Episode 39F – Peeping Belle – Myths Your Teacher Hated

Episode 39F Show Notes

Source: French Folklore

This week on MYTH, we’ll discover a whole new world of invasion of privacy. This is the sixth episode in our telling of the classic French tale, Beauty and the Beast. You’ll see that questions can be dangerous, that peeping isn’t creepy if you’re rich, and that mirrors can totally reflect sound over hundreds of miles. Then, in Gods and Monsters, it’s time to meet a scarier tabletop monster than the demogorgon from Stranger Things. This is the Myths Your Teacher Hated podcast, where I tell the stories of cultures from around the world in all of their original, bloody, uncensored glory. Modern tellings of these stories have become dry and dusty, but I’ll be trying to breathe new life into them. This is Episode 39F, “Peeping Belle”. As always, this episode is not safe for work.
When we last left our story, we met a rich merchant in a city in France whose wife had probably died, but not before having six sons and six daughters with him. Things had gone pretty well until an unlucky fire had burned everything the merchant had owned, and a series of accidents on the high seas had destroyed his business dealings. Broke and bereft, he was forced to move his family out to a tiny cottage several hundred miles away from the city that he had managed to hang on to by his fingernails. The dozen children had settled into their new routine of being poor and abandoned by everyone who had previously wanted to either flirt, befriend, or fuck them, although all but the youngest had done so with bad grace. That young woman, nicknamed Belle (or Beauty) because of her incredible looks and even better personality, had been the only one to try and make the best of the situation. Two years into this Purgatory, a message had come that one ship full of goods had arrived at port unexpectedly. The merchant had rushed off to the city to try and get some of his previously vast wealth back, but he was cheated out of everything by his former partners and found himself having to head back in defeat six months later only to get lost in a blizzard. He wandered into a magical seeming castle full of weird shit but no people and, for reasons unknown, decided that fate wanted him to have it. He had plucked a rose for his beloved Belle, the only thing she had asked for while he was gone, only to be confronted by a horrible, hideous beast enraged at the merchant for ripping him off. The Beast demanded the merchant’s life, but offered to take one of his daughters in his stead, but only if she came to the castle willingly and in full knowledge of what awaited her. He warned the merchant that if he tried to flee or break the bargain, the Beast would hunt down everyone he ever loved. Then, he sent the man home for a month to say his goodbyes. When his children learn what happened, the sons offer to fight the Beast, and the daughters offer up Belle as a sacrifice. The merchant doesn’t want to accept this bargain, but Belle is insistent. At the end of the allotted month, the Beast’s horse arrived as promised to take them back to the castle and their certain doom. We then took a detour out to a neighboring kingdom to meet a Prince who’s father had been killed around the time he was born. A neighboring king decided that a widowed single mother with a newborn infant would make an easy target and invaded, forcing the Queen to ride off into battle with her army. Before leaving, she entrusted her son to the care of an old, ugly, mean-spirited but very powerful fairy to raise until the war was over. This she did for around 15 years, during which time she went all creeptown on the Prince and decided that she wanted to be his wife instead of his mother and began pressuring him to marry her. They rode out together to meet the Queen, since the Prince insisted he couldn’t wed without his mother’s blessing, and he took up arms for the final battle of the war. Victory achieved (although with the villain still alive against the advice of the Queen’s generals because she feared for the safety of her son), they began the long ride back home. Once there, the Fairy almost immediately tells the Queen of her desire to marry the Prince. The Queen, quite reasonably, is horrified by the idea and, exhausted from nearly two decades in the field, she tells the Fairy exactly what she thinks. The Fairy doesn’t take rejection well, and vows vengeance, leaving the mother and son writhing in pain on the palace floor. Back at the Beast’s castle, Belle and her father finally arrive to a huge celebration, with music and fireworks, much to their surprise. The Beast is polite about receiving his victim and offers her father two trunks full of whatever treasure he likes from the closet in payment for his daughter. He can’t exactly refuse, and so on Belle’s advice, he fills them up with gold, jewels, and dresses for his other daughters with the intention of keeping his new wealth secret from his children to keep them from getting greedy. They share one last meal together and, in the morning, the merchant rides off on the magical horse once more leaving Belle alone and in the clutches of a horrid monster. Belle takes a depression nap and meets a sweet, handsome, sexy man in her dreams who sweeps her off her feet. She wakes up and puts her dream lover out of her brain to go explore her prison. While wandering, she finds several portraits of the man from her dreams, and she decides that he must be a real person also kept prisoner by the Beast. At dinner, the Beast asks Belle to fuck him, she says no, and they both go to bed (where she spends more time with her dream Prince, who turns out to be the Prince from our aside, being punished by the wicked Fairy). She discovers wonders in the palace, including birds that sing opera and monkeys that perform theater.
