Égide D’Anjou

Égide D’Anjou is the eldest son of the D’Anjou family’s founder and the father of Guillaume. Though he is largely known through other characters’ memories, family portraits, and competing accounts of his death, his presence shapes the novel’s sense of inherited grief. His violent death in the forest becomes both a family trauma and an unanswered question: was he struck by a stray shot, or had someone aimed at his father instead?

Identity and Family Position

Égide belongs to the generation between the Founder and Guillaume. The novel identifies him as the Founder’s eldest son, and Guillaume remembers him as his own father. The family’s prominence in Touladi gives his position a public dimension: the D’Anjous had long governed the locality, and their standing would later face a challenge from the rising Bolduc family. In this history, Égide is not simply a private ancestor but part of the lineage through which the family’s authority and reputation are understood.

The surviving image of him is formal and fixed. After an earthquake shakes the D’Anjou home, the family portraits hang crooked, including those of Égide and his wife. Unlike the portraits of Guillaume and Marie-Ange, which are described as leaning dangerously, the older couple’s oval frames remain in place. The contrast makes the family’s past seem at once established and vulnerable: Égide belongs to an earlier generation held within the house’s visual order, even as the disturbance unsettles the descendants around him.

Death and Unresolved Accounts

Égide was killed in the forest in 1920, by a bullet described in the family’s received account as stray. His death occurred only weeks before the birth of Marie-Ange. Later, Guillaume recalls this loss among the family’s accumulating calamities, linking it with the deaths of young siblings, Maurice’s fatal car accident, and the death of Guillaume’s son Élias D’Anjou during the Dieppe Raid. The sequence is not presented as proof of a supernatural cause; it shows how Guillaume experiences successive bereavements as a pattern bearing down on the family.

Régis D’Anjou’s private investigation complicates the accepted account. Writing in what serves as his journal, Régis wonders whether the shot that killed Égide was meant for the Founder. He records having heard from his father that the Founder said he had bent down at the instant the bullet struck his son. A group of American hunters had reportedly been in the area, but the investigation produced no proof identifying a shooter. Pursuing them to cities such as Boston or Philadelphia would have been difficult, and Régis speculates that the Founder may have preferred not to revive a concealed past. These remain suspicions and family recollections, not a solved case.

Another explanation circulated in Touladi: some people suggested that a jealous husband had fired the shot. The novel places this rumor alongside the theory Régis later considers, preserving the uncertainty rather than selecting a culprit. The allegations also sit within a broader struggle over the D’Anjous’ reputation. Guillaume resents the black legend of violence and debauchery spread about the Founder and Égide, which he understands as an attempt to discredit the family. The competing stories therefore leave the death doubly unresolved: its physical circumstances are unknown, and its meaning is contested by the family and the village.

A Presence in Later Generations

Égide returns not only as a subject of investigation but as an image in the experiences of his descendants. In a letter dated August 18, 1942, shortly before his death at Dieppe, Élias D’Anjou tells his family that he dreamed of Égide, whom he had never known. In the dream, Égide signals him toward an object giving off a disturbing light. The vision connects the dead ancestor to the mysterious cameo already found in the family’s history, but it does not establish what Égide knew about the object or what the dream means. Its importance lies in the recurrence of his image across generations and in the way family history reaches Élias through a dream rather than direct knowledge.

The cameo also haunts Guillaume’s response to later events. When a storm and the uncovering of the Founder’s grave revive questions about the family’s past, Guillaume interprets the strange circumstances as another possible sign of a curse. His fears arise amid a history already marked, in his mind, by the Founder’s troubling legend and Égide’s unexplained death. The novel thus shows how an unverified account can exert real force: the uncertainty itself becomes part of the inheritance, shaping how descendants interpret new losses and discoveries.

Inheritance and Narrative Significance

Égide’s death is echoed in the death of his son. In 1964, Guillaume is found in the forest near Pain-de-Sucre, with his hunting rifle fallen from his hands and a dead deer nearby. The account attributes his death to a failure of his chronically weak heart; he had not brought the nitrate capsules he used in case of a crisis. The narrator notes the resemblance to Égide’s death forty-four years earlier, almost to the day, while stopping short of proving that Guillaume’s death was intentional. The repeated setting and family relationship make the parallel significant without resolving its cause.

For Guillaume, the echo turns family memory into a pattern of loss; for Régis, it remains a clue in a historical mystery. Égide’s narrative role is therefore largely posthumous, but not passive. His disputed death gives later characters a question they cannot close, while his portrait and dream-appearance make the past recur in the domestic and imaginative lives of his descendants. Through him, the novel binds personal bereavement to the D’Anjous’ public standing and to the fragile boundary between what the family knows, what it suspects, and what it fears may be true.