Dieppe Raid

The Dieppe Raid enters the novel through the death of Élias D’Anjou and the letter he sent shortly before he was killed. The raid becomes both a family loss and an early point in the story’s chain of associations between the D’Anjou family, a mysterious jewel, and the sense that misfortune is being passed down through generations.

Élias D’Anjou’s Death

Élias, Guillaume D’Anjou’s eldest son, was killed by German gunfire during the disastrous raid. The novel gives no account of the military operation itself; instead, its significance is measured through the loss that remained with his family. When Guillaume later confronted another cluster of calamities, Élias’s death returned to him as part of a succession of griefs.

The Final Letter

In a letter dated August 18, 1942, on the eve of his death, Élias described a dream about his grandfather Égide D’Anjou, whom he had never known. In the dream, Égide beckoned him toward an object that seemed to give off an ominous purple-and-black radiance. The account ties the coming death at Dieppe to the jewel’s troubling presence without establishing a literal cause between them.

Memory and Family Misfortune

Two years after the raid, as a storm and the uncanny exhumation of a skeleton bearing a mysterious jewel unsettled the village, Guillaume remembered Élias’s letter. He interpreted the storm and the family’s repeated losses as possible signs of a curse; the memory of his son’s dream gave that suspicion a personal and unsettling precedent. The raid thus reverberates beyond the battlefield: in Guillaume’s recollection, the letter makes a private wartime loss part of the family’s contested story about the jewel and its misfortune.