The Elephant Of The Bastille

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24 February 1808, Napoleon Bonaparte decrees a giant elephant monument to be cast in bronze from cannon taken in the battle of Friedland in commemoration of the storming of the Bastille.  In 1814 a full size plaster model was in place.


The vision.


The reality.  The elephant was falling apart and became a haven for rats.  It was standing in a swamp.


This is for a film of Les Miserables at the Royal Navy College of Greenwich.

  "Few strangers visited this edifice, no passer-by looked at it. It was falling into ruins; every season the plaster which detached itself from its sides formed hideous wounds upon it … There it stood in its corner, melancholy, sick, crumbling, surrounded by a rotten palisade, soiled continually by drunken coachmen; cracks meandered athwart its belly, a lath projected from its tail, tall grass flourished between its legs; and, as the level of the place had been rising all around it for a space of thirty years, by that slow and continuous movement which insensibly elevates the soil of large towns, it stood in a hollow, and it looked as though the ground were giving way beneath it. It was unclean, despised, repulsive, and superb, ugly in the eyes of the bourgeois, melancholy in the eyes of the thinker. There was something about it of the dirt which is on the point of being swept out, and something of the majesty which is on the point of being decapitated".
Victor Hugo's eye witness account. Now there is this:

The July Column and the Opera.  The column is in memory of the 1830 revolution that overthrew the rule of the unpopular Charles X.


 
 
Remains of the Liberty Tower of the Bastille found in 1899 while Line 1 of the Metro was being excavated, now in the Square Henri-Galli down the street from the original location. 
 

 Outline of the Bastille towers on the Rue St. Antoine and Blvd. Henri IV.  Both the above pictures are from https://www.francetraveltips.com/remains-of-the-bastille/.

  And this elephant is from the Moulin Rouge:


And this from Coney Island:


Coney Island.  Burned down in 1896.  Built by the guy who gave us this-
 

Lucy, Atlantic City.  Built by James V. Lafferty in 1881.  Oldest roadside attraction in the States.


But what is this?

https://youtu.be/oDh6T7_3-Bg
 
Magnifique! 
 
 

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