Belle spent several days in the palace just exploring, and never really had a dull moment. There was just so much cool shit to see in the palace. Over the course of a few days, the monkeys somehow trained the parrots to act as interpreters, allowing them to carry on conversations with Belle as she explored and cater to her wants and needs. If it weren’t for the fact that she had to spend every dinner having the same exact conversation with the Beast which always ended with him asking her to fuck him, this would have been a paradise. It was far from as bad as it could have been however, and she never had to spend much time with the Beast, and he never tried to force anything, so all in all, it wasn’t bad for a prison.
More than once, she considered asking the Beast who the man in her dreams (and those paintings) was, but she could never quite bring herself to do so. It was obvious that the Beast had asked her to be here because he was lonely, and that he had a huge crush on her (maybe even thought he was in love with her), and she was afraid of how he would react if she brought up another man. He was still the Beast, after all. She didn’t want to risk a jealous rage, so she always put off asking about the Prince.
In time, she finally visited every room in the palace. Now that she had seen everything (or at least, everything that was open to her since she had never found her prince’s prison), she decided to go back to a large hall she had visited once before. The light in the room was weak, so she tried to open a window to let a little more in. To her astonishment, she found that the window opened inwards, not outwards, revealing an enclosed space she hadn’t yet visited. The space was lit by a dim light off in the distance, which seemed to come from behind a thick tapestry hanging on the wall.
“What on earth could this room be used for?” She took a few steps inside, but her eyes were suddenly dazzled by a blinding light. The tapestry turned out to be a curtain as it rose into the heights, revealing a massive, well-lit theater. The stalls and boxes along either side were full of handsome men and gorgeous women. As she stared in surprise, the silence was broken by the sound of an unseen orchestra beginning a beautiful symphony. Belle took her seat as the play began, performed by actual actors, not her dear parrots and monkeys.
Belle had always loved the theater. It had been one of the few pleasures of the city that she had missed when her family was forced to flee to the country. She was curious about the weird walls of the box she had found herself in, so she investigated. It turned out that the walls were made of mirrors, and it just got weirder from there. The actors, the other audience members: none of them were actually in the room with her. By some really complicated (and possibly magical) mirror reflections, the view from some theater in the city was being reflected into the castle for her to watch.
When the play ended, she stayed in her box to try and watch the people leaving (she was a little lonely, after all), but when the lights came up at the end of the show, everyone disappeared from the mirrors. She was alone. She went out into the gardens to be alone with her thoughts until dinner.
The Beast joined her for supper, as always, and he asked her what she had done that day, also as always. She told him about her wanderings and about discovering the magical play box. “Did you have fun?” She nodded. He always asked her if she had fun with whatever she had discovered that day. It was tedious always having the same conversation. She had long since realized that the Beast was very stupid and was probably making conversation based on some etiquette book or something. “Is there anything you want? I like giving you things. You are very pretty.” His manner was very direct and uncivilized, but she knew he was trying to compliment her. “Will you fuck me now?” “No, Beast.” She couldn’t help but wonder if he was just offering her gifts because he was a “nice guy” and figured that if he did enough nice things, she would be obligated to finally touch his dick. She just wasn’t interested.
As always, the Beast had nothing else to say after being rejected, and so he stood and left silently. He was always pretty docile about leaving, but that didn’t make her feel much better. She wondered if he would reach the end of his patience one day and decide to just rape or kill her and be done with it. It wasn’t like there was anything stopping him except his own restraint and decency, and she had no reason to believe that the Beast was a decent and civil man. He was keeping her prisoner to pay for her father’s crime of plucking a rose, after all.
Her thoughts were dark enough that it was nearly sunrise before she finally collapsed into sleep. As she had every time she had slept in this place, she found herself in the odd dreamscape castle with her dream Prince. “Took you long enough to show up tonight.” His words were a little bit criticism, but were mostly just sadness and loneliness and worry that he wouldn’t see her that night. She didn’t know how to respond, and the Prince noticed something sad in her expression. “What’s wrong? Did something happen in the palace today?”
