The destruction of Atlantis

The destruction of Atlantis is the catastrophe at the center of a history the Sea Woman sings to visitors at Versailles. In her account, the Sea People’s first encounter with land people begins in curiosity and friendship, amid gifts and shared play, but ends when an immense explosion destroys Atlantis. The survivors search for their friends and never find them again: the lost city marks the first Sea People to perish through contact with the people of the land.

The First Meeting

The song places the encounter four hundred and three thousand years in the past, using the Sea Woman’s unusual stated reckoning rather than a date supplied by Marie-Josèphe de la Croix. An entrancing ship, its sail painted with octopuses and fish, glides across the sea. The Sea People watch without fear, curious about the vessel and its passengers. The land people are described through a strikingly different kind of beauty: youths, boys and girls alike, with narrow waists and curled hair, cast off their short belted kilts and dive from the ship. They play and sing with the Sea People.

The newcomers are not presented as conquerors or captors. Their meeting is remembered as mutual welcome, and the Sea Woman’s song gives that welcome its own principle of exchange: the Sea People give songs; the land people give stories. The gifts cannot be taken, only given. This is more than an account of first contact: it establishes a relationship between peoples through forms of expression each can offer the other. The later destruction matters in part because the song remembers the land people not as an abstract population but as friends with whom the Sea People had begun to share a world.

Atlantis and the Catastrophe

The Sea People accompany the ship to an island in the Mediterranean, described in the song as gold beneath shimmering heat and a sapphire-blue sky. The vessel enters a harbor below a stone palace spread across a cliff. At the water’s edge, 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 twist the blossoms into their hair. Marie-Josèphe tells the visitors that the Sea People enter Atlantis’s chief city and ride in pools painted with dolphins and squids, exchanging shells and flowers with the land people.

The song’s change of melody turns this scene of welcome into a warning. Its harmonics grow dark and threatening; then an immense explosion wracks the ground and sends a hot wind across the island. Burning cinders and molten stones rain down, while ash rolls over the Sea People’s chariots. The city is destroyed. The account gives the catastrophe through its physical effects—shaking ground, wind, falling fire, molten stone, and ash—without naming a cause beyond the immense explosion or describing how the Sea People themselves escape. The sequence is abrupt: a city of harbor, palace, pools, and shared gifts gives way to destruction.

Loss and the Limits of Retelling

After the eruption, the Sea People search for their friends, but see them no more. The Sea Woman’s song identifies the land people as the first of the Sea People’s friends to perish in their encounters with land people. That conclusion makes the remembered friendship inseparable from loss. The episode is not simply a story of a city destroyed; it is also the account of a relationship cut off before the Sea People can find those they had met.

The visitors do not hear the complete account as the Sea Woman sings it. Marie-Josèphe, surprised and apprehensive, tries to describe the images in words she recognizes are inadequate. At the song’s end, she stops before the Sea People’s loss and leaves the visitors with the image of them accepting flowers in Atlantis. They applaud. The Sea Woman snarls and splashes Marie-Josèphe, demanding an explanation for the omission; Marie-Josèphe’s broken question makes plain that she has withheld the ending, not that the Sea Woman has finished singing.

Narrative Significance

The event reaches the visitors—and the reader—through two acts of transmission: the Sea Woman sings her people’s history, and Marie-Josèphe renders its images for an audience that cannot hear the song’s meaning directly. The account distinguishes the Sea Woman’s history from the story Marie-Josèphe first tells. When Marie-Josèphe stops at the flowers, the visitors applaud a scene of welcome while the Sea Woman protests the missing devastation. The gap between the song and its retelling gives the loss a second consequence: the story of the first land friends can itself be left incomplete when its teller’s meaning is not carried across.

The catastrophe therefore interrupts both a friendship and an exchange of stories. At the beginning, each people gives the other something that cannot be taken; at the end, Marie-Josèphe’s abbreviated telling fails to convey what the Sea Woman has sung. The lost city remains a vivid setting, but the account’s emotional center is the disappearance of the friends and the Sea Woman’s insistence that their loss be heard.