Charles de Castelmont et Roger Bolduc

Charles de Castelmont and Roger Bolduc are connected by a concealed attempt to recover a missing family cameo, a scheme in which access to the D’Anjou family mattered as much as the jewel itself. The relationship is reconstructed through Charles’s agents and Loïc’s later deductions: Roger appears as a prospective insider and, in Loïc’s account, as the family member whose betrayal helped set the affair in motion. Yet the evidence leaves the exact scope of Roger’s participation unresolved.

A Covert Route into the D’Anjou Family

Charles pursued the cameo through intermediaries rather than approaching the D’Anjous openly. His associate Pierre de Mirbeau had cultivated a network of underworld contacts, including Franck Aubry, a former police officer and counterintelligence agent who could operate under assumed identities. Aubry was sent to Montréal under the name Patrice Desbois to investigate the family and find a way into its circle.

Aubry’s research suggested that public information about the prominent D’Anjous would be easy to obtain. The harder task was finding a point of entry. In screening the family’s connections, he focused on a Bolduc businessman whom he judged potentially susceptible to corruption and therefore useful as a Trojan horse. This was an operative’s assessment, not proof that the approach had succeeded; the narrative later associates Roger with the suspected family accomplice, but does not establish that every detail of Aubry’s initial target and Roger’s role are identical.

The Cameo as the Scheme’s Objective

The object of the approach was the missing counterpart to a cameo Charles’s family had sought for generations. When Aubry sent Charles a photograph of the jewel held in Québec, Charles took it as evidence that his agent had made contact and apparently bribed someone inside the D’Anjou family. He was prepared to spend heavily to recover the stone, but considered a stratagem more advantageous than a straightforward purchase. The photograph confirmed the lead; it did not settle how far the insider’s cooperation extended or how the cameo could be examined while kept under secure custody.

For Charles, the recovery effort carried an additional risk. He wondered how much the D’Anjous knew about the cameo’s history and whether their inquiries might expose secrets his ancestors had worked to conceal. The scheme was therefore both acquisitive and defensive: recovering the jewel could reunite the old pair, while controlling what the D’Anjous learned might prevent a family history from becoming public. Roger’s potential value to Charles lay in the access he could provide, but the text does not give a full account of their communications or any explicit agreement between them.

Loïc’s Reconstruction of Roger’s Role

Years later, Loïc tried to understand how Charles had gathered information about the D’Anjous and identified a possible accomplice within the family. He came to suspect that Roger was the relevant insider. From Régis D’Anjou’s notes and his own deductions, Loïc reconstructed a chain of events beginning after Régis’s visit to France: Charles had set his recovery effort in motion, and the affair proceeded toward the events of September 11 through Roger’s betrayal.

This is Loïc’s retrospective account, assembled from incomplete records rather than from a witnessed exchange between Charles and Roger. Régis’s papers did not name Charles, because Régis had never learned who was behind the operation. Loïc inferred that Charles may have wanted Régis eliminated before he could discover the aristocrat’s identity. The proposed connection makes Roger a crucial link between an overseas plan and the family’s private world, but the novel presents the chain as a reconstruction, not as a fully documented conspiracy agreement.

Suspicion Surrounding Régis’s Death

The possibility that Roger’s cooperation extended to Régis’s sudden death remains a question rather than an established fact. Loïc considered whether Charles might have arranged for Régis to be poisoned because the older man knew about Victor Bourdieu and the Pollux cameo and could obstruct the recovery. He also wondered whether Roger might have put a toxic powder in Régis’s drink when he invited him to have refreshments at a café.

Loïc judged it more plausible that Charles would have hired a more practiced operative to administer poison, perhaps with Roger’s cooperation that was partial or not fully conscious. This distinction matters: Roger’s suspected betrayal in the cameo affair does not prove that he killed Régis or knowingly helped to do so. The account preserves several possible degrees of involvement, from access and information to complicity in a murder plot, without converting Loïc’s suspicions into certainty.

A Relationship Defined by Access and Uncertainty

The connection between Charles and Roger is not depicted as an open alliance of equals. It is a clandestine, instrumental relationship inferred from Charles’s search for a family foothold and Loïc’s later identification of Roger as the likely insider. Charles’s network treated personal and family connections as routes to a guarded object; Roger’s significance arose from his possible ability to make that boundary permeable.

The relationship consequently remains asymmetrical and partly unseen. Charles directs the broader recovery effort, while Roger appears in the evidence as a suspected point of access whose exact commitments are unclear. Loïc’s use of the idea of betrayal gives the connection its moral weight, but the unresolved questions about recruitment, knowledge, and Régis’s death keep it from becoming a simple account of a proven partnership.