1996 Discovery of the Paired Cameos in Paris

The 1996 Paris discovery of the paired cameos was a decisive breakthrough in Régis D’Anjou’s long investigation of the Founder’s stone: it connected the family heirloom to a documented aristocratic pair once held by the Regent, yet did not explain how one half had reached the D’Anjou ancestor. The exhibition supplied a visual and archival match, turning a family mystery into a question of provenance, separation, and uncertain transmission. Its importance lies as much in what it established as in the gaps it left open.

The Cameo as an Unsolved Provenance

Régis had begun investigating the cameo decades earlier. Its worn surface obscured the engraved figure, making it difficult to decide whether the image represented a mythological figure or a real person. Under a magnifying glass, however, details remained: traces of attributes, the outline of clothing, and the style of the carving. These clues made the stone legible only in fragments, and its damage was not incidental to the inquiry; it restricted the certainty that any identification could claim.

To test his observations, Régis studied lapidary art systematically and consulted European experts during his travels, presenting himself as an enthusiast without identifying the family object. He concluded that the cameo was Italian and dated at least to the eighteenth century, perhaps the seventeenth. The figure, he believed, could only be one of the mythological twins Castor and Pollux. If that identification was right, the stone should have had a counterpart. The Paris exhibition would provide the first strong confirmation of that inference.

Régis had also searched for written evidence. In an obscure eighteenth-century catalogue at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, he found a brief reference to a pair of cameos of Castor and Pollux in the collection of the Duke of Orléans, later the Regent. The catalogue did not trace what happened to them. Régis considered whether they had entered the royal collection after the Regent’s death in 1724, but the inventory of royal possessions made during the Revolution, following the arrest and execution of Louis XVI, did not list them. He also entertained the possibility that Louis XVI’s brothers, fleeing revolutionary France, had taken them, or that the cameos had passed to another princely or émigré family. Each possibility offered a route, but none established one.

The Invitation and Recognition

The immediate opportunity came through Victor Bourdieu, who told Régis that Christie’s would hold an auction of antique jewelry in Paris the following day. Much of the material came from royal collections and prominent families. Alongside the sale, an exhibition would present old engraved stones, including pieces that had remained in private collections. The event had not been publicized and was limited to an invited clientele, largely European aristocrats. Bourdieu said he had access and invited Régis to accompany him.

Régis accepted eagerly, sensing that the visit might set something consequential in motion. Christie’s had assembled the exhibition with private collections and museums in France and elsewhere in Europe. Its cases held many objects, while photographs showed cameos once owned by aristocrats and subsequently lost from view. As Régis scanned the material, he recognized a photograph of a cameo strikingly like the one belonging to his family. Beside it was an old engraving of the supposedly lost Founder’s cameo, shown without the scratch that marked the family stone. The image brought back his earlier examination of the object, freshly exhumed from the ancestor’s grave.

Seen together, the two images made the proposed pairing unusually specific. The figures were the Dioscuri, standing opposite one another, each holding a horse by the bridle and carrying a spear; each wore an egg-shaped cap topped by a star. The exhibition’s description identified the material as five-layer onyx with a dark upper layer. It also stated that the pair had belonged to the Regent’s collection and had been separated after the Revolution. One cameo had entered the private collection of a family of the old French aristocracy, whose name was not given. The missing Castor cameo had disappeared in unknown circumstances, probably amid the revolutionary upheaval. Thus the display linked the family object to a known pair, but withheld the identity of the surviving owner and offered only a probable explanation for the loss of its mate.

What the Discovery Established—and Did Not

For Régis, the exhibition settled a central part of the question: the Founder’s cameo came from an aristocratic family, probably French, and belonged to the same pair as the surviving Pollux. It did not establish the chain by which the Founder acquired it. The distinction mattered. Similarity of image and the catalogue’s account supported the pairing and its earlier provenance, but they could not, by themselves, show whether the stone had been sold, stolen, given, or passed through other hands before reaching the family.

Régis tried not to reveal too much to Bourdieu, but his reaction was apparent. When asked whether the jewel meant something to him, he answered cautiously that it reminded him of the cameo he had seen in Canada and that he had wondered whether it represented Castor or Pollux. He added that he was not certain even about what he had seen, invoking the possibility that memory could fail with age. The hesitation was a deliberate retreat from the intensity of his recognition, not a resolution of the provenance question.

Suspicion and the Continuing Investigation

Régis later recorded that he regretted having said too much. He noticed Bourdieu’s keen, almost covetous interest and took a photograph of the Pollux cameo, which Loïc would later find among his papers. Bourdieu soon excused himself, claiming a forgotten appointment and complimenting Régis’s company and conversation. The cordial manner of the encounter did not reassure Régis. In his journal entry of May 10, 1996, he described Bourdieu as too quick in business, suspected that his affable manner concealed calculation, and resolved to remain on guard. He wondered whether the man saw a profitable opportunity in the cameo.

The discovery therefore opened two lines of inquiry at once. Historically, it placed the pair in the Regent’s collection and documented their separation after the Revolution, while leaving the Founder’s route to the stone unknown. In the present, it made the cameo’s value and identity newly visible to someone whose interest Régis distrusted. Loïc later inferred that Bourdieu had alerted an old associate, Charles de C..., and that this contact helped set the later plot in motion; Régis himself did not know that name. The subsequent conspiracy and the cameo’s disappearance on September 11, 2001, give the Paris encounter a foreboding consequence in retrospect, but they do not erase the limits of Régis’s discovery: he had identified the pair and its earlier history, not the full path by which the Founder possessed it.