I – The Founding: The Stones of the City – Women Who Became Walls

"Someone, I tell you, will remember us, even in another time." – Sappho, fragment 147

FIELD NOTES – Dr. Eleanor Hartley LOCATION: The city wall, Quarter of Reason SUBJECT: The Law of the Stone Every stone in the Cité is a woman. I had read this in the Bureau's preliminary file and taken it as poetry. It is a building regulation. A story becomes a stone when it is told whole. Whole has a precise meaning here, and every mason in the city can recite it: the name, the deed, and what was done to her. A name alone makes a pebble. A name and a deed make rubble, which the masons use for fill. Only when the third part is spoken – the thing the world did to her for being who she was – does the story set, and can be cut, and will carry weight. Christine knew this in 1405 without the vocabulary. Her book never praises a woman without saying what was said against her. I have put my hands on the wall. The stones are warm. Not sun-warm: warm the way a cup is warm when someone has just put it down. Each has the faint texture of handwriting under the surface, like the impression of a...

From the lore of Cité des Dames.