France

France is both a place of investigation and the historical ground on which the D’Anjou family’s cameo mystery takes on an aristocratic past. In Paris, Régis D’Anjou identifies the family heirloom as one of a lost pair; later, Loïc’s inquiries connect the stones to the Castelmonts and to upheavals of the French Revolution. The country’s archives, collections, and family histories turn an obscure, damaged object into evidence of a story spanning inheritance, exile, and uncertain identity.

Research and Recognition in Paris

Régis’s long inquiry into the cameo had begun decades before his decisive visit to Paris. Since the 1940s, he had tried to establish where the stone came from and how it reached the Founder. A scrape across its surface obscured the carved figure, leaving its identity uncertain. Close examination under a magnifying glass nevertheless brought out fragments of mythological attributes, traces of clothing, and stylistic clues. Régis studied lapidary work systematically, consulting European experts while presenting himself as an enthusiast and withholding the family connection. Their assessments led him to place the stone’s manufacture in Italy, in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, and to suspect that its figure represented either Castor or Pollux—and that the carving therefore belonged to a pair.

In the 1960s, Régis pursued the question in the National Library of France. An obscure eighteenth-century catalogue recorded a pair of cameos depicting Castor and Pollux in the collection of the Duke of Orléans, who became Regent after Louis XIV’s death in 1715. The catalogue did not establish what happened to the jewels afterward. They were absent from the inventory of royal possessions made during the Revolution after the arrest and execution of Louis XVI. Régis considered whether the king’s brothers might have carried them out of France, or whether the stones had passed to another royal or aristocratic family in exile, but the records he had found did not settle their later route.

The investigation reopened in May 1996, when Régis travelled to Paris for a meeting of Francophone parliamentarians. There he met Victor Bourdieu, a French senator and former industrialist whose conversation with him moved from steam locomotives and the philosophy of machines to engraved stones. Bourdieu invited Régis to an unpublicized Christie’s exhibition accompanying an auction of historic jewels. It included objects from private collections and museums, as well as photographs of cameos whose whereabouts had been lost. Régis recognized a pictured stone that looked like a twin to the family heirloom. Beside it was an older engraving of the Founder’s cameo, shown without its scrape. Seeing the images together revived his memory of examining the stone after it had been exhumed from his ancestor’s grave.

The exhibition clarified the pair’s design and its documented history. Each figure stood facing the other, holding a horse by the bridle and a spear, and wearing an oval cap topped by a star. The catalogue described the stones as five-layer onyx with a dark upper layer. It also confirmed that the pair had belonged to the Regent’s collection before being separated after the Revolution. One cameo had entered the private collection of an unnamed family from the old French aristocracy; the other, identified as Castor, had disappeared, probably amid revolutionary unrest. Régis had established the heirloom’s provenance more firmly, but the exhibition did not reveal the missing stone’s full path or prove where it had gone.

Revolutionary France and the Castelmont History

Loïc’s later research placed the cameo’s history within the violence and dislocation of revolutionary France. In reconstructing events from newspapers, memoirs, and correspondence, he pictured Paris on 21 May 1794, when the Countess of Castelmont was guillotined at the Place des Victoires. Her execution followed the massacre of her husband, children, and a younger son at Château des Castelmont earlier that year. The twin boys, Louis and Charles, had escaped the massacre while in Paris with their mother. Their survival did not reconcile them: accounts Loïc found described a bitter hostility between the brothers, which even their parents had struggled to contain.

The cameos passed into the twins’ keeping in the shadow of that danger. Louis XVI, a childhood friend of Delphine de Castelmont, had given her the second stone, Castor, shortly before his attempted flight from revolutionary France. When Delphine feared arrest, she gave one cameo to each son and made them promise never to part with them, sewing the jewels into their clothes. Louis received Castor; Charles received Pollux. The stones thus became more than paired antiquities: within Loïc’s reconstruction, they were family tokens entrusted to two fleeing brothers whose lives and claims would soon diverge.

The brothers’ escape carried the pair’s history beyond France. Louis fled to England and then made his way to America, eventually settling near Carthage, Missouri. Charles reached the émigrés in Germany and later returned to France during the Bourbon Restoration, where he recovered the family’s landed properties while Louis was presumed to be dead. When Louis returned to claim his title and inheritance, his claim rested partly on having been born a few minutes before his twin. Charles rejected his identity and, according to the records Loïc assembled, repeatedly tried to have him killed. Louis eventually returned to America, but continued pursuing his inheritance through legal and political channels. The struggle makes France a center of both the Castelmont estate and a contested family history that extended across the Atlantic.

Later Journeys and Historical Connections

France also frames Loïc’s inquiry in the present. While following the Castelmont line, he explored the history of the Chaussegros de Léry family, members of the governing elite of New France who returned to France after the colony’s capitulation. Three sons of Gaspard-Joseph Chaussegros de Léry pursued careers there under Louis XVI and during the Revolution and Empire; one, Louis-René, served among the king’s bodyguards at Versailles. Loïc wondered whether he might have encountered the Castelmonts at court. The evidence raised a possible connection rather than establishing one, keeping the investigation’s distinction between documented history and conjecture visible.

In June 2003, France became a setting for Loïc and Laurence d’Albignac’s honeymoon and for a new stage in their collaboration. After their discreet wedding, they travelled to the Lot, where Laurence’s parents hosted a reception at Château d’Albignac and the couple planned to stay for three weeks. The following day, Hervé d’Albignac drew his new son-in-law into a conversation about the D’Anjou cameo. His familiarity with the aristocratic families of southwestern France, including the Castelmonts, offered Loïc another source of historical knowledge. He described Château des Castelmont as a Pomerol vineyard inherited by Charles, the eldest of four children, from a father who had restored the estate after the war. Over a game of billiards and later in a small adjoining salon, family history and the object’s uncertain provenance became part of the couple’s shared investigation.

Narrative Significance

Across these episodes, France is not a single, stable repository that resolves the mystery. Its catalogues and collections establish a former pairing and an aristocratic provenance, while the Revolution explains how family possessions, titles, and relatives could be separated. Yet crucial gaps remain: the exhibition does not identify the family that held Pollux, and the records Loïc consults support a historical reconstruction without answering every question about the stones’ passage between owners. France therefore gives the cameo a traceable past while preserving the uncertainty at the heart of its story. Its archives make a route legible in fragments; its revolutionary history supplies the rupture that turns those fragments into an inheritance dispute and a transatlantic family mystery.