In the fifteen hundreds, a noble girl is born in France. She is named Marguerite, after her mother, who dies in childbirth. Her father dies when she is three years old. The orphaned Marguerite, along with everything she inherits – chateau, vineyards, villages, wealth – are left in the care of her guardian, her father’s cousin, Roberval. Marguerite is left to grow, to learn, to pray, and to hope that her guardian guards her trust well. She is entirely dependent upon him.
As she grows up, Marguerite is cared for by her nurse and constant companion, Damienne. She learns to read, to write, to play music, to pray, and how to behave like a lady. She emulates her beloved teacher and her teacher’s daughter, and does her best to impress her guardian, on those rare occasions when he deigns to inspect her. But he is a sailor, an adventurer, a man of fortune, and her future is not safe in his hands. Instead of safeguarding Marguerite’s inheritance and using it to secure a favorable marriage for her, he uses it to fund his own voyages, and when his luck turns down, so does Marguerite’s.
Marguerite does her best to endure. But the worst comes when Roberval is appointed to lead a trio of ships to Canada, with colonists in tow, to settle in the New World. He insists that Marguerite accompany him on the voyage, and she has no choice but to obey. On the journey, Marguerite and Roberval’s secretary, Auguste, fall in love, and though they try to keep their affair a secret, Roberval discovers them. In his fury, he casts them off. Marguerite, Auguste, and Damienne are left alone on an island off the coast of the New World, populated only by sea grass and birds, to live or die together.
This is a gorgeous book. Consider the opening two lines: “I never knew my mother. She died the night that I was born, and so we passed each other in the dark.” The prose is carefully constructed to have an old-world feel befitting the setting, without ever feeling cumbersome, awkward, or gimmicky. There is a certain simplicity to the narration, a matter-of-factness, that makes the text eminently readable, but does not detract from the beauty of the descriptions or the emotion the words convey.
The novel is told in first person, and Marguerite’s voice shines through the pages. As a girl growing up in sixteenth century France, she is constrained by the norms of the time – norms that are laid out for the reader at the beginning of each part of the novel, in the form of excerpts from Lessons for My Daughter by Anne of France, from 1517. These excerpts admonish the eponymous daughter, and by extension Marguerite, to “guard against doing, saying, or thinking anything that will anger God,” to “aim to please, doing and thinking what will be agreeable… attempting nothing on your own” – to resist temptation, and always to be chaste, prudent, modest, delicate, and patient. These qualities do not come naturally to Marguerite, who as a child loves to climb the towers to view her land and escape to the stables to see the horses. As she grows into a young woman, she resents the lack of care that Roberval treats her with, and the indignities she must endure because of his decisions. She fears and resents the power he has over her, and chafes under his control. When he abandons her on the island, she rails against him, and against God, to whom she prays, but in whom she doubts. Yet despite her abandonment, she endeavors to be compassionate, faithful, and loving to Damienne and Auguste. She shows strength, resilience, and cunning in the face of incredible adversity, and it is these qualities that ensure her eventual freedom – though not without great cost.
I did not realize, till I reached the author’s note at the end of the book, that Marguerite de la Rocque de Roberval was a real woman, that this book was a fictional retelling of a real person’s tribulations. There is much that is unknown about the story of the real Marguerite – but the journey of her fictional counterpart, told with elegance and heart, is a fitting tribute to the life of what must have been an incredibly resilient and remarkable woman.
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