The Living City: The Salon of Reason — Where Ideas Have Weight

I do not wish women to have power over men, but over themselves.

FIELD NOTES — Dr. Eleanor Hartley LOCATION: The Salon of Reason, Quarter of Reason NOTE: These are informal observations. I have ceased pretending they are clinical. The Salon of Reason is a drawing room. I know that sounds insufficient for a Shard report, but there is no other accurate term. It is a drawing room of Georgian proportions — high ceilings, tall windows with cream silk curtains, walls lined floor to ceiling with books in tooled leather. Three fireplaces burn simultaneously, because the English climate persists here even in a city that exists outside of England and, arguably, outside of climate. Armchairs and settees are arranged in conversational groupings. There is always tea. Mary Wollstonecraft runs the Salon. She is — and I am aware that this sentence will earn me a footnote from the Bureau's Temporal Anomaly Division — exactly as she appears in John Opie's 1797 portrait: angular face, sharp grey eyes, auburn hair escaping its pins. She wears white muslin. She carrie...

From the lore of Cité des Dames.