In a moment it will be behind me!

Hmm. I would have sworn that this story originated from Voltaire. But that is based on a forty or fifty year recollection of something I read.

I actually came across this while reading about the origins of the phrase "smallest room in the house" as a euphemism for toilet, bathroom, or lavatory. It is much more recent than I realized.

From The Phrase Finder.

The expression may have been introduced into English from German. Certainly the most celebrated use of it was a quotation from the German musician Max Reger. Reger was notoriously irascible and didn't react well to a savage review by Rudolph Louis in Münchener Neueste Nachrichten, February 1906. His response was:

"Ich sitze in dem kleinsten Zimmer in meinem Hause. Ich habe ihre Kritik vor mir. Im nachsten Augenblick wird sie hinter mir sein"

("I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it will be behind me!")

All of which brings to mind another long ago memory.

I was seven or eight. We were living in England in the late sixties. My parents were headed to Switzerland for a week. My younger sister and I were to lodge at Piper's Hill, a boarding house for children for just such occasions. Piper's Hill was owned by a doctor and his wife, an old country place full of rooms and their own children grown and gone. There was land and gardens, a donkey paddock, a chicken coop from which you could daily collect the eggs. A small stream ran adjacent to the grounds and it was all surrounded by agricultural fields.

We children enjoyed a Mr. Toad existence, messing about. Exploring, climbing trees, "helping" the gardener with his chores, watching and waiting for the hens to lay their eggs, roaming about. Indeed, there was much the spirit of The Wind in the Willows.

When the girl returned, some hours later, she carried a tray, with a cup of fragrant tea steaming on it; and a plate piled up with very hot buttered toast, cut thick, very brown on both sides, with the butter running through the holes in great golden drops, like honey from the honeycomb. The smell of that buttered toast simply talked to Toad, and with no uncertain voice; talked of warm kitchens, of breakfasts on bright frosty mornings, of cosy parlour firesides on winter evenings, when one's ramble was over and slippered feet were propped on the fender, of the purring of contented cats, and the twitter of sleepy canaries.

In planning their journey to Switzerland, my mother took my sister and myself up to Piper's Hill to visit before we stayed their.

We met the doctor's wife in the parlor, had some tea while the grown-ups talked and we children looked around the book lined room and through the windows to the beautiful sunshiny outside.

Eventually, we were taken on a tour around the manor and ultimately into the grounds.

As we passed through the large entrance hall, the proprietress nodded to heavy wood door and asked whether I needed to "spend a penny?"

Not understanding what she meant, my first thought was "On what?"

My mother leaned over and whispered that "to spend a penny" meant to use the bathroom.

In those days in England, the doors of cubicles in public restrooms at theaters or railroad stations had a locking device on them. You dropped in a penny, turned the lever, and the door would open for you to enter and do your business. Hence, to spend a penny was to use the bathroom.

Of course this had nothing to do with tiny little aluminum copper plated pennies of today. These were large, heavy copper pennies that made a solid clunk sound if you dropped them.

The big pennies are gone, as are the paid-for cubicles. I wonder if they still use the phrase.

From Max Reger to spending a penny at Piper's Hill. The mind travels path-dependent routes.