These are not heroic qualities in any exceptional sense.

They are the qualities that the human mind reaches for when its ordinary resources have been stripped away, and they are the qualities that make the difference between survival and collapse in extreme isolation.

Marguerite had them.

The documented outcome proves it.

The Language Of The Sources

The way that the primary sources describe Marguerite’s experience tells us something important about the sixteenth-century framework within which her story was understood — and about what the people who recorded it considered most significant.

The queen of Navarre’s account in the Heptaméron emphasizes faith above all.