The Prologue serves to set up the plan under which the stories are told. Ten members of the high French nobility have assembled, for various reasons, in an abbey in the Pyrenees mountains. They expect to be there for several days while they wait for a bridge to be rebuilt. In order to amuse themselves, they agree that each member of the group (five women and five men) will tell a story each day, and that the stories must be true, things the tellers have observed for themselves or heard from a very reliable source. Originally intended to be a set of 10 stories a la The Decameron, Marguerite never finished the rest of them, hence the title.