It began, as all great French absurdities do, with a robbery that felt like theatre. Eight imperial jewels vanished from the Louvre in broad daylight, and France woke up to the kind of crime it thought belonged to novels. But the nation’s obsession was not with the thieves, or the jewels, or even the security failures. It was with a photograph.A single frame caught by Associated Press photographer Thibault Camus: three policemen by a silver car, and on the right edge, a stranger in a fedora and three-piece suit walking past the chaos as if it were none of his concern. He looked less like a witness and more like a scene from The Third Man spliced into a news report.Within hours, the internet gave him a name. The Fedora Man.He was the detective, the insider, the ghost of French elegance. Some believed he was an AI hallucination. Others thought he was part of the heist. He was analysed, edited, memed and mythologised before anyone thought to ask who he really was. The truth was stranger than fiction.He was a fifteen-year-old schoolboy from Rambouillet, named Pedro Elias Garzon Delvaux.
The detective who wasn’t
Pedro loves Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. He lives with his parents and grandfather, collects vintage watches, and borrows waistcoats from his father. He wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near the Louvre that morning. He was there as a tourist.When he saw the police cordon, he walked closer, curious. Camus clicked the photo. Pedro kept walking. That was it. No drama, no plan, no destiny. Just a teenager in the wrong place at the perfect time. Four days later, he received a message from a friend. “Is that you?”Then his mother called to say he was in The New York Times. His phone began to buzz with screenshots from cousins in Colombia and friends in Austria. In a few days, five million people had seen his face.He didn’t rush to correct them. “I didn’t want to say immediately it was me,” he said. “With this photo, there is a mystery, so you have to make it last.”That is not the logic of a child. That is the philosophy of someone who understands performance.
The absurd made flesh
Pedro Elias Garzon Delvaux during an interview with Associated Press, Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025, in Rambouillet, south of Paris. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus)
Albert Camus wrote that the absurd is born from the confrontation between our search for meaning and the universe’s silence. Pedro, by accident, stumbled into that silence and smiled.He became a metaphor for our age — a real person mistaken for an AI creation, a still image misread as fiction, a teenager embodying the collapse of certainty. The Louvre had been robbed of its jewels, and France had been robbed of its sense of reality.When the world asked who he was, Pedro played along. Not to deceive, but to watch. He let the story breathe. He became both actor and audience, the detective and the mystery, the meme and the mirror.When he finally agreed to an interview, he appeared exactly as he had that morning: fedora angled precisely, Yves Saint Laurent waistcoat from his father, jacket chosen by his mother, a weathered Russian watch on his wrist. Every detail was a choice. The hat, he said, was a tribute to Jean Moulin, the Resistance hero who defied the Nazis and died for France.He wasn’t mocking the tragedy or the theft. He was honouring a style of living — one where dignity survives chaos.
Style as defiance
Pedro doesn’t dress like this for attention. He dresses like this because he believes the world has forgotten how to. “I like to be chic,” he said. “I go to school like this.”In a generation that worships casualness, his formality feels revolutionary. No hoodie, no sneaker, no logo. Just old-fashioned precision and an almost spiritual love for detail. His classmates, amused at first, have begun showing up in ties. His mother, Félicité, understands. She was raised in an 18th-century museum-palace by a curator father and a performer mother. “Art and museums are living spaces,” she said. “Life without art is not life.”For Pedro, that sentence is biography. He grew up surrounded by objects that once belonged to history. So when millions projected their stories onto his photograph, he let them. He understood that every image invites an illusion.He became the illusion — willingly, gracefully, without irony.
The calm in the farce
When Pedro finally revealed himself, the internet laughed, then sighed. The Fedora Man was not a detective, not a model, not an AI fantasy, but a polite teenager who loves old films and French history.He shrugged at the chaos. “People said, ‘You’ve become a star.’ I was astonished that with one photo you can become viral in a few days.” He is untroubled by the fame. “I’m waiting for people to contact me for films,” he said, smiling, not quite joking.There is a strange poetry to it. The Louvre lost its crown jewels, yet the image that defined the crime was not of the thieves or the broken glass, but of a boy in a hat walking past the absurd.Camus once wrote that one must imagine Sisyphus happy, content to roll his boulder forever. Pedro, standing still as meaning unravels around him, is that happiness embodied. He doesn’t search for answers or explanations. He simply exists, beautifully and absurdly, in the frame between history and fiction. Somewhere in Paris, perhaps, he’s still walking — not towards the truth, but through it — fedora tilted, shoulders straight, a child carrying the weight of irony with the grace of style. And when the world asks who he really is, he’ll probably just smile and say, “I’m a star.”Wtih inputs from agecnies
