Replied I: “Then Rome fell.”

For instance, in the course of one very short walk from my hotel near Place du Carousel to Les Invalides, I was accosted no less than four time, including one with the classic “beggar woman with baby” scam, in which a woman comes up to you pretending to be a homeless mother asking for money. If you don’t fork over, she tosses her “baby” in your direction, and when you reflexively move to catch the infant, an accomplice lifts your wallet. Fortunately for me, I had seen this before.

Then I saw a mother and son team doing the “found ring” trick: the gypsy pretends to see a gold ring on the ground (actually, he palms it and places it there), picks it up and asks if it is yours. You say no. He presses it on you ‘for good luck”. You accept. He then asks you for money. You give him ten Euros to go away. He demands twenty. You start looking around for a Gendarme. He runs off.

These are some of the more benign activities in which they engage, and it is making public life in France’s larger cities impossible.

Now, there are “good Gypsies”, who have settled down, become respectable, send their kids to school and want nothing more than to make a life for themselves and be left alone. But there are far too many “bad Gypsies” who have no desire to assimilate, and whose may preoccupation is grifting and petty larceny, and occasionally darker crimes. And France is perfectly within its rights to deport those who come into the country illegally, break its laws and disturb its public order.

By the way, I’ve seen Gypsies do the same sort of things in other European cities, but never as shamelessly as in Paris. Even in Bucharest, they are more circumspect, perhaps because the people are more aware of them and have a lot less tolerance than the French. When I mentioned that I wanted to go see the Old City, the concierge at my hotel shook his head gravely and told me, “You do not want to go there–there are many Gypsies”. And my daughter, who spent a summer in Romania when she was all of sixteen, gave me three very good pieces of advice when I had to go there: “Don’t eat the meat. Don’t drink the water. Don’t talk to Gypsies”.

Another dirty little secret about oral contraception is that >5% of women of northern European decent carry a genetic mutation which puts them at greatly increased risk of thrombosis (blood clots) if they take oral contraception.

Another one of those nasty, potentially fatal complications the doctors never tell you about when they had you that prescription for unmother’s little helper.