The 1944 Touladi storm and cemetery landslide transform a night of natural disaster into the village’s defining encounter with its buried past. On November 13, a violent storm and earthquake damage homes and streets, then shift the ground beneath the cemetery. The landslide exposes the Founder’s remains and a cameo, bringing a family secret into view and setting off a contest between testimony, rumor, and attempts to contain the story.

The Storm and Its Aftermath

Before dawn, Noé Bolduc notices his cat acting unusually alert, as if sensing a disturbance. The air seems suspended; then a dark shadow passes over the garden and a fierce wind begins, driving hail against houses across Touladi. Roof timbers groan, animals panic, and people wake in fear as branches and signs are torn loose and hurled against buildings and vehicles. The violence of the weather is followed by shaking ground: the houses move, and residents wonder whether the war in Europe and Asia has somehow reached them. Noé thinks of German submarines reported in the Saint Lawrence, including one recently seen near Rimouski.

At first light, the wind drops abruptly and soft snow begins to fall. Outside, the village finds trees stripped and broken, roofs and cars damaged, windows shattered, and animals dead. The large Labrie family dog has been killed, and unfamiliar, straight, hoof-shaped impressions cross the snow. A villager reports seeing something dark near the dog, but the tracks do not fit an ordinary animal. The villagers’ uncertainty gives way to religious fear: some make the sign of the cross, while the statue of Archangel Michael outside the church has also suffered damage, its trident broken in two.

The Cemetery Opens

The earthquake has loosened the clay hillside above the river, and the cemetery is caught in the resulting slide. Several graves are exposed, their contents brought into the open. Lazare Moreau, the bell ringer, had gone out after the storm and tremor and comes upon a figure among the wreckage of a coffin. At first he takes it for a specter; then he recognizes Élie D’Anjou, the village Founder, whose body has been uncovered by the landslide.

The priest hurries out before he has finished dressing and calls for the families to be warned, beginning with the D’Anjous. Moreau and the priest have already noticed an unusual glint among the remains. When Guillaume D’Anjou arrives, the gathered villagers fall silent as he approaches his grandfather’s body. Guillaume sees the object, takes it from the fragments of clothing, and turns it in his hands. It is a cameo, its pale and dark agate visible as he carefully rubs it clean. For him, the discovery gives concrete form to an old family legend. The event thus joins two kinds of exposure: the landslide reveals what a grave held, while the jewel brings a history the family had kept in legend into the present.

A Warning Becomes Village Lore

La Grébiche follows Guillaume as he leaves with the cameo. She insists that it is the Devil’s stone and warns that taking it from the dead will bring misfortune. Guillaume puts it in his pocket and continues home without answering her. Her warning does not prevent him from carrying the object away; instead, it gives the discovery a second, ominous interpretation that quickly travels beyond the family.

That evening, the jewel is already the subject of intense curiosity at the Blanchette restaurant. Damien Verreault arrives asking why Élie D’Anjou took it to his grave, turning a private discovery into a question for the village. The setting matters: Moïse Dubois, a celebrated storyteller who knows Touladi’s history and remembers the Founder from his own childhood in the 1880s, is among the village’s established keepers of local lore. His Saturday-night storytelling and his lively rivalry with Noé Bolduc make the restaurant a place where remembered history and current speculation meet. The evidence presents the question about the cameo as a new public mystery, not as a settled explanation of its origin or meaning.

Repetition, Silence, and Significance

The episode returns later through Donat Côté, one of the first villagers to encounter the strange tracks and the dead dog. The narrative connects the shock of that day with his subsequent mental collapse: in a later scene, amid the commotion surrounding La Grébiche’s disappearance, he again invokes the Devil’s stone and the fire of the devil. His cries show how the 1944 event persists not as a stable account but as a frightening fragment that resurfaces in village memory.

The village’s response also becomes a pattern of concealment. When a later fire destroys La Grébiche’s dwelling, local authorities seek to prevent newspapers and radio from reporting it, circulate a mundane explanation, and arrange an inadequate burial. That episode is distinct from the 1944 storm, but its handling echoes the earlier unease around the cameo: alarming events are reduced to official versions while rumor preserves what those versions leave out. The landslide’s lasting significance lies in this tension. Nature opens the grave, Guillaume removes the jewel, and La Grébiche names it as a curse; from then on, the village must live with a discovery that neither family silence nor public explanation can make ordinary.