She had entered into a romantic relationship without the approval of her guardian, in circumstances — aboard a colonial expedition — that her guardian considered inappropriate.

The punishment he imposed — exile to an uninhabited island — was excessive by almost any standard, and several of the people who told her story at the time recognized it as excessive.

But the authority to impose it was his.

She outlasted the punishment.

She returned to France while Roberval’s colony failed and he came home in defeat.

The irony of this — the woman he abandoned surviving conditions that killed three people while his grand colonial project collapsed around him — was not lost on the people who told her story.

The fact that he faced no official consequence for abandoning her is also not incidental.