Canadian Senate

The Canadian Senate is presented through Régis D’Anjou’s career rather than through its internal workings. His path from former religious to public intellectual, government service, and senator gives the institution a personal and political presence in the novel: it confers stature and connects him to public projects, while Loïc sees that career as bound up with a decline in Régis’s creative life. After retirement, Régis returns to the historical inquiry that leads toward the Founder’s origins and the cameo’s past.

Régis D’Anjou and Public Service

Régis’s senatorial role is part of a broader public career. By the time of Guillaume’s funeral, he cannot attend because he has been sent to a conference on cybernetics in California as a delegate of a government commission established to reform education in Quebec. The detail places his work within an official undertaking, while also showing the demands that public responsibilities make on his time: his absence is explained by the commission’s assignment, not by a lack of connection to the family or its history.

Years later, when Loïc visits him in Ottawa in the spring of 1994, Régis is described as a former religious and senator. His body has become frail, and his speech and laughter have slowed, but his mind remains lively and his indignation strong. He condemns what he sees as the degradation and growing barbarity of the age. The scene presents a man whose public identity has not erased his critical voice, even as age and disappointment make his remaining time feel constricted.

Political Prestige and Its Cost

Régis’s standing appears to rise through his political engagement. In Loïc’s assessment, he had diminished himself by serving Pierre Elliott Trudeau, despite seeming, from the outside, to have advanced socially: he appeared to be the Prince’s éminence grise and eventually became a senator. That distinction between public elevation and inward cost is central to the novel’s treatment of the office. The Senate signifies influence and prestige, but those outward signs do not settle the question of what the career has done to Régis’s intellectual life.

Loïc believes that political service had drained Régis as a writer and thinker. This is an interpretation attributed to Loïc, rather than a neutral institutional judgment, and it stands beside the evidence of Régis’s continuing intellectual force: even in old age, he remains capable of sharp criticism and sustained historical inquiry. The novel therefore holds two aspects of his public life together. The office marks achievement and access, while the literary vocation appears to have suffered during the years of political involvement.

Retirement and Historical Inquiry

Retirement from the Senate changes Régis’s relation to research. Once he has left public office, he returns to a question he had pursued earlier: the origins of the Founder and the history of the cameo. A discovery in Paris of a twin cameo has reopened the inquiry, prompting him to investigate the object’s route into the family’s possession. In the spring of 1999, he obtains permission to search Jesuit archives in Montreal.

Régis’s account of the investigation explains how retirement affords him the leisure to renew the work. He had previously consulted the Jesuit archives held at Collège Sainte-Marie in Montreal without finding the needed material. Later, a new provincial directs him toward a collection at Saint Louis University, where records concerning the parish of Saint-Ferdinand in Florissant may be found. There Régis comes upon an account of a living infant discovered in 1842 in the arms of a woman who had died in the snow; a fine cameo was pinned to the child’s swaddling clothes. The document helps establish that the jewel was not simply stolen or taken as war booty, and it opens a new line of inquiry into the Founder’s origins.

The Senate’s Narrative Significance

The Canadian Senate’s significance in the novel is conveyed through this contrast between public office and private intellectual purpose. Régis’s government and senatorial career place him among influential political figures and take him away from the historical work to which he later returns. His retirement does not resolve his dissatisfaction with the age or restore his earlier life, but it gives him renewed time to investigate the family’s past.

The institution is not developed through scenes of legislative procedure. Instead, its presence is measured in assignments, status, absence, and the consequences Loïc associates with political service. That limited but telling portrayal makes the Senate part of Régis’s personal history: a source of public stature and responsibility, and a phase of life that stands in uneasy relation to the writer and investigator he remains.