People had scents, pock-marks, moles and a thousand other imperfections that made them both unique and perfect. A good thief knew to recognize those perfections so as not to hit the same mark too often. Clopin had learned that as a boy. And a traveler knew that what held true for people also held true for cities. It was perhaps dangerous for Clopin and his troupe to take up permanent residence in Paris but the road held its own dangers. Any child could be taught the nooks and alley ways best suited for avoiding Judge Clause Frollo's guards as they learned to walk and run. But no matter how soon you started with a child nothing could prepare them for finding a safe place from a pack of well-trained dogs in an unfamiliar landscape. That too was a lesson Clopin had learned as a boy.
He had been a wild child just as he would be as a man. But when his family first came to Paris he knew he had found home. Notre Dame Cathedral had stood out on the horizon overlooking the city the way the priests had always said God watched over them all. Clopin did not believe in the gadje's god with his Jesus and saints and virgin mother but for that brief moment when he first beheld Paris he almost did.
He wasted almost no time learning the streets of Paris with the same care and attention one might a lover. And as he grew older their were quite a few of those. Serious and not so serious never kept him for long. His heart had been long ago been pinned by Cupid's own arrow to the doors of Notre Dame, in the very center of Paris, when he had first caught site of his city.
He loved her like a wife, her people swimming through her streats like blood through veins and he stopped seeing them as Roma and gadje. Gypsy and outsider. They were all a part of her. But his lady was diseased. Like the lumps from the Bubonic plague small black clothed men would snake through her veins terrozing her people on the orders of another man who if asked wouldn't have hesitated to say yes if asked if Paris was his city. And like the jealous rival for a woman's hand Clopin took a special glee in being a thorn in that man's side.