Attentats du 11 septembre 2001

Attentats du 11 septembre 2001 turns a world-historical catastrophe into the point where several private histories collide. In the novel, Roger Bolduc disappears in New York while carrying a rare cameo, Loïc is shaken by a dream that seems to echo the attacks, and Charles de C... sees a years-long plan to acquire the jewel swallowed by the destruction. The human loss is immense; the family’s fixation on the stone persists within it, making the event both a rupture in the characters’ lives and a source of renewed uncertainty about the cameo’s power and fate.

Roger’s journey to New York

In September 2001, Roger travels toward New York on a night bus, unable to sleep. He anxiously watches the other passengers and worries about the briefcase chained to his wrist beneath his raincoat. It contains a rare, unique jewel of inestimable value, and he understands that the risk reaches beyond the object: his family, marriage, and career are all implicated in what he has arranged. The novel presents the journey as a dangerous wager already in motion before the attacks begin.

Roger’s route has taken an unexplained turn. He had been heading for Toronto, but changed direction in Montreal and boarded the night bus to New York. When Georges D’Anjou later informs Loïc of this itinerary, he says that the reason for the change is unknown and that no one can establish whether Roger was at the World Trade Center complex on the morning of September 11. The uncertainty is essential to the event’s personal aftermath: Roger is connected to the catastrophe by his journey and by the jewel, but the family initially lacks confirmation of where he was when the towers were struck.

The novel places the attacks inside the unfolding news broadcast. After a telephone call, Loïc turns on the television and sees the World Trade Center complex burning; the second plane has just struck the south tower. The footage repeatedly returns to the first impact, at 8:46. For Loïc, that time is not merely part of the broadcast: it coincides with the moment of his nightmare. His private unease and the public images thus arrive together, before he has any evidence that Roger is in New York.

Loïc’s dream and its aftermath

Loïc is transfixed by the images and increasingly disturbed by the apparent correspondence between the dream and the attacks. He considers whether the coincidence is random or whether he has experienced telepathy. What troubles him is not simply that he may have dreamed of a disaster; he thinks the dream involved the particular, subjective thoughts of another person, as if he had entered someone else’s consciousness. He entertains the possibility that his mind briefly received another consciousness’s vibration, perhaps at the moment of death, but the novel leaves this as his interpretation rather than a verified explanation.

His questions turn toward Roger. The two men are cousins, although Loïc has not often thought about him, and he wonders whether kinship or another affinity might explain the experience. He also considers whether the scale of the disaster itself could have produced the images in his mind. Neither possibility resolves the connection. The dream instead makes Roger’s otherwise unexplained trip newly urgent: Loïc begins to suspect that the cousin who appeared in his thoughts may have been in New York.

Loïc calls Isabelle D’Anjou to ask whether there is news about Roger and leaves a message saying that the matter has been turning over in his mind since Tuesday. He adds that the dream contains something important for the D’Anjou family. About an hour later Georges D’Anjou calls him. Isabelle is not able to speak because she has just learned that Roger was in New York on the day of the attacks. Georges gives the itinerary—Toronto, then Montreal, then the night bus—and stresses that the family’s information is confidential. The news confirms Roger’s presence in the city, but does not establish that he was in the towers.

The family’s concern is also directed toward the object in Roger’s possession. On September 14, at a gathering in Georges D’Anjou’s house on Grande-Allée, Georges announces that the cameo has disappeared from its bank vault. The missing jewel binds the family’s private crisis to Roger’s disappearance, but it does not clarify whether the stone was with him at the World Trade Center complex or what became of it. The announcement makes the uncertainty concrete: both a man and an object central to the family’s past are now beyond its reach.

Charles de C... and the failed transaction

Across the Atlantic, Charles de C... has prepared for the same jewel to change hands. At Château Barzac, he looks out over the estate’s vineyards and waits for a meeting arranged after five years of maneuvering. His friend Pierre de Mirbeau has just reported that the New York intermediaries, Franck Aubry and his assistant, are waiting for Roger at the World Trade Center complex. The selected location is meant to impress the Québécois. Charles expects the arrangement to succeed and has invested heavily in it; the attacks transform his anticipation into alarm.

