Alcide Bolduc—Loïc D’Anjou

Alcide Bolduc—Loïc D’Anjou is a relationship divided between biological parentage and the care that makes a home. After Loïc’s mother, Marie-Ange, dies in childbirth, Alcide remains his birth father, but Guillaume and Marie-Louise D’Anjou adopt the dangerously frail newborn. Years later, Alcide’s intermittent returns to Touladi revive the question of whether he will reclaim Loïc. The child, meanwhile, experiences the two men not as a settled choice between fathers but as separate poles of a world he is still trying to understand.

Birth and Adoption

Loïc enters the relationship under the shadow of loss. Marie-Ange dies after giving birth, and the newborn appears unlikely to survive. In the turmoil that follows, Guillaume and his daughter Laurette take him into their home so that he can receive better care. Guillaume gathers his family and asks them, through tears, to care for Marie-Ange’s child. The scene establishes the first form of fatherhood Loïc knows: a household taking responsibility for a vulnerable baby whose survival is uncertain.

The family brings Loïc promptly to the church for baptism. Guillaume and Marie-Louise serve as his godparents and decide to adopt him, with Alcide’s agreement while he is still not fully sober, and with the broader Bolduc family’s consent. The Bolducs share care of the other two children. Adoption therefore does not erase Alcide’s paternity, but it places Loïc’s everyday upbringing with the D’Anjous. The distinction is present from the beginning: Alcide is the father by birth, while Guillaume and Marie-Louise become the parents who take the infant into their home and undertake his care.

That arrangement also makes Loïc’s identity difficult to name. At six, he hears the adults downstairs discussing the possibility of a visit by the man he understands to be his father. The adoptive father is simply papa; Alcide, by contrast, is the unnamed father who is often far away in his airplane. Loïc has no easy word that can hold both relationships together. In his play with his brother Maurice and his cousins, he uses a plain expression for Alcide, but the difference between the father at home and the father who arrives from elsewhere remains unmistakable.

An Unsettled Claim to Custody

Alcide’s visits repeatedly bring the same question around Touladi: will he take his children back? The possibility has circulated for years, and by the time Loïc is six it has become a rumor with consequences for both families. Guillaume opposes a change of home. He believes Alcide is unreliable, describing a man who cannot keep steady between alcohol and his hunting rifle, and who escapes responsibility by taking to the air or drinking. This is Guillaume’s judgment of his brother-in-law, a person he once loved; it is also the basis of his resistance to Alcide’s possible claim.

The dispute reaches Loïc indirectly. He is not shown as a participant in an adult negotiation so much as a child listening from the upstairs toilet, trying to catch fragments of a tense conversation. He hears references to the airplane and to the man who has returned, while the adults’ discussion makes clear that his living arrangements may be at stake. The rumor has already traveled through the village and reached his brothers and cousins, who treat Alcide’s return as a sign that Loïc will be taken away. What is uncertain to the adults becomes a looming change of home for the child.

The Airplane and the Adoptive Father

On the Saturday of the earthquake, Loïc wants to go flying with Alcide. Guillaume has planned his usual jeep excursion as a forest guard for the Brunswick Company, a trip Loïc normally enjoys for the chance of seeing wildlife. This time, the airplane has greater pull. Guillaume notices the intensity of the boy’s wish and does not insist that he come along. He asks whether Loïc would rather fly, receives a shy nod, and tells him to go, while warning him to be careful.

Loïc answers Guillaume with the word papa. The response touches Guillaume deeply; he turns away so that the child will not see his emotion. In this brief exchange, the conflict over custody is not resolved, but the emotional significance of the adoptive bond becomes plain. Guillaume does not keep Loïc close by refusing the competing father. He lets him go toward Alcide, even though the airplane is tied to the very uncertainty that has troubled the household. The scene places Guillaume’s care in an act of permission and restraint, while Loïc’s spontaneous address recognizes him as the father present in daily life.

For Loïc, Alcide’s airplane carries a different attraction. The man is distant and unfamiliar, but the possibility of flying with him is compelling. After the earthquake, Loïc hurries to dress, already imagining himself in the sky with the airborne figure he calls his father. The scene does not establish what happens during the flight; it shows the child’s anticipation and the way his desire can coexist with his attachment to Guillaume. The two fathers seem to belong to different elements, land and sky, but Loïc does not yet know how to rank or reconcile them.

A Relationship Held Between Two Fathers

The available episodes leave Alcide and Loïc’s relationship open rather than neatly settled. They establish Alcide’s biological paternity, his intermittent presence, the prospect that he might reclaim his son, and Loïc’s eagerness to spend time with him. They also show the counterweight: Guillaume’s role in the adoption, his opposition to Alcide’s taking the child, and his tenderness when Loïc calls him papa. No final custody outcome is supplied in these scenes, so the relationship cannot be reduced to a completed transfer or a simple choice of one father over the other.

The tension is sharpened by the unequal forms of connection. Alcide’s bond is carried through birth, absence, and the airplane that brings him back into Loïc’s imagination and into the village’s dispute. Guillaume’s bond is established through the decision to take in an endangered newborn and the continuing work of raising him. At six, Loïc experiences both claims before he can fully understand their implications. His divided naming of the two men is not a rejection of either; it is evidence that his family life contains two kinds of fatherhood that the surrounding adults treat as rivals.