In this episode, we tackle Carly Rae Jepsen's 2020 tragicomic holiday single It's Not Christmas Til Somebody Cries alongside Victor Hugo's dramatic portrait of the structure of suffering & the human character, Les Misérables. Is Jean Valjean actually santa claus? Is Santa a lie? Somewhere beyond the barricade, is there a world you long to see?
subscribe to I'll be Pod for Castmas in your podcatcher of choice!
On Napoleon's decrepit elephant folly serving as a shelter for a homeless child:
The unforeseen usefulness of the superfluous! The charity of great matters, the kindness of giants! That extravagant monument to the fantasy of an emperor had become the hide-out of an urchin. The pigmy was accepted and sheltered by the colossus. Citizens in their Sunday clothes passing the Elephant of the Bastille might glance at it in dull-eyed indifference saying, ‘What use is it?’ But it served to protect a homeless, parentless youngster against wind and hail and frost, to preserve him from the slumber in the mud which causes fever and the slumber in the snow which causes death. It housed the innocent rejected by society, and thus in some degree atoned for society’s guilt, affording a retreat to one to whom all other doors were closed. It seemed indeed that the crumbling, scabby monster, neglected, despised, and forgotten, a sort of huge beggar crying in vain for the alms of a friendly look, had taken pity on that other beggar, the waif without shoes to his feet or a roof to his head, clad in rags, blowing on numbed fingers, living on such scraps as came his way. That was the use of the Bastille elephant. Napoleon’s notion, disdained by men, had been adopted by God, and what could only have been pretentious had been made august. To complete his design the Emperor would have needed copper and marble, porphyry and gold; for God the structure of wood and plaster sufficed. The Emperor had a lordly dream: in that prodigious elephant, bearing its armoured tower and lashing its trunk, he had thought to embody the soul of the people: God had done something greater with it, He had made it a dwelling for a child.