As reports of the disaster multiply, Charles tries to establish what has happened to Aubry and to the planned meeting, which he believes is to take place on the ninety-ninth floor of the north tower. His first concern is the cameo, ahead of the safety of the agent, the assistant, and Roger. The novel makes that ordering part of his characterization, while also showing the scale of the emergency breaking through his fixation. As the situation worsens and the towers collapse, he understands that the jewel he has pursued may be buried in the immense field of human and material wreckage. He repeatedly calls Pierre de Mirbeau, although he knows there is nothing either of them can do.

The collapse ends Charles’s immediate hope of securing the cameo and leaves the New York participants’ fate uncertain. The contrast with Loïc’s strand is sharp: Loïc wonders whether Roger’s absence has been anticipated in a dream, while Charles knows of a planned meeting but cannot see beyond its destruction. For both, the attacks make the cameo more than a contested heirloom. It becomes an object whose passage through the world is entangled with danger, loss, and incomplete knowledge.

Identification, recovery, and renewed uncertainty

In June 2002, Isabelle receives a letter from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in New York. It reports that fragments of Roger’s bones have been found in the World Trade Center debris and that DNA analysis identifies them as his. The confirmation turns his disappearance into a death, though it does not settle the story of the jewel: the letter says nothing about the cameo, apparently because none has been found. Isabelle and her family have come to accept that Roger is gone, while continuing to hope that the object may yet emerge from the still-extensive search of Ground Zero.

The narrative then carries the aftermath forward through a discovery dated April 11, 2002. At Ground Zero, firefighter Jim Browning, finishing an exhausting week among the ruins, notices a bright glint as he prepares to leave. The scene begins with the unexplained light rather than a full account of what it means, sustaining the gap between the debris field and the family’s expectation that the missing cameo might be recovered. Later, Loïc has a flash of a stone shining amid rubble and privately suspects that the cameo survived the attacks and may have been pulled from the wreckage. He keeps the intuition to himself; the D’Anjou family has stopped keeping him informed.

Much later, after hearing of events in Cuba, Loïc speculates that agents working for Charles de C... may have helped move the cameo from Ground Zero to Cuba and that it subsequently disappeared again. He imagines possible informants and infiltration, including links to the people around Rodrigo Lerbier, but the account marks these ideas as speculation, not established fact. What Loïc believes he has learned is narrower: if the object in question is indeed the D’Anjou cameo, it emerged from the Ground Zero wreckage, reached Cuba, and vanished once more. The attacks therefore do not provide a final resting place for the jewel; they become one stage in its uncertain passage.

Public reverberations and narrative significance

The attacks also return to public view through Roger’s disappearance. In 2011, as the controversy surrounding Lucille D’Anjou’s death and Georges D’Anjou’s conduct spreads through media and public debate, a journalist brings Roger’s disappearance in New York back into the story. That disclosure widens the scandal and further entangles the family’s public reputation with its concealed history. At Georges D’Anjou’s funeral, ten years almost to the day after the attacks, Loïc fears that the story of the cameo may also become public. The affair concerning Roger is not pursued again after Georges is cleared, but the renewed attention shows that the consequences of September 2001 have not simply passed with the immediate disaster.

Structurally, the novel approaches the event through intersecting but unequally informed strands: Roger’s anxious journey, Loïc’s dream and television viewing, and Charles’s distant expectation of a transaction. The reader sees connections that the characters cannot yet assemble, while each strand preserves a different uncertainty. Roger’s presence in New York is confirmed, but his exact location at the moment of impact is not; his death is later established by DNA, but the cameo’s fate remains open. The attacks thus create a decisive break in the plot without closing its central mystery. Their force lies partly in that imbalance: a catastrophe that destroys lives and buildings also sends a small object into a chain of conjectures, discoveries, and disappearances that outlast the day itself.