She also came back with a story.

Not a story she composed or planned — a story that the events of her life had written on her.

A story that the queen of Navarre found worth preserving in one of the significant literary works of the French Renaissance.

That story gave her a form of permanence that most women of her era did not achieve.

Most people who lived in sixteenth-century France left no trace at all in the historical record.

Marguerite de la Rocque left a trace that has lasted nearly five centuries.