And yet, through all those mediations, something of the actual experience persists.

The core facts are too consistent across too many different sources to be pure invention.

The woman was abandoned.

The people with her died.

She survived.

She was rescued and came home.

That core — resistant to the literary elaborations that accumulated around it, consistent across the different versions that preservation produced — is the trace of Marguerite de la Rocque herself in the historical record.

Her voice, however distant and attenuated, speaking across nearly five centuries.