“No, nothing in particular happened. This castle is amazing except for that awful creature I have to eat dinner with every night. Even him I could probably get used to if it wasn’t so painfully obvious that he lusts after me. He’s accepted my rejections of his crude advances so far, but for how long? How many times will he accept my ‘no’ before he decides he’s done waiting and either rapes or murders me? He gives me clumsy compliments in a transparent effort to convince me he’s nice enough to fuck. I don’t know what to do. Should I just let him get in a few thrusts and be done with it?” She sighed heavily. “It’s all so complicated. I think he might want to marry me, which is ridiculous. Even if he was as charming as he is ugly, I still would want nothing to do with him because he isn’t you, my Prince. I love you, and only you, and I’m not ashamed to admit it!”
The Prince made doe eyes at her. “And I you. My advice, Belle, is to love who loves you. I need you to release me from my prison. Keep your eyes open and your wits about you.” This was a variation on something he said to her every time they saw each other, without fail. She didn’t understand what he was trying to tell her. “What do you want from me? If I knew how to find you, I would have freed you already, no matter what it cost me! Can’t you tell me more about where you are, how to find you? I’ve searched everywhere that I can find!”
She regretted her words as soon as they were out of her mouth. Every time she had asked her Prince to tell her where to find him, the dream had dissolved into a nightmare, and tonight was no exception. Whatever evil magic the Beast used to keep this man trapped also kept him from telling her how to release him. A thousand images burned through her skull in an incomprehensible torrent. She saw the Beast seated on a jeweled throne carved from solid gold, blazing gems on his clothes matching those on his seat. He called her to him and had her sit beside him. Her Prince appeared from the shadows and cast the Beast off the throne, only to be hurled to the tiles himself by the awful Beast, who materialized from nowhere. They fought, tumbling behind a black veil until only a horrible roaring could be heard, boring into her skull through her ears.
She awoke, head ringing from the imaginary cacophony of her dreams and, even though she was always coated in sweat, her heart racing from the agony of the nightmares, she was sorry to be awake and separated from her beloved Prince for another day. Knowing that it was futile to try and get back to sleep, Belle rose and readied herself for the day. She had gotten into a routine during her time here, spending over an hour washing and dressing (more from a lack of any pressing place to be than anything else), then wandering the gardens, reading in the library, visiting the animals, or using one of the countless other rooms to pass the time until the curtain would rise on the daily play in the castle’s odd mirror box.
Today, as she seated herself, she noticed that the stage was set for an opera instead of a play. As always, the performance began as soon as she was situated. The performance was sublime, as always, but she still found herself watching the audience as much as the singers. She always felt a small thrill at seeing other people around her again, even if they weren’t completely there. The quality of the mirrors was so fine that she could distinguish very fine details of the audience members, recognizing more than one person that she knew from the city. The only way her daily trip to the theater could have been more perfect would have been if she could have spoke to the others in the audience. She missed having another soul to have an intelligent conversation in the waking world.
After the opera was over and Belle finally stopped applauding, she went to dinner with the Beast, turned down his request for sex, and went to bed. As always, her dreams were filled by her Prince as they visited dreamscape versions of some of her favorite places in the palace and gardens. In the morning, her bath stuff was waiting for her as always, and so she rose, bathed, and dressed. Opening up one of those strange windows had taken her to the theater and the opera, and so today, she decided that she would open another of the windows and see where it led.
It turned out to lead to the Fair of St. Germain, a huge festival held in a suburb on the south side of Paris beginning in February. It was still early, before the cream of society would be out enjoying themselves, so she had time to wander around and explore. As with the opera, she was able to see everything in minute detail, so she was able to properly admire the incredible works of art and rare curiosities on display in the various booths. She stopped to watch a marionette show to pass time until the fashionable people showed up. As she left the theater, she could see the streets filling with fancy people in fancier clothes.
Here and there, gamblers offered games of chance to passersby, few of them honest. From her magical mirror, she was able to watch them palm the cards. She wanted to warn the hapless rubes about to be cheated out of their money, but since she was almost a thousand leagues away from them, there was nothing she could do. It was a delight to be able to walk amongst the people again, but it was as a ghost. Although she could see and hear everything, she could not make herself seen or heard. It was lonely.
