It was in Le Marais where the noblesse de robe and noblesse d’épée… where all the aristocratic re-de-de (in made-up slang) of the l’Ancien Régime would congregate… noblesse oblige… It was the place, the “Place Royale”, where those aristocratic egos would burst open in delight like rose buds in conversing with dandies, intellos, and other courtesans… where those individuals so excellent at pretending to think and therefore pretending to be… promenaded under the perfectly symmetrical arcades alongside their “precious women”… that is, until the Le Petit Caporal would re-re-baptize the square as “Place des Vosges”—after the French revolutionaries had already re-named it, “Place de l’Indivisibilité.”

For Napoleon, who was not at all one for “indivisibility,” the gest was a lifesaver, For the Vosges had the great honor of being the very first departement of the former first French Republic to pay its hard-earned taxes to the soon-to-be-self-declared Emperor after his coup d’etat on the 18th Brumaire… That was almost a decade after the Vosges itself had seceded from the Holy Roman Empire and joined with the revolutionary “frog eating man eating cannibals” to send its volunteers to repulse the royal invaders—that is, before France then turned to conquer all of Europa, if not much of the world, in revanche against John Bull’s Perfidious Albion…

Yes, it happened near that very famous Place des Vosges on bus B-29—on a bus always packed to the hilt with tourists and everyday French as it sped from bus stop to bus stop and ejected its human offal onto the street as rapidly as possible. As their schedules were set by the clock, the drivers never had enough time to rest for a coffee, or grab bite to eat, or even pee, when they reached the end of their routes—only to begin the next… I stop to think. Ironically, it was here, on this very block, where Victor Hugo had written much of Les Misérables at his residence. What would he think, if he could ever return to life, if he saw how his great book had been transformed into a hit Broadway musical? That Les Mis had made megabucks in a cribbed Reader’s Digest form? What would Hugo think of 21st century misery and its Misérables?

I don’t know what size of creature you once were. Maybe you were a crocodile poached from the now plastic-swamped swamps of the Mekong. In any case, slices of your hide were transmuted into a shiny brown wallet that managed to rinse itself in the soapy waters and added infant softener of my washing machine with the rest of my clothes. My lucky 2-dollar Benjamin Franklin, my notes, bills, and other papers, such as my Blood type, received a good withering rinse… Yet somehow you dried without a flaw.

I remember how I thought I had hidden you safely inside my black bag that I had parked without thinking beneath the wooden bench that overlooked the white sands of Cancún. That was when I was sipping one Margarita after another at sunset during that joyous family reunion after two years of Horseshoe Bat lockdowns… Much as I’d been forewarning for the past 30 years in book after book rotting on no-longer-existing library shelves, war had just broken out in Ukraine in February 2022 over the Donbas—after the Russian Double-Headed Eagle had annexed the Crimea in February-March 2014. It was all a desperate and foolish and brutal act to preclude the expansion of the White Compass Rose up to Russian borders—a conflict caused by a lack of real communication, engaged diplomacy, and compromise… A storm of hypersonic missiles had begun to rain down upon Kyiv… It was a failure of diplomacy as stupid and absurd as when the German Iron Cross and French Gallic Cock went to war roughly a century earlier in July-August 1914 over the Balkans, Vosges and the rest of Alsace-Lorraine. After all, prophet or not, World War III or not, as long as a few western CEOs and Russian Oligarchs are profiting, even when the great many are suffering, who gives a damn, right?

