What it gave her was knowledge of her own capacity — knowledge that she could not have had before the island and that, once acquired, could not be taken away.

She learned that she could kill large animals, that she could maintain herself through multiple winters in extreme cold, that she could endure grief and isolation at a level that most people in her social world had never been tested on and could not have predicted surviving.

This is not to minimize the terrible cost of that knowledge.

The price she paid for it — the deaths of those she cared about, the years of her life, the transformation of her social position — was enormous.

But the knowledge itself was real, and it belonged to her in a way that few things in sixteenth-century French society were allowed to simply belong to a woman.