She was having so much fun that it was after midnight before she was finally tired enough to go back to the castle proper. She’d skipped dinner, but she’d found baskets of wine and snacks in the box with the magical mirrors to the fair, so the lateness of the hour hadn’t really occurred to her. When she made her way back towards her room, however, she found that dinner was still set out for her as usual, somehow hot and ready for her late appearance. She dined quickly, and the Beast could apparently sense her impatience in spite of his dullness, so he got rejected for sex and bid her goodnight quickly.
The next several days passed for her in this fashion. She opened the last three windows to discover a theater with an Italian comedy, the Tuileries (a gorgeous public garden near Versailles), and a mirror that let her see different things happening in the world at large. She didn’t know how to control it (or if it could even be controlled), but the scene would always show her something interesting: sometimes it was the inside of a powerful embassy, sometimes the weddings of the rich and the powerful, sometimes scenes of battles happening around the continent. From this window, she watched the last revolt of the Jannissaries (elite guards to the Turkish sultans between the 14th and 19th centuries).
Belle no longer found herself bored in her isolation; there was just too much to see and do in the castle. Even the Beast, ugly as ever, didn’t offend her eyes the way he had when she’d first arrived. I mean, he was still grotesque, don’t get me wrong, but it wasn’t like her eyes were bleeding so she could stand to meet his gaze now. She even found herself more tolerant of his inane and incredibly repetitive questions every night at dinner. Honestly, if their conversations had lasted a little longer and been just a little more varied, she might have even enjoyed them. A little. It was hard to feel much social release from having the same five questions asked in the same harsh monotone and requiring little more than a yes or no in response.
As Belle grew used to having her every whim anticipated and provided for, she began to spend more time each day getting ready. There was no one to see her and nowhere to be, so why not spend some time on self care? Besides, she enjoyed trying on literally any type of clothing or costume she could imagine (including a number that she saw from the magic mirrors). Playing with hair, makeup, and dresses helped pass the time (and helped her feel a little closer to her sisters, who had always enjoyed this more than she had). It was an incredible life which wanted for nothing, but you can get bored of anything if given enough time, and time was all Belle had. She never had to work for anything, and so these pleasure became boring. She had no fear and no hope, just a certainty of an eternity of days that were all exactly the same and completely alone. She missed her home. She missed her family.
After a long time in the castle (she really didn’t know how long exactly, since every day was the same and even the gardens outside the castle seemed eternally trapped in the same perfect, boring weather), she began to feel almost comfortable with the Beast. Her curiosity finally outweighed her caution, and she decided that it was time to ask him about her dreamy Prince. “Can I ask you a question Beast? And will you promise not to get angry?” “Of course, Belle. You can ask anything.” She wasn’t sure whether his promise would hold to literally anything, but she figured it was good enough. Still, she was far from being a fool, so she approached the matter delicately. “Are we the only people living in the palace?”
“Of course, Belle. It’s just you and me, apart from the birds and monkeys and other animals.” He seemed overly excited about her question for some reason, but Belle didn’t care much why. The conversation wrapped up the same way it always did, and the Beast departed more abruptly than usual. Belle didn’t care. She now knew that her prince was not being kept in the castle proper. She longed to see him in the waking world, to have an actual conversation with him, to touch his face, to kiss him. She would have gladly traded her own freedom of movement around the grounds for this chance. After all, it was just a very large, very luxurious prison that would one day become her large, luxurious tomb.
These melancholy thoughts followed her into her dreams. When the Prince saw her, he gently took her hands in his and lifted her chin. “What’s wrong, Belle? What is troubling you? By the love I bear you, I beg you to tell me! You know that you can have anything you want, so what is there to make you sad? Is it that awful Beast? I’ll get rid of him!” The Prince drew a dagger from nowhere and stalked towards the Beast who was suddenly standing nearby.
The dagger glittered in the sun as the Prince drew back and plunged it into the Beast’s chest. The monster made no effort to defend himself. He kept his massive paws submissively at his side as the Prince plunged the bloody dagger again and again into his fur. Belle found that she was running towards her Prince, desperate to stop him from slaying the Beast. That wasn’t an emotion she had been prepared for, but now wasn’t the time to try and unpack shit. “Stop, please, stop hurting him! You’ll have to kill me too if you kill him!”
