“I have it,” she says excitedly. “Laetitia. Joy. That’s perfect.”
“Laetitia,” I whisper, somehow accepting that I now have a cat named Laetitia.
Être indulgent, c’est mourir. To be soft is to die.
I hear the voices, but I also hear Lafrenière:to be soft is to be merciful…beneath your bitterness…
Isabelle laughs. “Laetitia is skinny, but her tummy is fat.” With her hands she draws a big belly in front of her own flat one. Her eyes widen with understanding. “Oh, may I have a kitten after they’re born? Please,” she pleads. “Papa will let me. I know he will.”
Light-headed, I can only sit down and nod vaguely. Isabelle comes and takes my hand. Her fingers are warm and sticky. The cat follows her and rubs against her ankles.
Isabelle studies me closely. “Why are you always so sad?”
“Am I?”
“Very. Your face would be pretty…but it is always sad.”
I pull my hand from Isabelle’s and, inexplicably, reach to touch the cat. She allows me to stroke her fur. My fingers marvel at its matted softness. I can feel the rumbling purr through my fingertips. Tears gather. I cannot protect her and her kittens.
I hear an infant whimpering, the voices mocking: La fille faible, la fille stupide. La fille naïve.
“Is it because your husband and your baby died?”
I continue to stroke the cat and wonder if Isabelle too has heard the baby’s hungry wails.
“Was he very handsome?”
“Very.”
“I am sorry, Madame de Roberval.”
“Non,non,” I say quickly. “It was not me. It was a different Madame de Roberval who lost her husband. I have lost no one.”
Isabelle frowns and remains silent for a long time, stroking the cat. “I do that too,” she confesses very quietly. “When I am very, very sad, I say to myself: ‘Isabelle’s mother was beautiful. She loved Isabelle. But she died. Poor Isabelle, she has no mother.’” She rubs the cat’s cheeks. “Then I can feel sorry for Isabelle, and I don’t feel so sad for me.”
We sit for a while, petting the cat. “Papa says it’s all right to do that,” Isabelle whispers. The cat trills softly and rubs her side against my leg. I am startled at the silkiness and the warmth. Isabelle touches the cat’s tattered ear. “How did that happen?”
“I do not know, Isabelle. I do not know who has hurt her.”
Isabelle reaches up and wipes a single tear from my cheek. Her fingers smell of grass and flowers. The cat purrs, and we are quiet once more, petting and stroking, Isabelle’s small hand bumping into mine.
“Was your baby very pretty?” she finally asks.
I sit for a long time, the pain in my throat choking me. “Her…my baby was beautiful.” The words escape, sounding like hoarse croaks. “I did everything I could to save her. Everything.”
Isabelle puts a hand to both sides of my face, her open palms like a benediction. “Of course you did,” she says. “You loved her. You were her mother.”
“Oui, I was her mother.”
“I have learned of the poor unfortunate Damoiselle named Marguerite who was left by the Captain Roberval, her uncle, for the expiation of punishment for the scandal which she had made against the company which was voyaging to Newfoundland and Canada by the command of King Francis.”
André Thevet,Grande insulaire, unpublished manuscript,
as translated by Elizabeth Boyer in A Colony of One.
“And she told me moreover that when they embarked on these Breton ships to return to France, that a certain desire seized her not to leave, and to die in that solitary place like her husband, her child, and her servant; and that she wished she were still there, moved by sorrow as she was.”
André Thevet, 1575,Cosmographie universelle,
as translated by Roger Schlesinger and Arthur Stabler in
Andre Thevet’s North America: A Sixteenth-Century View.
“So living as to her body the life bestial, as to her soul the life angelical, she spent her time in reading of the Scriptures, in prayers and in meditations…The poor woman, seeing the ship draw near, went down to the strand, where she was when they came. And after praising God for it, she brought them to her hut…[T]hey took her with them to Rochelle…and made known to all that dwelt therein her faithfulness and patient long-suffering. And on this account she was received by all the ladies with great honour, and they with goodwill gave her their daughters that she might teach them to read and write. And in this honest craft she earned a livelihood, always exhorting all men to love our Lord and put their trust in Him, setting forth by way of example the great compassion He had shown towards her.”
