Spragg often grew wistful. Soon she would be back in Paris, where a new season of hope and promise and escargot would begin. Yes, it would be glamorous and festive, but she would miss the informal pleasures of Deauville, the commune in the Calvados department in the Normandy region in northwestern France that lived in the house that Jack built.
There was the harbor, where every day the ocean would meet the shore–how cunning! There was the film festival, where she and her friends would pretend to find Jerry Lewis amusant. There was the casino, where one could employ one’s rudimentary French to say “Les jeux sont fait!” There was polo–boring! There was the conference centre, where if one was willing to sit through a ninety-minute continuing education lecture one could keep one’s ball point pen and one’s legal pad and one’s 10 ounce hard-grip fitness bottle bearing the logo of Le Centre du Conference du Deauville. Such a lot of swag!
But the main attraction was none of these. No, “The Queen of the Norman Beaches” was best known for its racing toilets, as Edith Wharton had recorded for the edification and amusement of her readers around the world. That was something you wouldn’t see in Paris, non monsieur! Toilet-racing is a great leveling influence, she thought, a booster shot of egalite et fraternite in the bicep of her adopted country. It took le capital to buy a string of racing toilets, but the best jockeys were drawn from le boue–the mud of France, the common people.
Marcel Marceau toilet paper dispenser.
And so she accompanied Countess Hubert to races of Le Grand Prix du Chambre Pot for the preliminary heats, and the quarter-finals, and the semi-finals, and now–as summer drew to a close–the grand championship! The winner would take home a twelve-pack of cottony-soft T.P., the loser? Well, let’s just say it can fairly be called a load of crap.
“What is Countess Hubert’s le strategy for the finals?” the fashionable portrait painter Claud Walsingham Popple asked Undine.
“I believe she wishes to establish herself down low, and ‘bump-draft’ her way through the backstretch.”
“These termes du NASCAR!” Popple exclaimed. “So colorful, but so difficult to manger.”
“I think you mean manage,” Undine said. “You mangez des saucisses sans doubte, if I remember my Francais correctly.”
“I hope the Countess wears her ‘brain bucket,’ as the safety helmet is styled.”
Tres gauche!
“I am certain she would not leave home without it,” Undine said.
The racers approached the starting line, and were just about to take off, when a commotion arose in les pits.
“What is the bouleversement?” Popple asked, and the source of the delay became apparent in a moment.
“It is the age-old problem,” Undine said, pursing her lips and shaking her head.
“What is that?”
“Before you take off on a long trip,” she explained, “everyone panics and must go to the bathroom.”
I thought about competing, but I have nothing to go on.