The rise and fall of the dagger didn’t slow. “So it’s come to this, then? You don’t really love me the way you say, do you. You take the side of this hideous monster, who stands between me and my happiness?” Belle grabbed his arm, holding it fast. “Don’t be an asshole! I love you more than life itself, and I would rather die than stop loving you! You are the greatest treasure I have found in this castle of marvels. If you led me into the deepest desert with no supplies, I would follow you without complaint. You know that! None of that means that I want the Beast to die, though! He has been kind to me, and as thoughtful as he can be. He could have raped me or murdered me, and that was the bargain I agreed to so no one could say he didn’t have the right (if there was anyone here to say anything at all), but he hasn’t. I love you, but I am grateful to him for his kindness, and also for being the reason I met you. I don’t want to watch you hurt him, okay? Stop being a jealous dick!”
The Prince strained against her hand, holding him fast, but not quite hard enough to pull free. She held him fast until the dream shifted. A woman (she thought it was the same woman from before) appeared as everything else vanished. “Take heart, Belle. Prove your generous nature. Show that you are as wise as you are charming, and do not fear to abandon your sense of duty if you must. I think you are on the road to happiness, if only you can keep your eyes open and your wits about you.” This woman’s words stayed with her after she woke, although she could make nothing of them.
As more endless days went by, her loneliness grew. She found that her longing to see her father again had begun to outweigh her fear of the Beast or the unknown. Surrounded as she was my wonders and riches, Belle was miserable. She tried to watch the Italian comedy, but grew bored after the first act and went to the opera but grew bored of that as well. She bounced from window to window multiple times, sometimes opening all six windows six or seven times in a day, but she was still bored, lonely, and miserable. Her unremitting sorrow began to hang heavy on her, causing her to lose weight and grow haggard.
She did her best to conceal her unhappiness and unhealthiness from her host using all of the tricks of makeup she knew. He surprised her several times with tears in her eyes, and she lied and said that she had a headache. The Beast, being very stupid and very male, accepted her excuses and didn’t bother to wonder whether there were other emotions he should try to explore. One evening, though, he came to dinner to find her full-on sobbing at the table and even he knew that something was wrong.
Belle finally admitted that she longed to see her family again, but hadn’t wanted to bother him with her pain. The Beast froze, obviously rocked to his core by this revelation (which really shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise). He dropped heavily to the floor like his bones had turned to string and he howled his rage and pain to the heavens, terrifying poor Belle.
“Are you fucking serious, Belle? You would abandon this wretched Beast? Could you really be so ungrateful for all I have given you? All I have done for you? I have given you anything you wanted. Anything! How can there be anything lacking, anything to make you unhappy! After all of this, don’t I at least deserve not to be despised by you? You prefer to live in a hovel with your father and those bitches you call sisters than in splendor with me? You would rather go and herd shit-stained sheep, and smell of their shit yourself, than be here and luxuriate in perfumed extravagance? It is not your love of you family, but your hatred of me that makes you want to leave me!” The Beast was being wildly unfair, unable to realize that not everything was about him, but he was also frighteningly angry. Belle had never seen him act this way. It frightened her. This was it. She had finally found the line, and he was going to kill her.
You can cut the tension with a knife, but I don’t have one handy, so it’ll have to wait until next week, which means it’s time for Gods and Monsters. This is a segment where I get into a little more detail about the personalities and history of one of the gods or monsters from this week’s pantheon that was not discussed in the main story. This week’s monster is the tarasque.
If you’re a fan of the classic tabletop role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, you probably know about the tarasque. He’s one of the biggest bads you can meet in a game, and that comes directly from the ancient French tradition, although its origin might surprise you a little. Throughout Provence, the most southerly part of France, it was widely believed in the Middle Ages that the region was converted to Christianity shortly after the crucifixion, although not by the resurrected Jesus or by one of his apostles, but by his close personal friends. In a confusing piece of storytelling, the group from Bethany that travelled together consisted of Mary Magdalene, Mary mother of the apostles James and John, Mary Salome, Martha, and Lazarus.
They had fled persecution at home and settled in Tarascon, near the French border with Spain. To this day, there is a local church dedicated to St. Martha, and it’s from her tale that we know of the tarasque. The earliest version of the story that we have was written in Latin somewhere between 1187 and 1212.
