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Well you see, Renzo, Marie Antoinette had a long-standing historical infatuation with Hypatia, Queen of the Vandals. Before her eventual evisceration by conch-shell and boiling oil, Hypatia rode with the Vandal clan of Arabic horsemen who staged sacks across much of southern Europe and of course North Africa, including provinces that were to become modern Tunisia. Amongst their exploits, the vandals came across a cache of gold hidden by Latvian ascetics in previous decades that would fund their campaign for decades to come were it not for plundering Franks and Visigoths intent on pilfering the vast fortune. When Hypatia was captured in her family's Moroccan estate, Frankish wayfarers made off with the gold-casted armanents that had been the trademark of the wealthy bandits, and hastily expedited them to Gaul... or so they thought. The gold was intercepted by Spanish missionaries in central Romania after a freak wagon accident dispatched its greedy drivers. The monks, hungered, and rich only with a King's ransom of gold in a particularly impoverished part of Europe as well as several sacks of cocoa beans from the Phillipines, conceived of the notion that they could easily double their coffers by making foil of the gold and wrapping it around a chocolate center. The novelty was a hit amongst the European aristocracy, and actually funded the Benedictine monastery in which Umberto Eco's famous novel The Name of the Rose is based. I need not remind you of the real-life exploits held there.
These foils obviously became an immensely popular collector's item amongst the royalty of Europe for the next century, leading to our modern notion of 'chocolate coins', and of course valuable due to their rarified occurrence and actual gold-value. By the early 1800s, popularity had waned - as popularity does - and vast collections of these foil wrappers were stowed away by only the few, avid collectors left, and passed down throughout their families as heirlooms. In the tumult of the first world war, great estates were disrupted and pillaged, and the great chocolate foil collections were shipped east to more exotic markets for their re-sale. Imelda Marcos, ever the collector of now-defunct European fashion, purchased many of these collections on the black market, for display in her grandiose mansion. In the subsequent uprising, these foils were looted as the Marcos' were in exile, and eventually slagged down into buillion by the starving Phillipino populace, then re-sold to Arabic expatriates whereby they made their way to tunisia, and currently, Saudi Arabia.
And where does James Earl Jones fit into all of this? The man just loves his chocolate coins. No, really - his pockets are constantly full of them. Go ahead. Have a reach, will you?
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There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
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