The additions that Belleforest made — the clandestine marriage, the pregnancy explicitly mentioned, the more elaborate descriptions of the island’s terrors — served to amplify the story’s dramatic potential.

Whether they accurately represented what happened is a separate question from whether they made for a more compelling story.

They clearly did, and Belleforest’s more elaborate version circulated widely.

The figure of Marguerite de la Rocque thus became, almost immediately, something more than a historical person.

She became a story.

A story about survival, about punishment, about female endurance, about the dangers of the New World.

Different tellers made her into different things — a victim of injustice, a sinner receiving appropriate consequences, a heroine of faith, a symbol of French colonial ambition and its costs.