Normandy. January 27, 1758.
Marguerite was 61, and almost certainly could not read or write. So she told a scribe what to say to her son, Nicolas Quesnel, a young sailor on the Galatée.
On New Year's Day, Nicolas had written to his fiancée. Not to his mother. “I think more about you than you about me,” she told him.
Then she added a little guilt. “I think I am for the tomb, I have been ill for three weeks.” The only news she got of him, she said, came from a shipmate's wife.