Soon after coming to Tarascon, which was then known as Nerluc (Blake Lake), and settling down, Martha hears that the people are being terrorized by a huge dragon (because old France was apparently just fucking full up with dragons). Not unlike the gargouille, it was part land animal and part fish, fatter than an ox and longer than a horse, with a lion’s head, a horse’s mane, teeth like swords, a blade like an axe running down its back, six feet with bear claws, a serpent’s tail, and a shell like a tortoise, bristling with scales and spikes, although this dragon lived in a forest near the Rhone river. The dragon was said to be more than a match for a dozen lions or bears, although I don’t know if anyone ever saw it fight such a group (although it would be a pretty awesome fight sequence). It was known to attack and kill many people passing that spot or attempting to cross the water, often sinking passing ships. It supposedly also had pestilential smoke for breath and sulphurous sparks spitting from its eyes. Several times, groups of villagers had set out to try and kill the beast, and the king of Nerluc had even attacked with knights and catapults, but all had proved futile as the creature would simply dive under the water and hide until everyone had left.
The monster, known as the tarasque, was said to come from Galatia and be the offspring of the legendary Leviathan that had swallowed Job in the Bible and a monster called the Bonachus, Onachus or Bonnacon, which set people on fire by spraying them with burning shit (and I mean literal shit, but on fire here people), although some versions say it set anything it touched on fire, like a somehow more horrifying King Midas. Although heavily armed men had been foiled by the beast, they figured that Martha was the perfect dragonslayer for the job.
Martha was a people-pleaser, and so she decided to take on the task without requiring any mass conversions or huge churches built in her name (unlike some people). She went into the woods alone, where she found it halfway through a meal of a man it had killed. As always in these early Christian tales of saints confronting stand-ins for Satan, she approached the monster fearlessly, confident of her victory, sprinkling the beast with holy water and brandishing a cross to make the monster suddenly and completely tame. She made a leash out of her belt, and the dragon followed her out of the forest like Mary’s little lamb (or Martha’s little dragon, as the case may be).
She brought it back to the town, where they didn’t even bother holding a sham trial: the townspeople immediately set upon it with lances and stones, ripping the tame monster to bloody shreds. Meekly, the monster didn’t even try to defend itself as it died. Martha preached to the crowd, which converted to Christianity on the spot and also began to feel guilty for killing what had become a tame and helpless beast (that maybe could have been a bitching guard dragon). In honor of the dead dragon, they changed the name of the town to Tarascon (although there is no historical record of the town ever having been called Nerluc).
The monster has become a symbol of the town, featured prominently on its coat of arms and becoming a major part of several town festivals. Known as La Tarasque (making the monster female), she’s become almost a mascot. Her effigy is carried down the street during the town’s religious and seasonal festivals, escorted by a group of young men called Tarascaires, dressed in cocked hats, sashes, and knee-breeches. It is first recorded in 1461 and occured every year until the French Revolution, when such demonstrations became less frequent, although she has come into her own once again. One of these effigies, dating from the mid-1800s, can bee seen at the museum in the Rue de Marches. The body would be carried from the inside by four men while a fifth would work the movable head and jaws, allowing the group to mock-terrorize the crowd as they proceeded. In 1943, the effigy was mounted on wheels, making it easier to carry, although not as much fun at parties since it could no longer get all up in the laughing crowd.
That’s it for this episode of Myths Your Teacher Hated. Keep up with new episodes on our Facebook page, on iTunes, on Stitcher, on TuneIn, and on Spotify, or you can follow us on Twitter as @HardcoreMyth and on Instagram as Myths Your Teacher Hated Pod. You can also find news and episodes on our website at myths your teacher hated dot com. If you like what you’ve heard, I’d appreciate a review on iTunes. These reviews really help increase the show’s standing and let more people know it exists. If you have any questions, any gods or monsters you’d want to learn about, or any ideas for future stories that you’d like to hear, feel free to drop me a line. I’m trying to pull as much material from as many different cultures as possible, but there are all sorts of stories I’ve never heard, so suggestions are appreciated. The theme music is by Tiny Cheese Puff, whom you can find on fiverr.com.
Next time, we’ll learn what happens when you ask a Beast for a get out of jail free card. You’ll discover that being the center of attention isn’t always good, that the Beast is kind of a drama queen, and that dreams are tricky things. Then, in Gods and Monsters, you’ll see why you should never greet anyone in southern France after dark. That’s all for now. Thanks for listening.