Cité des Dames (Epoch 3) — Buildings

The Salon of Reason

social

A great drawing room of Georgian proportions with high ceilings, walls lined with books, and three fireplaces. Lady Reason's Mirror hangs above the central fireplace. Elizabeth Montagu's Bluestocking ...

The Observatory of the Blazing World

industrial

Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World made real. Telescopes, astrolabes, Babbage's Analytical Engine completed. Ada Lovelace's domain. The dome ceiling reveals constellations from a different mathematics...

The Gate of Justice

military

Lady Justice's gate from Christine's allegory. A stone arch flanked by caryatids depicting women in the act of speech. Inscription: "Nulle n'entre ici qui ne puisse nommer une femme oubliée." The gate...

The Unnamed Archive

infrastructure

A repository in the Quarter of Rectitude that collects documents from other Shards — bureaucratic forms, propaganda leaflets, military orders — and files them under the names of the women who were era...

The Footnote Room

social

A small chamber beneath the College of Letters where footnotes from books in other Shards manifest as physical objects — marginalia carved in stone, annotations that glow faintly in languages the read...

The Listening Wall

military

A section of the city wall in the Quarter of Justice where the stone is thin enough that sounds from adjacent Shards leak through. Hildegard tends it. She says the wall does not separate; it translate...

The Garden of Remembered Names

residential

A residential quarter around a walled garden in the style of the Ladies of Llangollen. Cottages in honey stone with climbing roses. Every plant named for a woman erased from history. Mary Delany's bot...

The College of Letters

infrastructure

Newnham College Cambridge in amber stone with oriel windows and Pre-Raphaelite stained glass depicting scholars, not saints. Lecture halls, library, observatory dome. Founded on Wollstonecraft's princ...