It was in this atmosphere of fears of impending global war mixed with the sour taste of vino tinto and the nightmarish hallucinations of tequila clase azul that I had forgotten that I had left your hide hidden in blackness… that is, until the dinner $$$-bill-$$$ arrived in a small brown casket… No, it was not some Mexican wetbacks who had rumbled through my black bag when my back was turned in desperate need of funds to pay their coyotes to tunnel under, or else leapfrog over, the Tex-Mex border wall—in their clandestine struggle to avenge the defeat of Montezuma, Santa Anna, and Poncho Villa…. No, it was not some Mexicans, but a few pimply-faced American teens who were crying “Remember the Alamo!!!”—as they dug into my pack and began to manhandle the refined curves of your soft flesh and rip out of your guts a dozen or so of my Benjamin Franklin 100’s. Just like a back-street abortion in contemporary God Bless America!!!, the gringo gangbangers left you alone to bleed, abandoned. And I must confess, if I, like so many Americans, were “born again,” I would try my best to forgive you…

Yes, packed to the hilt, the B-29 bus bomber had rocked to a sudden stop… It was not my stop, not at all where I wanted to stop… The back door slid open, and out of the corner of my eye, I remembered seeing the cuff of a blue sleeve sweep by my side… And before I knew it, I felt a vague emptiness, an unexpected vacuum now sucking my hip. I cried out in English, “Someone took my wallet!!!” I turned to see the bearded short-haired bus driver in open sandals staring back in the mirror. He said nothing, not even moving. Laughing pimply-faced teens and frustrated mothers and fathers brushed against me as they barged out the exit door... Two suspects stood out… A very tall white man, his head tucked into a straw hat, strolled away from the bus… He looked too much like a tourist in tight green pants and yellow T-shirt… A much smaller man, dressed in jeans and a long dark blue shirt, not tucked in, slowly walked on the sidewalk toward Louis XIII’s square. I stepped off the bus… With a bit of Roma profiling, I ran up and looked directly into the Al Pacino eyes of the man in dark blue, and then barked in pigeon French, “Monsieur, je crois que vous avez pris mon portefeuille!” (“Mister, I believe you took my wallet!”) As he rolled his eyes up without speaking, I was certain he was not French, yet was also certain that he understood. He gracefully took his own wallet out of his left pocket and then his I-phone out of his right—in an effort to prove he ported only his own affairs… It was at that moment that I could hear my crocodile snarling. With a firm voice, I cried out again, “S’il vous plaît! Donne-moi mon portefeuille!” (“Please! Give me my wallet!”) With onlookers mocking my effort to remain polite and politically correct, the man gave me a dirty, yet panicked, look. And in a split second, he swung around and lifted up the back of his flannel shirt…

In a flashback, I re-envisioned that kid on a Baltimore street corner whom I saw lifting up his viscose raincoat, while still running. In an instant, he took out a handgun strapped to his back and shot point blank in the back the smaller kid he had been chasing. He then stood there frozen, strait as a popsicle, just staring down at the boy’s body still quivering, blood trickling onto the sidewalk—as if wondering what the hell he had just done. So too, the two cops, who had been in hot pursuit, stood frozen, their handguns pointed at the Billy the Kid with the gun no longer hidden under his raincoat… It all happened just before the traffic light had turned green and all the cars—mine included— rushed out of there. Just another coffee drip in the morning newspaper drizzle… just another shooting among the almost 50,000 or so yearly gun-related deaths in God bless America!!!—the Land now proving so difficult to love…

Yes, I was certain the man in dark blue would point a gun in my face in a cowboy showdown… Yet it was not a gun in his hand. Not even a switchblade. Incredibly, my crocodile hide now leapt back into my hands—as if alive… “Merci!” I replied, “Merci!!!”—as if he was somehow doing me a favor. As the onlookers snickered, I opened the wallet as quickly as I could. Just like that Mexico heist, my debit cards, my national ID, and my lucky 2-dollar Jefferson’s were still inside. Yet unlike the Mexico heist, there had been no Benjamin Franklin 100’s—only a few red and blue Euros with architectural facades. No portraits of dead presidents or other famous public heroes to be snatched. Politeness pays! Nothing was missing!!! I then stared in rage as the man in blue—who was looking in all directions in fear that the caped police might arrive, sirens blasting—but nothing happened. He just disappeared like a camouflaged special force operative—after running swiftly down a cobblestone street though an arcade where a whited powdered face male soprano with small, deep set yellow-green eyes and a black bowler hat pulled down over his curled ears, was singing Dido’s Lament, “When I am Laid in Earth,” in the cool heavenly shadows…

