Whether she told it to the queen of Navarre directly, or whether it passed through intermediaries before reaching the queen, the telling itself was an act of significance.

It was a decision — conscious or unconscious — to share an experience that was both extraordinary and potentially embarrassing within the social framework of her time.

The story she told preserved the core of what happened: the abandonment, the companions, the deaths, the survival, the rescue.

The queen of Navarre preserved that core in the sixty-seventh tale of the Heptaméron, and through that tale, Marguerite de la Rocque’s experience has survived nearly five centuries.

She told her story.