Charles de Castelmont et Pierre de Mirbeau

Charles de Castelmont and Pierre de Mirbeau are childhood friends turned business partners whose alliance joins elite social access to clandestine networks. When the search for the missing Castor cameo reaches Canada, Mirbeau helps Charles plan an indirect investigation, making their partnership an operational link between the European collectors’ world and the inquiry into the D’Anjou family.

Friendship and Business Partnership

Mirbeau is described as a childhood friend of Charles and, by the late 1990s, his business associate and close accomplice in Paris. Their relationship is presented as longstanding and practical: the two had collaborated in ventures of a shadowy nature for years, and Charles could turn to Mirbeau not merely for companionship but for access to contacts and discreet channels.

Mirbeau’s activities included property and stock-market speculation, as well as covert trafficking in vulnerable people from poorer countries. The novel also connects him to a wealthy American who used an apartment overlooking the Champs-Élysées to host an exclusive circle of powerful guests. This context establishes the reach and moral character of the networks available to him, without making every member of those circles a direct participant in the same activities.

The Cameo Investigation

After learning that the missing Castor cameo might be in Canada, Charles judged that openly asking about its location would be unwise. He and Mirbeau agreed that the inquiry should proceed through intermediaries and that Charles should seek a local accomplice. Mirbeau’s clandestine contacts made him useful to this plan: among them was former French counterintelligence officer Franck Aubry, who spoke English and Spanish and had experience operating under different identities in North America.

Mirbeau arranged for Aubry to be sent to Montreal. Using the name Patrice Desbois, Aubry examined the D’Anjou family’s connections and focused on Robert Bolduc as a possible point of entry. The aim was to learn who held the cameo, whether the D’Anjous possessed it, and where it might be found, with recovery as the eventual objective. Mirbeau’s contribution was thus chiefly logistical and connective: he supplied the intermediary through whom Charles’s private interest became an investigation on the ground.

Missed Encounter and Continuing Uncertainty

Years later, Charles regretted that Mirbeau had narrowly missed meeting Loïc Bolduc on the morning of Loïc’s accident in the Lot, thirteen years earlier. Charles imagined that Mirbeau might then have learned whether the D’Anjous had received news from New York, information that could have spared him the later surprise of renewed claims concerning the cameo. The missed encounter is presented as a lost opportunity, not as proof that Mirbeau knew what had happened to the jewel.

Their partnership gives Charles access to people and channels beyond the formal world of art collections, but it does not resolve the cameo’s provenance. The later discovery that the images Charles received showed a counterfeit leaves the original’s identity and custody unsettled. In that contrast, the alliance is both effective and limited: it can mobilize discreet agents, yet it cannot close the gaps in a history shaped by disappearance, substitution, and incomplete evidence.