We know that they hunted.

We know that Marguerite’s young man proved capable of contributing to the effort of survival.

We know that they had the gun.

What the accounts do not tell us — and what we cannot know from the available evidence — is the daily texture of that first autumn on the island.

The learning curve must have been steep.

The psychological adjustments required must have been profound.

A woman who had spent her life in the structured comfort of aristocratic French society, who had traveled across the Atlantic expecting to help establish a colony, who had found companionship and love on the voyage — she was now on an uninhabited island in the North Atlantic, watching the days shorten and the temperature fall, with a limited gun and a finite supply of powder.