Not comfort in a trivial sense, but structural meaning: the sense that time was organized, that actions had significance, that the ordeal had a framework within which it could be endured.

The Figure Of The Survivor In Sixteenth-Century Europe

When Marguerite returned to France and her story began to circulate, the response was not simply fascination with a dramatic survival account.

It was complicated by the social framework within which her story was understood.

In the France of 1543 and 1544, a woman who had been abandoned because of a romantic affair and who had survived alone on an island was not simply a remarkable survivor.

She was also a woman whose body and behavior had been the subject of punishment, and whose story carried the freight of the moral categories through which her world understood sex, gender, and punishment.