"I shall raise the palaces and the houses, and I shall people them." – Lady Rectitude, *The Book of the City of Ladies* (1405)
FIELD NOTES – Dr. Eleanor Hartley LOCATION: Walking survey, all quarters, and the Margin SUBJECT: Geography; time; the edge A survey requires a base line. I chose the main street of the Quarter of Reason, from the Salon to the Observatory, and walked it with a chain and a lamp. The chain was useful. The lamp was redundant, because the street brings its own. The Cité has no common time. Every house keeps the light of the century it came from, and the residents call this the right to light. The Salon of Reason is a Georgian drawing room in honey stone and is lit, at any hour, by a London afternoon in 1780. Next door the Footnote Room's stair is oil-lamp yellow. The College's cloister is the white noon of New Spain; its upper storeys, Cambridge brick, carry the grey daylight of 1870. At the end of the street the Observatory burns with gas. Walking from one end to the other you walk from candle to gas in five hundred paces. At the thresholds between the houses the light hesitates and fli...
From the lore of Cité des Dames.