Sébastien covered his mouth, his eyes alive with laughter. Jean-Charles choked on his olive tapenade, cleared his throat of the crumbs, and tried to remain calm. “A Mustang. A 1968 Fastback Mustang GT 390. Are you writing this down? I want you to keep an eye out for one when you get back to the States.”

“Right,” I said. “Right. Mustangs would be Fords, right?”

Jean-Charles sighed. A few other men in hearing flinched, which seemed unfair, because I later looked it up on the Web, and I had gotten that one right. Jean-Charles was a nice guy, though. He changed the subject to something he thought I could handle—customs laws for shipping classic cars from the U.S. to France—and poured everyone more wine. Bees buzzed thickly among the lavender in the restaurant’s garden and occasionally flew through the open doors, over the tables, and out the other side.

“I hope we make good time,” Claudine said as we headed off again. “We promised we’d be in St. Pantaléon at four for the festival, and if we’re late we’ll miss the caisses à savon!”

Soapboxes seemed a puzzling thing to be anxious about missing. “Why did we promise we’d be there at four?”

Jean-Charles grinned at me over his shoulder. “We’re the starring attractions.”

We were, too. The line of us swept into town at 4:30 and did a figure eight up and down cobblestoned streets, the drivers blaring their horns in a hilarious and enthusiastic cacophony of all the toots and honks invented over four decades. To my delight, the Torpedo had by far the best, something like a cross between a scream and a car upchucking.

We were almost too late, though. “Come on!” Sébastien’s mother gestured urgently. “Hurry! We’re going to miss the caisses à savon!” We ran past bales of hay and a bank of men clearly set up to judge a finish line, then around the curves of a twisty, near-vertical cobblestoned street. “Here’s a good spot.” Claudine stopped abruptly and pulled back from the curb as a clatter of wheels from above grew louder. “It’s a tradition.”

Two half-size refrigerators flashed past us. They were missing doors, welded together side by side, and packed with a team of two adult males and two adult females completely equipped in helmets and padding.

“They have this contest every year, who can make the best car without an engine. They give prizes for speed, and the funniest, and things like that,” Claudine explained.

A six-year-old in a tiny little concoction I didn’t even know how to describe came bowling down, his chin set determinedly. The purpose of those bales of hay became clear; they came between all those stone houses and the human bodies likely to ram into them. And a nice bulk of them protected the judges at the finish line.