The burning of the Founder’s House destroys more than the ancestral home where Loïc spent his childhood: it removes a material landmark of the D’Anjou family’s presence in Touladi. The family suspected that Romuald Bolduc had set the fire, but his dominance in the village made proof difficult to obtain; the aftermath then compelled Loïc to sell the ruins and land to the very man they suspected.

Background: An Empty Ancestral Home

After Marie-Louise’s death and Laurette’s move, the Founder’s House stood deserted and badly deteriorated. Romuald Bolduc wanted to buy it from the D’Anjous, but they stubbornly refused. The old house thus became a point of conflict between a family holding on to its inherited place and a local power steadily acquiring Touladi’s houses and properties.

The Fire and Its Suspected Cause

A fire ravaged the house from end to end. The D’Anjous were furious and became nearly certain that the blaze had been deliberate, suspecting Romuald Bolduc as the culprit. Their suspicion was sharpened by the pattern of his property acquisitions, but conviction could not substitute for evidence. In a small community so thoroughly dominated by Bolduc, the family saw no clear way to gather the proof needed to accuse him.

Sale, Pressure, and a Rejected Memorial

With no other buyer coming forward, Loïc was left to sell the ruins and the land to his wealthy uncle, Romuald Bolduc. The sale was deeply repugnant to him. The D’Anjous had kept the property for a time and did not intend to rebuild in the near future, but pressure from the municipality—whose mayor was Bolduc—forced their hand.

A memorial stele might have preserved a public trace of the house. The D’Anjous agreed to sell the land on condition that the municipality erect a monument in memory of the village’s founder. Romuald Bolduc firmly opposed the proposal and managed to have it set aside shortly before his death. The land therefore passed without the commemoration the family had sought, extending the loss from the destruction of the building to the loss of an intended memorial.

Loïc’s Return and the Meaning of the Ruins

On the rain-slick highway back to Montréal, Loïc drove mechanically in the solitude of his car. He mourned not only the loss of his family but the disappearance of the people who had witnessed his childhood and of the places that had anchored its memory. The burned house completed, in his mind, a chain of losses associated with Guillaume and his family: the Founder’s work, as a home for his descendants, had endured for barely a century.

The episode gives physical form to Loïc’s sense that the D’Anjou roots in Touladi had been fragile and shallow. Houses and objects, he reflects, disappear quickly, while few monuments or remnants remain to mark a community’s existence. The house’s destruction and the thwarted stele thus converge as a local family loss and a broader meditation on how easily the traces of small communities can vanish.