Camée du Fondateur

Camée du Fondateur is the family gemstone around which the novel’s historical investigation and supernatural unease converge. Its worn surface makes its image difficult to identify, while its disputed provenance ties Le Fondateur to an old European collection and to an infant found alive in Missouri in 1842. The stone repeatedly seems to return from disappearance, but later evidence of counterfeiting leaves its identity unresolved: the object that carries the family’s history may not always be the original object at all.

Identity and Material Clues

The cameo is an engraved stone, described as an heirloom kept by a Canadian family whose members initially know little about its history. A scratch or abrasion across its surface obstructs identification of the figure. Under a magnifying glass, however, Régis D’Anjou can discern traces of mythological attributes, part of a garment, and stylistic features that offer clues to the image and the period of manufacture. The damage is not incidental to the mystery: it both conceals the figure and becomes a mark by which later images and purported copies can be compared.

Régis’s examination leads him to identify the subject as one of the mythological twins Castor and Pollux, and to infer that the family stone once belonged to a pair. His research with lapidary experts in Europe supports a date no later than the eighteenth century, and possibly as early as the seventeenth, as well as Italian workmanship. Much later, an exhibition record describes the paired gems as five-layered onyx, with a dark upper layer. These observations establish a plausible material and artistic history, but do not by themselves prove that the family’s stone is an authentic member of the documented pair.

Provenance and the Missing Twin

Régis’s search begins in the 1940s and develops into a systematic study of engraved stones. During European visits he consults specialists while presenting himself as an enthusiast of gemstones and lapidary art, carefully withholding the family connection. In the 1960s he searches the Bibliothèque nationale de France and finds a brief eighteenth-century catalogue entry for a pair of cameos depicting Castor and Pollux in the collection of the Duke of Orléans, later the Regent. The record traces neither gem’s subsequent passage through private hands nor its ultimate fate. The pair is absent from the inventory of royal possessions made during the Revolution, leaving open whether the stones were taken away, transferred, or lost amid the upheaval.

A later invitation gives Régis a decisive visual clue. At a private exhibition organized by Christie’s with material from private collections and European museums, photographs show a cameo resembling the family heirloom beside an old engraving of the supposedly missing gem. The engraving depicts the Founder’s cameo without its scratch. Seen together, the paired figures stand facing one another, each holding a horse by the bridle and carrying a lance, with a star-topped, egg-shaped cap. The exhibition record says the pair had belonged to the Regent’s collection and was separated after the Revolution; one cameo entered a private collection, while Castor’s disappearance was attributed, cautiously, to the revolutionary disturbances. For Régis, this is a major step in tracing the family object’s European history, though the record leaves the missing stone’s later route unknown.

The Cameo and the Founder’s Origins

The family’s possession of the cameo acquires a deeper meaning when Georges D’Anjou removes it from the safe after Guillaume D’Anjou’s funeral and takes it to Quebec. The transfer had been contemplated in 1951, when a heart attack brought Guillaume close to death, but his recovery halted the plan. In 1964, as Georges retrieves the stone, he discovers a concealed American birth-record extract at the bottom of the safe. He keeps the document’s discovery to himself; it later helps Régis investigate the Founder’s origins. The cameo’s removal thus shifts not only the heirloom’s location but also exposes a document that changes the family’s understanding of its ancestor.

Régis’s later archival discovery supplies a more striking connection. A damaged handwritten account describes a living infant found in 1842 near Florissant, Missouri, beside a young woman who had frozen to death beneath the snow. A dog’s persistent barking led the Sisters of the Sacred Heart to the scene. The woman had used her own clothing to protect the baby, and a torn silk pouch containing a finely made cameo was pinned to the infant’s swaddling. The account records the stone as a possible means of identification, not as conclusive proof of the child’s parentage. The infant was baptized and adopted by a childless French-Canadian D’Anjou couple; Loïc later considers whether the dead woman might have been his distant ancestor. The text therefore places a cameo beside the Founder from infancy, while preserving uncertainty about the woman’s identity and the precise history of the gem.

Disappearance, Apparent Return, and the Curse

After a flash of intuition, Loïc suspects that the cameo survived the September 11 attacks and may have been drawn from the wreckage. At Ground Zero, firefighter Jim Browning spots a reddish glint among twisted steel and human remains. He finds the cameo partly buried in debris, apparently intact and attached to dangling clothing fibers. Though workers are required to turn over recovered property, Browning pockets it, intending to show the stone to his wife after the weekend. He never makes it home that evening. The scene makes the gem’s recovery inseparable from another disappearance, while leaving the circumstances of Browning’s fate unstated in this account.

For a time, Loïc believes the absence of the jewel from the remains identified as Roger Bolduc’s means that the family’s destructive history with it has ended. He feels relief that the secret seems buried with the debris, yet that conclusion does not hold. His intuition that the cameo is neither destroyed nor gone returns. In 2002, Tim Jones wakes in a motel room to red light and smoke rising from the imitation-leather case in which he has stored the stone. His remembered religious upbringing gives the unexplained glow a demonic cast; when he makes the sign of the cross, the light and smoke cease. Later, after Ramondo Cardoso’s body has been reduced to ashes in a brief, contained blaze, the cameo lies beside the burned chair and emits a sinister light. A priest responds with repeated signs of the cross, while an old woman calls the gem the devil’s eye. The novel presents these events through the witnesses’ terror and their inability to explain what happened, sustaining the stone’s supernatural reputation without turning that reputation into a settled account of its powers.

Copies and the Unresolved Original

The cameo’s identity remains uncertain even when Loïc encounters a photograph supplied by Rodrigo Lerbier. Rodrigo produces the small picture from an old wallet; its blur prevents Loïc from confirming the match, though it resembles the Founder’s stone closely enough to trouble him. Loïc withholds that reaction and says only that the image lacks precision. The episode extends the object’s history through images as well as physical transfers: resemblance can prompt recognition, but cannot establish authenticity.

That distinction becomes crucial when Charles de Castelmont examines later photographs. He recognizes the old Castor cameo and its characteristic scratch, but zooming in reveals that the photographed mark is recent and imitated. The D’Anjou family, like Charles, has apparently received a counterfeit from New York. Charles concludes that two forged cameos were sent in response to separate claims, perhaps after someone substituted copies for a valuable original. The evidence resets the provenance question rather than resolving it: neither the family’s inherited gem nor the later New York object can simply be accepted as the authentic Castor cameo. The scratch that once impeded Régis’s identification has become a counterfeitable signature, and the stone remains at once a historical artifact, a contested piece of evidence, and the focus of a family legend that cannot be laid to rest.