Silence of Stone

Based on historical records, Silence of Stone recounts the story of Marguerite de Roberval, a young French noblewoman. During a colonizing expedition to New France in 1542, she falls in love with a soldier. Jean-François de Roberval, the commander of the expedition and Marguerite's guardian, is so outraged at the disgrace she has brought upon the Roberval name that he abandons her, her lover, and a servant on the Isle of Demons, a small island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Marguerite survives, spending nearly a year entirely alone. More than two years after her abandonment, she returns to France, rescued from the island by a Breton fishing ship. In Silence of Stone, Marguerite at thirty-six is an entirely different woman from the eighteen-year-old abandoned on the Isle of Demons, so much so that she speaks of her younger self as "she." Sixteen years after her return to France, relentlessly questioned by King François II's geographer, André Thevet, Marguerite reluctantly recounts her life on the island.