For a story that has attracted scholarly attention for centuries and that involves a royal colonial expedition, a woman of some social standing, and events that multiple contemporaries found significant enough to record, the documentary record is thin.

No journal or personal account in Marguerite’s own hand survives, if one ever existed.

No official documentation of her abandonment — no order recorded in an expedition log, no formal notation in any surviving administrative document — has been found.

No court record documents any legal proceeding related to what Roberval did to her.

The primary sources — the Heptaméron, Thevet’s cosmography, and Belleforest’s Histoires tragiques — are all literary documents rather than administrative ones.

They were written to tell stories, not to record facts for official purposes, and they were written at various removes from the events themselves, shaped by the interests and assumptions of their authors.