Lizard Skins

Here is what a pair of €12,000 shoes looks like, thank you Hermès . The matching belt €1,925.

I am up for my 7AM run across Concorde, through Touilerise then along the Seine until Île de la Cité and around Notre dame; then back along the Right Bank , under the Louvre and then the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel , and finally the US Embassy and Le Crillon then my hotel. All this inside four miles. Unfortunately my achilles wrecked from my 2009 marathons and I no longer enjoy pain free running. Without the bounce, each step "flat" and by the end I feel, well, 44 years old.

As the Hermès Parisian store across the street on rue du faubourg saint-honoré, I am tempted to buy my favorite beauty artifact: an Hermès tie. The company's designers spend years creating new print patterns, individually screen-printed with vegetable dye. Each added color dries for a month before the next color is applied. Designers chose from over 200,000 different colors. Every man knows when the other wearing one.

Me: "Do you want to see a pair of $20,000 shoes?"
Eitan: "No way!"
Madeleine: "And they aren't even matching."
Eitan: "They're made of lizard skin?"
Madeleine: "Cruel!"
Eitan: "Killing a lizard to make shoes..."
Madeleine: "Tell me about it."