I have to admit it. The fact of the matter is that everyone in Paris has been adequately forewarned by the benevolent French authorities on signs and in daily recordings on buses and metros that are broadcast in French, Chinese, German, Spanish, Japanese, and even in English (no longer Russian) … “Beware of pickpockets…. Pickpockets may be operating in the station… Pickpockets may be operating in the buses.” And the City never stopped warning everyone to never put a wallet in the front pocket! But I was not travelling on Metros 1, 2, 6, 8 and 9 that were known to be the Metro lines preferred by bag snatchers… Nor was I on bus lines No. 62 and No. 95. Nor at the other favorite sites, such as the crowded shopping center at Châtelet-les-Halles; nor at the Gare du Nord where the French can try to escape their own daily pickpocketing to that across the Channel. Nor was I outside in the crowd during the prayer service at Sacre-Coeur. Nor was I on the Champ de Mars beneath the Eiffel Tower that has become a proxy war between World Souvenir Freaks and the Neuf Trois of Seine-Saint-Denis—all battling for turf like medieval Franc field warriors funded from unknown sources abroad. Beware! Beware! Pickpockets are everywhere!!!

Here I am again on Bus No. 29 in approaching the Place des Vosges with its restaurants, art galleries, and exquisite flats… now just passing the Four Riders of the Bourse—Profiteering, Speculation, Usury, Exploitation—not far from the Hôtel de Sully vampires who practice their craft in which “No Freebies,” complaints, and denunciations can result in Les Inconnus Rap-Tout audits. Upon my arrival, I see the real Louis, with his unlucky number 13—just after his green gallant father, King Henri IV, had been assassinated in the Protestant/ French- Catholic/ Hapsburg dispute over the Spanish Netherlands. Galloping on horseback, he is chasing hawks across the green before his original bronze statue was melted down by French revolutionaries to make cannons—his double row of teeth clattering miserably in inherited paranoid rage at all those innocents chit-chatting upon the well-kept lawn… without stuttering. Neither his, nor Napoleon’s, royal Richelieu monopoly of force rules… for now…

The waiter is staring downward. I almost ignore him, but then look to where his finger points. I could not believe it. There was my crocodile skin—that had originated from who knows what pestilent swamp, its corpse handed over to the undertaker—now just waiting to be poached upon the filthy restaurant floor.
How you fell, alongside the still floating food bill and its TVA, I have no idea! Yet like all of the natural world, this innocent creature, presently in a state of taxidermy, was just basking stark naked in the sun’s rays … not knowing what next to expect… He must be a good man, this French server who pointed to my fallen wallet—one of the very few honest souls left on this rotten planet. For it was he, who had, by fluke, reminded me that governments, banks, big and little companies, pharmaceuticals, universities, non-profits, mafias, as well as part- and full-time rip-off experts, all want to stuff as much bacon, bread, dough, scratch, mullah, cheddar, quid, blé, thunes, l'oseille, pognon, flouze, l'artiche, pèze, and sous that can be purloined by sucking the blood from out of as many of our wallets made of crocodile skin, or other more politically-correct materials, and into their own pockets—and as quickly, and in as large a quantity—as is possible.

Yes, it can all be understood at the Place des Vosges—a Cosmic Revelation that can easily be comprehended from my wallet-lifting experience. For you see, for all of the history of the Place Royale / Place de l’Indivisibilité / Place des Vosges can easily be digested into a concise Metatheory—one that reveals Galactic Truths for Homo Geopoliticus and its courtesans to follow in their futile efforts to rule the globe. For by re-naming this square, the Place des Vosges—even if it is just a tiny space in this huge, garbage-strewn planet in which everyone is in a quest for $$$-Instant Cash-$$$—it was Napoleon who best proved the maxim: “War is the greatest pickpocket of them all!!!”