1951 Touladi Earthquake and Loïc's Plane Ride

The events of October 13, 1951, bring a literal tremor into Loïc’s childhood just as the ground beneath his family life is already unsettled. An earthquake shakes the house where he lives with his adoptive parents, Guillaume D’Anjou and Marie-Louise D’Anjou; the same day, Guillaume permits him to go to the lake and join his birth father, Alcide Bolduc, for a flight. The episode joins a child’s bodily fear to a family’s unresolved custody conflict, making the journey toward Alcide feel like more than an ordinary outing.

A custody question beneath the ordinary day

By that morning, rumors had been circulating in Touladi for several days that Loïc might change homes and that Alcide, an aviator, would reclaim him. Loïc’s brother and cousins had spoken to him about it as though the possibility were certain. The rumor revived a question that had returned whenever Alcide visited, even briefly: would he take his children back? For six years, Guillaume had answered that possibility with a categorical refusal. The Bolducs and the D’Anjous were powerful local families, and the uncertainty around Loïc’s home was entangled with the tension between them.

Guillaume’s opposition was rooted in what he believed about Alcide’s ability to care for a child. He saw his brother-in-law, whom he had once loved, as unable to keep his footing between drinking and hunting. Alcide evaded constraints and responsibilities either by taking to his airplane or through bouts of drunkenness. His return therefore carried two meanings for Loïc: the excitement of seeing an aviator father and the possibility, voiced by others, of being taken away from the household that had raised him.

The earthquake inside the house

The morning’s first upheaval is physical. Around nine o’clock, a low crack travels through the timbers, followed by a deep subterranean rumble and the force of a seismic wave. The house creaks, trembles, and sways. Loïc, alone in the washroom and already uneasy in its windowless corners, is caught by the quake while lingering there. Startled, he urinates on his abacus and bolts downstairs, leaving the beads scattered when the instrument breaks.

The family gathers around him. Marie-Louise draws him into her lap, covers him with her shawl, and reassures him; his shame at being naked is overwhelmed by fear. In that instant the shaking seems to him like a rising of buried forces, from underground or the dark cellar beneath the house. The building’s history intensifies the impression: it had been built by the Founder on the ruins of the village’s first house, and stories surrounded that earlier place. The tremor is real, but the scene also shows how Loïc’s fear gives the unseen world a presence in the family home.

Afterward, Laurette sets the pictures straight while Annette nervously repeats that it is an earthquake. Guillaume reassures the household, though his concern remains visible. The disturbance interrupts the day without settling the family’s deeper uncertainty. It is followed not by a resolution of the custody question but by a choice that brings Loïc closer to Alcide.

Guillaume lets Loïc go to the lake

Guillaume had planned his usual forest-guard round to the Brunswick Company camps and asked Loïc whether he wanted to come. The child usually loved those jeep excursions, with the chance of seeing deer, bears, beavers, or porcupines along the road. This time, however, his attention was fixed on the airplane. Guillaume recognizes how strongly Loïc wants to go and does not press him to choose the forest trip instead.

He gives permission, adding a warning to be careful. Loïc answers by calling him Dad, and the word touches Guillaume deeply enough that he turns away to hide his emotion. The exchange makes the decision more than a concession to a child’s appetite for flight: it briefly affirms the intimacy between Loïc and the man who has raised him, even as the boy is about to spend time with his birth father. Guillaume then goes to get his hat, delayed by the earthquake and by the feeling the child’s address has stirred in him.

At the pontoon

Loïc hurries to dress and runs to the lake with his brother and cousins. His fear of the quake has receded; he imagines himself in the sky, aboard the aircraft of the flying god said to be his father. Yet a red abacus bead has rolled as far as his bedroom doorway, carrying a small remnant of the morning’s shock into the moment of departure.

At the pontoon, Alcide is working on the large seaplane, which rocks slightly on its floats. Roland Bolduc is there too, beside his Plymouth. The brothers speak gravely and quietly; fragments of their conversation concern a fire tower, caches, and deer. Alcide is known to land on remote lakes beyond the reach of roads and to store game in forest caches for later retrieval. The children can only catch pieces of the men’s discussion, while the plane itself makes the prospect of escape into open country tangible. The supplied scene establishes Loïc’s consent, Guillaume’s permission, and the waiting aircraft, but does not describe the flight’s route or its outcome.

A day poised between two kinds of rupture

The episode places the earthquake beside a family boundary that has not yet visibly broken: Loïc belongs to Guillaume and Marie-Louise’s home, while Alcide’s return repeatedly raises the possibility of a change. The quake gives that underlying instability a bodily form, shaking the house just as the adults’ competing claims unsettle the child’s sense of where he belongs. The scattered abacus beads register the shock in a domestic object; the red bead later marks the threshold between the house and the lake.

The airplane offers a contrasting image of freedom from the earth’s disturbances, but it also draws Loïc toward the father whose visits revive the question of custody. The day’s movement—from private fear, to comfort in Guillaume’s arms, to the open pontoon and Alcide’s seaplane—does not resolve the family conflict. Instead, it makes its emotional stakes visible: Guillaume can let the boy go on this outing, and Loïc can eagerly choose the sky, while the larger question of which home will claim him remains suspended.