Isola

by Allegra Goodman

If you want to be considered wise, behave wisely and chastely. Be humble to all. Be truthful, courteous, and amiable…

should have left—and yet I stayed.

We were prisoners of love—but not as poets would describe it. We had lost hope and equanimity, but not for any passion of our own. The lust of a young man confined us. His wealth and his position trapped us upstairs.

As I have said, my daughter, no matter what virtue and goodness you see in yourself or others, know that in this world, not one in a thousand escapes without some deception or attack on her honor, no matter how good or perfect. Therefore, for greatest safety, I counsel you to guard against all private meetings, no matter how pleasant, because, as you have seen, many honest beginnings come to a bad end. (Anne of France, Lessons for My Daughter, XII)

“Some evils are visible, and some lurk beneath the waves. We have seen whales swim away—but what faults do we carry with us?”

“What is the point of missing what I cannot have?”

and I craved strange fruit because I was with child.

“To be a man is to have your way.”

This was my prayer. Not for rescue or escape, but for my soul, which had been sick. I gazed at waves rising and shattering, and this was my resolve—to remember myself as God remembered me.

“Those who know their faults are truly wise,” the Queen said. “And those who have endured the worst have most to teach.

Marguerite de la Rocque de Roberval, a sixteenth-century noblewoman, enters the historical record in 1536 when she declared fealty and homage to the King for lands she owned in Périgord and Languedoc. She accompanied her kinsman Jean-François de la Rocque de Roberval (c. 1500–1560) on his voyage to New France in 1542. He marooned her on an island in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, and she lived there for two years. Two contemporary accounts of her ordeal survive.