Founder’s House is the D’Anjou family’s ancestral home in Touladi, where private family history and the village’s changing life converge. For Loïc, it is at once a childhood home, the setting of uncanny experiences linked to the hidden cameo, and the place where his adoptive father Guillaume lies in state. Its later abandonment and destruction erase not only a residence but also a physical point of reference for the family’s brief history in the village.

Ancestral Home and Haunted Interior

For a time, the house embodied the D’Anjou family’s standing in Touladi. The family’s connection to Le Fondateur was present in its grand portrait, which dominated the interior and remained part of Loïc’s most unsettling childhood memories. As he rode his tricycle through the house at night, the portrait frightened him; years later, at Guillaume’s wake, the coffin was placed in the salon beneath that same imposing image. The house thus bound the family’s ancestral claim to the living presence of its dead, with the portrait watching over both.

The house also figured in Loïc’s early perception of forces that he could not explain. During a period of fantastic episodes in childhood, he discerned a sinister radiance that seemed to envelop the village, especially the house, in enormous black tentacles. He traced its source to the house and understood it as the diabolical magnetism of the cameo, which, in his perception, no safe could contain. The malign field appeared to mark certain places more strongly than others: it crossed the portrait of Le Fondateur and pointed toward the cellar and the foundations, where stillborn children lay. Loïc imagined echoes rising from the cavernous space and vermin working at the fabric of the visible and invisible worlds. The cellar’s physical depth became inseparable from a buried family history and an occult threat.

That childhood knowledge did not remain accessible to him. It sank into his subconscious, and the magical, surreal world eventually vanished into locked regions of memory. The narrative leaves open whether its disappearance coincided with television’s arrival, Loïc’s departure for school, his growing distance from the village, Guillaume’s death, or the cameo’s removal to Québec. The house is therefore not just the setting of a supernatural episode: it is one of the places through which Loïc later tries to recover the hidden reverse side of his own past.

The First Television in Touladi

On November 21, 1954, Founder’s House briefly became the village’s foremost gathering place for a different reason. Guillaume wanted the D’Anjou home to be the first in Touladi to receive television, and prepared for the installation with an exceptionally tall mast beside the house. Its many-branched antenna was aimed due north to catch signals from Rimouski across the hills. Inside, he placed the large, varnished television set in a clear corner of the salon, to the right of Le Fondateur’s portrait. The machine’s glass screen, described as a great open eye, brought a new kind of spectacle into the ancestral interior.

Loïc remembered waiting with his cousins for the screen to flicker into life. At least a hundred people came, many arriving hours early; those who could not fit inside gathered at the windows outside. When the broadcast began, the crowd first saw the image of an Indigenous person, then watched as the screen filled with moving images from Montréal and elsewhere. Faces, voices, gestures, and scenes travelled across vast distances into this settlement in the back country. The television’s arrival transformed the house from a symbol of inherited local status into a threshold through which a distant, rapidly changing world entered Touladi. Its Sunday gathering also marked a change in communal habit: the day would no longer be reserved solely for the Lord.

Guillaume’s Wake and the House as Family Memory

Guillaume’s body remained in the salon for three days in the autumn of 1964. Family members, neighbours, and visitors came to kneel at a prie-dieu beside the coffin and offer condolences to his widow, Marie-Louise D’Anjou, and their daughter Laurette. The women of the family and neighbourhood spoke quietly around the bereaved women; the men stood nearby, silent and awkward. The salon that had hosted Touladi’s first television audience now held the community around its dead.

Loïc withdrew to a corner from which he could look at Guillaume’s still face. Before his adoptive father’s body, he thought about the questions he had never found the right moment to ask: why he had been brought into this family at birth, and why he had grown up among D’Anjous haunted by a jewel kept in this very house. The cameo had been present in his childhood precisely through its concealment, hidden from view yet powerful in his imagination. Loïc did not yet understand how much of his future would be occupied by the stone. The house gave these questions a concrete setting: it held both the person he had lost and the object whose history seemed to run through his life.

Abandonment, Fire, and Forced Sale

After Marie-Louise’s death and Laurette’s move away, the house stood empty and badly deteriorated. Romuald Bolduc wanted to buy it, but the D’Anjous stubbornly refused. Then a fire ravaged the old ancestral residence. The D’Anjous were convinced that the blaze was criminal and suspected Romuald, who was systematically acquiring houses and properties across Touladi. Yet in a small community where he exercised such dominance, they saw little prospect of assembling the proof needed against him.

Loïc was eventually given the task of selling the ruins and land to his wealthy uncle, a responsibility he accepted with profound reluctance. The family had held onto the property for a time, but pressure from the municipality—whose mayor was Romuald Bolduc—helped force a sale because the D’Anjous did not plan to rebuild in the near future. They agreed to sell on the condition that the municipality erect a memorial stele at the site to honour the village’s founder. Romuald opposed the proposal outright and succeeded in having it discarded shortly before his death. The sale therefore removed the house without replacing it with the public monument the family had sought; the site itself would not preserve the founder’s memory in the form they had requested.

Loss, Return, and Significance

Driving back toward Montréal after the loss of his family’s remaining connections to Touladi, Loïc felt that witnesses to his childhood and its landmarks had disappeared together. He understood the destruction of Founder’s House as the culmination of a family curse, but also as part of a wider erasure: the D’Anjou presence in Touladi had lasted barely a century, and houses and objects could vanish with little lasting trace. His grief over this particular home opens onto a reflection on the vulnerability of small nations and the way their histories can be scattered when few monuments survive to mark their passage.

That night, the house returned in a dream. Loïc found himself there, speaking with Guillaume, whose pale blue eyes looked at him intensely before his body thinned, disintegrated like a sheet of paper, and drifted through the rooms. Loïc followed him into a space that became an amphitheatre, where an indistinct audience waited for him to make a declaration he could not voice. The dream does not restore the house as a secure home; it turns it into a passage from intimate memory toward an unresolved public demand. In the novel, Founder’s House gathers family inheritance, buried secrets, technological change, death, and historical disappearance into one place—and its destruction leaves Loïc with memories, not a surviving landmark.