Marguerite d’Angoulême, Queen of Navarre, 1558,
The Heptameron, as translated by Arthur Machen in The
Heptameron: Tales and Novels of Marguerite Queen of Navarre.
“Roberval had left them some food and other commodities to aid them and serve their necessity as he himself told me three months before he was killed at night near the Sainted Innocents in Paris since which time I have marked and given the name of Roberval to this island of banishment and also marked my maps for the great friendship that I bore to him while he lived.”
André Thevet,Grande insulaire, unpublished manuscript,
as translated by Elizabeth Boyer in A Colony of One.
HISTORICAL NOTE
The historical documentation for the story of Marguerite de la Roque de Roberval is sketchy. Elizabeth Boyer, however, did extensive research to authenticate the documents surrounding the story and published her findings in A Colony of One: The History of a Brave Woman (Veritie Press: Novelty, Ohio, 1983).
Marguerite was an orphan, and Jean-François de la Roque de Roberval, a close male relative, became her guardian. It is likely that the Robervals were of the “new religion,” known after the 1550s as the Huguenots.
In 1541 King François I appointed Roberval to be Viceroy of Canada and to colonize New France. Roberval’s second-in-command, Jacques Cartier, left France for Canada in the spring of 1541. Roberval’s departure was delayed for nearly a year, and his ships, the Vallentyne,Sainte-Anne, and Lèchefraye (sometimes listed as the Marye), left La Rochelle on April 16, 1542. Marguerite accompanied Roberval, along with 200 felons François I had released from French prisons specifically for the expedition.
Roberval’s ships arrived in the St. John’s harbour in Newfoundland on June 8, 1542, and remained there for several weeks. Jacques Cartier, having abandoned the colonizing efforts in Canada, met Roberval in St. John’s and subsequently defied Roberval’s order to return to Charlesbourg Royal, reportedly slipping away in the night to return to France.
Roberval’s ships took a northern route from St. John’s, passing through the Strait of Belle Isle into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Somewhere along the way Roberval abandoned Marguerite, her lover, and a servant on the “Isle of Demons.” The island has variously been identified as Fogo, Fichot, Quirpon, and Bell Island, all off the coast of Newfoundland, as well as Belle Isle in the Straits of Belle Isle. The most likely location for the Isle of Demons is Harrington Harbour, the largest of the Harrington Islands, along the lower north shore of Quebec about 220 km southwest of Blanc Sablon.
Roberval was known as a spendthrift, a man perpetually in debt, and also as a cruel man, but why he abandoned Marguerite, her lover, and the servant on a desolate island in a forbidding climate can be a matter only for conjecture.
Roberval’s colony was a dismal failure. He and the surviving colonists returned to France in the spring of 1543, barely a year after leaving France. King François I then appointed Roberval minister of mines.
Marguerite, having lived for at least 27 months on the island, was rescued in the fall of 1544 by a Breton fishing ship. After she returned to France, she reportedly spent the rest of her life living near Angoulême and teaching young girls.
It is likely that Marguerite did tell her story to the Queen of Navarre, sister to Fran�
�ois I and a sympathizer with the new religion. The queen retold Marguerite’s story in her collection of tales, the Heptameron, which was published in 1558, after the queen’s death. The queen disguised the characters’ names and the details of the story.
The Franciscan André Thevet, cosmographer for four French kings and an antagonist to the Huguenots, interviewed Marguerite, reportedly in Nontron. Thevet retold her story in La Cosmographie universelle d’André Thevet, cosmographe du roy, published in 1575. Had he known the story earlier, he almost undoubtedly would have included it in his book,Singularitez de la France antarctique, published in 1557.
