In Which We Miss the Fair, Spend an Afternoon with the Gendarmerie and Receive a Gargantuan Gougere

The Enormous Gougere courtesy of Boulangerie-Viennoiserie Éric Febvre.

     Yesterday was meant to be spent observing Monique Salera make dishes inspired by Vietnam. She's a Dijon chef and teacher of cooking.

     Alas, the fates determined otherwise. Arriving in Dijon, my spouse was pick-pocketed. According to him, it was a clean kill. He had purchased a tram ticket using his Swiss bank card and its six-digit code. Apparently, this was skimmed from the ticket machine. As he descended from the tram, with a suitcase in one hand and brief case in the other, the person in front of him moved slowly and he felt someone behind him. When he got to the BnB, he looked for his wallet. Disappeared! There followed an hour of trying to contact the usual card companies and banks, along with a call to the police.

     Meanwhile, a check of our Swiss bank on-line showed that the thieves had quickly purchased a set of headphones and drained the bank account at the nearest ATM.

     The police instructed us to go to the Dijon headquarters of the Gendarmerie National to make a formal complaint. After a half hour forced march without lunch, we were allowed to enter and complete preliminary paperwork. And wait, and wait, and wait. Each of those waits was accompanied by a surprisingly good, cheap cappuccino from the police office vending machine. I asked if we would be seeing an identity theft expert. He is, "of habit," was the reply. "Habit of theft identity?" I wondered.

     Finally a bespectacled gentleman appeared and ushered us into a borrowed office. Would this be Inspector Clouseau or Chief Inspector Dreyfus? It mattered not, because the main actor would be the ordinateur and a Microsoft program for recording the facts. As Clouseau once said, "Facts, Hercule, facts. Nothing matters but the facts. Without them the Science of Criminal Investigation is nothing more than a guessing game." Our Inspector was on loan from the municipal court. He began typing the facts from the preliminary paperwork. He repeated everything aloud as he two-finger typed. Listening to his repetitions was a sort of French lesson. Our job was to answer "D'accord."

   After an hour and a half he produced a first person account of the crime for the victim to sign. This in turn was printed, signed, sealed and handed to us. 

     What doesn't kill you makes a good story. In this one, we were kept busy well beyond the French hours for luncheon. We were hungry, but the café-brasserie kitchens were closed. We sought a boulangerie for sandwiches, and found the shop of Eric Febvre, well-respected baker of Dijon. When we explained we'd had no lunch because we'd spent it with the police, the kind young man gave us an enormous gougere, the specialty of the shop. He offered that the Place de la Republique tram stop was frequented by gypsies. The good news and happy ending was that since the cafés were only serving drinks, we found one, ordered two kir and devoured our sandwiches and gougere.