And partly because Marguerite de la Rocque is exactly the kind of person whose story the historical record was designed to suppress.

She was a woman.

She was a woman who had transgressed the social rules of her time in ways that her guardian found unacceptable.

She was a woman who was punished for that transgression by the person responsible for her welfare.

She was a woman whose story was preserved only because a more powerful woman — the queen of Navarre — found it worth recording.

The story endures because survival itself endures as a human value, because the capacity to keep going in conditions that argue against continued effort is a quality that human beings have always admired, and because the specific combination of elements in Marguerite’s story — the injustice, the loss, the endurance, the return — makes it more than just a remarkable event.