Thevet, who was known to his contemporaries as a liar and plagiarizer, wrote that Marguerite’s lover died after eight months on the island, that Marguerite bore a child about a month later, and that Damienne, the servant, died about eight months after the child was born. The baby died about a month after Damienne. Thevet did not reveal either the name of the lover or the sex of the child.
Jean-François de la Roque de Roberval was reportedly murdered at the Church of the Innocents in Paris in the winter of 1560.
PRIMARY REFERENCES
Biggar, Henry P.A Collection of Documents Relating to Jacques Cartier and the Sieur de Roberval. Ottawa: Public Archives of Canada, 1930.
Boyer, Elizabeth.A Colony of One: The History of a Brave Woman. Novelty, Ohio: Veritie Press, 1983. (Can be obtained from: Women’s Equity Action League, Elizabeth Boyer Books, P.O. Box 16397, Rock River, Ohio 44116
Garrisson, Janine.A History of Sixteenth-Century France, 1484-1598: Renaissance, Reformation, and Rebellion. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.
Heinrich, Bernd.Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-Birds. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1999.
Johnson, Donald S.Phantom Islands of the Atlantic. Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane, 1994.
Johnson, Jean. “Marguerite de Roberval” in Wilderness Women: Canada’s Forgotten History. St. John’s: Centre for Newfoundland Studies, Memorial University, 1973.
The Holy Bible, Douay Rheims Version. 1609. Translated from the Latin Vulgate. Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1899.
King, Margaret L.Women of the Renaissance. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Knecht, R. J. The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France. London: Fontana Press (HarperCollins), 1996.
Machen, Arthur.The Heptameron: Tales and Novels of Marguerite Queen of Navarre. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1924.
Lestringant, Frank. Mapping the Renaissance World: The Geographical Imagination in the Age of Discovery. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994.
Ryan, D.W.S., Ed. Legends of Newfoundland and Labrador. St. John’s: Jesperson Publishing Ltd., 1990.
Ryan, D.W.S., Ed.The Legend of Marguerite: A Poem by George Martin. St. John’s: Jesperson Publishing Ltd., 1995.
Schlesinger, Roger and Arthur Stabler, Eds.Andre Thevet’s North America: A Sixteenth-Century View. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986.
Stabler, Arthur P. The Legend of Marguerite de Roberval. Seattle: Washington State University Press, 1972.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to Amy Evans for her gracious and generous hospitality when I visited the Isle of Demons – Harrington Harbour – and I thank Christopher Lirette of Repentigny, Quebec, for taking the time to guide me to Marguerite’s Cave. I also greatly appreciate Rhonda Molloy’s immense talents in designing Silence of Stone.
Thanks also go to Patricia Casson-Henderson and Morgane Chollet for reviewing early drafts of the novel, and I am tremendously grateful and indebted to my daughters Amy and Megan Beckel Kratz and to Michele Bergstrom, Christine Champdoizeau, Debra Durchslag, Tom Joseph, Clyde Rose, Rebecca Rose, and Denise Wildcat for critiquing the penultimate draft of this novel. All of them gave me valuable comments worthy of serious consideration. My deepest appreciation goes to Pat Byrne who has supported and encouraged me since the very first word.
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A novel of William Cormack’s quest to save the Beothuk from extinction, his love for Shawnawdithit, a young Beothuk woman, and the tragedy of her life and the lives of her people. Based on historical and ethnographic accounts of the Beothuk, the novel is a fresh glimpse into a pivotal period of Newfoundland’s heritage. Winner of the Book Achievement Award for Best Fiction in 1999 from the Midwest Independent Publishers Association.
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Annamarie Beckel at Marguerite’s Cave, Harrington Harbour.
Photo by Christopher Lirette.
Annamarie Beckel lives in Kelligrews, Newfoundland. She first worked as an animal behaviourist and science writer, and then for fourteen years as a writer, photographer, and newsletter editor on the Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe reserve, before turning her research skills to historical fiction.Silence of Stone is her third novel.
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