French Plumbing

Our plumber is finally gone and might deserve mention in the Guinness World Book of Records for completing two bathrooms and upgrading the heating system in just nine months, i.e. running about five inches of pipe a day and installing a faucet every other month. If relieved to wave Olivier goodbye, we are far from being pleased with the overall result.

Nearing completion, on month eight of this genesis, there was hot water yet we were not happy. I told Olivier that I thought the water was not sufficiently hot. He looked at me as though I was a member of a weird sect practicing self-inflicted corporal pain. I said the temperature was okay for a shower but not hot enough for a bath. His reply was that water temperature is regulated by law in France and cannot exceed 130°F.

Un point, c’est tout.

The last agonizing stretch involved the fitting of a bidet, the French ‘thing’ that possibly is nowadays only a literary image for grimy hotels of promiscuous frequentation and/or fin de siècle whorehouses. Coming from Italy, a country where the bidet is an indispensable part of the sanitary landscape, I have long had the habit of inventive acrobatics to supply for its lack in my travels. And I remember my chic Central Park West friend, Helen Levine, once telling me with amazement that her architect recommended equipping each bathroom of her farmhouse in Umbria with a bidet and wondering if the extravaganza could not have been contained to one for the whole house.

Our plumber and his father (a retired plumber himself and conscripted as necessary by Olivier, it seems) worked on the bidet for two entire days – allowing a pause of two weeks for reflection in between – to sort out the technicalities. There was a bit of rough surface on the bottom of the porcelain where the drain had to connect which made the two men scratch their heads for sometime. They wanted me to feel the asperity.

Knowing nothing of plumbing, I sympathized and was led to believe in some original flaw. I called my Italian supplier who listened carefully and then asked: don’t they use silicon in France? But Olivier was not happy with the idea and predicted horrible problems in case the bidet should later have to be removed. When they were done we found the bidet – itself a precious little thing, the product of a blissful marriage between old-fashioned esthetics and functionality – attached to the wall with grey PVC joints, corrugated pipes, and twisted flexible coils like a comatose patient on a life support machine.

That was not the only demoralizing sight though: the men had also mounted the toilet seat – an expensive hardwood one – without adjusting sliding screws that permit up to four different positions. Thus, the seat's ovals did not entirely correspond with the toilet bowl, rendering the whole thing truly unusable. We were in doubt as to whether this last bit was a little trick to punish us for showing, at times, our impatience, or rather a symptom of plain lack of skill. The dilemma was solved when we checked the other bathroom where, on top of a similarly disfigured WC, there was a piece of cardboard erected on which was scrawled a large red question mark.

?????? indeed!