Atlantis

Atlantis, as recounted by the Sea Woman, is the ancient island city where the Sea People first meet the people of the land, share songs and stories, and then lose their new friends in a catastrophic eruption. The account makes Atlantis more than a vanished settlement: it is the place where cross-cultural friendship begins and where the first remembered death of the Sea People occurs. Its history reaches the visitors through song, with Marie-Josèphe de la Croix translating images she admits she cannot fully convey.

Setting and First Contact

The Sea Woman dates the first meeting between the Sea People and the people of the land to “Four hundreds and three thousands of years ago.” Her song presents contact as an encounter between curious equals rather than a conquest or a flight. The Sea People watch an approaching ship without fear, and youths aboard it dive into the water to meet them. The first scene of Atlantis’s history is therefore an act of mutual approach: each group crosses into the other’s element, and the newcomers play and sing with the Sea People.

The ship’s painted sail, covered with octopuses and fish, marks the journey as an arrival into a world already familiar with the sea. The people aboard are described through Marie-Josèphe’s account as dark-eyed, graceful, and beautiful, while their clothing and manner distinguish them from anyone she has known. These details belong to a scene mediated twice over: the Sea Woman sings the history, and Marie-Josèphe describes the images to listeners. Atlantis is consequently introduced not by an impersonal account of its origins, but through a remembered meeting whose meaning depends on the Sea Woman’s voice and Marie-Josèphe’s imperfect translation.

The City and Its Exchange

The Sea People accompany the ship to an island in the Mediterranean, where a harbor opens beneath a stone palace spread across a cliff. The city’s welcome is public and reciprocal. Bare-breasted women in bell-shaped skirts, with gold in their hair, lead the greeting; children throw flowers into the water, and the Sea People weave the blossoms into their hair. The details place the exchange at the harbor and across the boundary between land and sea: flowers pass from children on shore to visitors who carry them in the water.

Marie-Josèphe identifies the destination as the chief city of Atlantis. She describes pools painted with dolphins and squids, and the Sea People and people of the land exchanging shells and flowers. The city’s identity in the account is thus conveyed through shared objects and meeting places rather than through rulers, laws, or monuments alone. Its pools carry the imagery of the sea into the city, while the reciprocal gifts make visible the friendship the song describes. The Sea Woman’s refrain, “We gave them songs, they gave us stories,” gives that exchange a second form: each people offers something the other can receive, but neither can simply take.

Destruction and Loss

The welcoming song changes in tone before the city’s destruction. Its melody darkens and its harmonics become threatening; then an immense explosion shakes the ground and drives hot wind across the island. Cinders and molten stones fall from above, while ash rolls over the Sea People’s chariots. The account does not present the disaster as a battle between the two peoples. The eruption is the force that destroys the city and breaks apart the friendship just established.

When the eruption ends, Atlantis is destroyed. The Sea People search for their friends and do not find them. The Sea Woman’s song identifies those lost people as the first of her kind to perish after meeting the people of the land. In this history, the city’s end is therefore also a foundational bereavement: the Sea People remember not only a vanished place but the disappearance of the first human friends they had made there. The joyful harbor scene and the search that follows give the catastrophe its force, setting reciprocal gifts against the inability to recover those who received them.

Atlantis as a Story Being Told

Atlantis reaches the Versailles visitors as part of the Sea Woman’s sung history, not as a present-day destination. Marie-Josèphe asks the Sea Woman to sing the story again so the visitors can hear it, then tries to describe its images in words she recognizes as inadequate. When the song reaches the destruction, Marie-Josèphe falls silent. She later ends the account while the Sea People are still accepting flowers in the lost city, leaving the visitors with the image of welcome rather than the ending the song contains. They applaud, but the Sea Woman snarls and splashes Marie-Josèphe, demanding an explanation for the omission.

The exchange makes the act of representing Atlantis part of its significance. Marie-Josèphe’s description can carry the city’s images to an audience, yet her stopping point interrupts the Sea Woman’s account of disaster and loss. The Sea Woman answers with a condition for any further telling: “You must always finish the story.” Atlantis is consequently remembered both through its ancient history and through a present demand that the history be told whole. The city’s vanished friendship cannot be restored, but its ending can still be withheld or heard; the Sea Woman insists that the audience receive the destruction as well as the flowers.