The stone bust at the Narbonne Gate guards the entrance to Carcassonne's medieval Cité. Below her carved image, a Latin inscription reads Sum Carcas: "I am Carcas."

According to legend, Dame Carcas was a Saracen noblewoman who took command of the city after her husband was killed defending it against a seven-year siege by Charlemagne. Facing starvation, she fattened up the last piglet in the city on the last of the corn, then hurled it over the walls at the besieging army. Charlemagne concluded that a city throwing food at him could not possibly be starving, and lifted the siege.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours unpack the legend's appeal and its contradictions, explaining how the Saracens briefly held Carcassonne in the eighth century, but it was Pepin the Short, not Charlemagne, who drove them out, and how the city's name long predates any of them.