Georges D’Anjou—Isabelle D’Anjou

Georges D’Anjou and Isabelle D’Anjou are father and daughter, bound by a family life in which affection, secrets, and suspicion coexist. The disappearance of the D’Anjou cameo turns their closeness into a test of trust: Isabelle is implicated in her husband’s theft, while Georges, a father and former judge, senses that she is suffering for reasons she cannot confess. As the family’s crises deepen, his concern for her remains real but cannot undo the damage of concealed complicity or the later devastation of Lucille’s illness.

A Family Shaped by Hidden Histories

The household Georges and Isabelle inhabit belongs to a family whose past is marked by concealed origins and broken ties. At a family gathering, Marthe recounts that Le Fondateur had confided that he was adopted, knew nothing of his birth family, and feared a valuable stone from the United States. He had hidden it in his scapular and wanted to be buried with it. The disclosure makes the cameo more than a valuable heirloom: it is entangled with an ancestry the family has not fully understood.

That family history also contains an older rupture. Mathilde, one of Le Fondateur’s daughters, broke with him after he refused a caesarean section for their mother, who died in childbirth. Le Fondateur cursed and disowned Mathilde; she fled, while Marthe later became a missionary and learned in secret that her sister had been living in Cuba. These episodes do not explain Georges and Isabelle’s conduct, but they place their conflict within a lineage where family membership, silence, and painful knowledge have repeatedly pulled against one another.

The family’s later understanding of its own origins remains unsettled. A record about a baby found in the snow describes a rescued infant adopted by the D’Anjous and named Éloi, whose name appears to have shifted into Élie through an ambiguous baptismal entry. Elsewhere, a doctor tells Loïc that his mother had carried another fetus, which was stillborn. Such revelations make the family’s received account of kinship less secure, even as Georges and Isabelle face a more immediate secret inside their own household.

The Missing Cameo and the Accusation

On September 14, 2001, at the family home on Grande-Allée in Québec, Georges announces that the cameo has vanished from its bank box. He says he cannot determine exactly when it was substituted, but recounts that he transferred it to a new box the previous spring and that it had not yet been touched at that point. The family’s attention turns to Isabelle: her husband, Roger Bolduc, had secretly traveled to New York and disappeared after the September 11 attacks. His unexplained trip and absence make him a natural suspect, and leave the family wondering whether he took the cameo with him.

Georges says that he has already spoken at length with Isabelle and that she told him what she knew, while emphasizing that Roger concealed many of his dealings from her and from the rest of the family. Yet the public explanation does not clear her. When the discussion turns again to whether Roger could have taken the stone, the relatives look to Isabelle, who breaks down and protests that she knows nothing of the matter. Her mother draws her into an embrace as she collapses in tears.

Georges has a private reason to remain skeptical. He knows that, besides himself, Lucille is the only person who knows the bank-box combination. Because Lucille drinks heavily and speaks frequently with Isabelle, he suspects that she may have disclosed it while intoxicated. Isabelle has sworn that she does not know the combination and that her mother never told her, but Georges does not believe her assurance. The resulting suspicion is painful precisely because it is not yet an open accusation: he has a theory, but holds it back while his daughter appears to be under suspicion from the whole family.

Complicity, Concealment, and Concern

The truth is more damaging than Georges initially knows. Roger had persuaded Isabelle that the cameo could make them rich. She obtained the combination from Lucille by exploiting her mother’s drunkenness, enabling Roger to take the stone. The couple had celebrated Roger’s forty-second birthday with champagne at La Goéliche on Île d’Orléans, two days before his trip to New York, excited by the money they expected to make and imagining cruises and stays on tropical islands. In retrospect, Isabelle fears that Roger may have fled with the money to enjoy those prospects alone.

Roger had also concealed the scale of his finances. Though he had claimed that the 2000 dot-com crash had nearly ruined him, he had kept much of his wealth outside Canada while maintaining modest Québec accounts, apparently to mislead the tax authorities and perhaps Isabelle as well. The hidden money strengthens the family’s suspicion that he planned to disappear, but it does not release Isabelle from her part in obtaining the cameo. She knows that she assisted him, and cannot confess without admitting that she took the combination from Lucille under false pretenses. Her mother still believes she never gave it to her. Isabelle is thus trapped between revealing her complicity and enduring the family’s suspicion while preserving the lie.

Her distress worsens into self-destructive illness. Already prone to drinking, she drinks more heavily through the autumn of 2001, then turns to cocaine. In early 2002 she nearly dies of an overdose and is sent to rehabilitation. Georges understands that Roger’s disappearance alone cannot account for his daughter’s condition, but, as both father and judge, he does not know how to release her from the crime weighing on her. The case unsettles his own life as well: he is due to retire at the end of the year and hand the family law practice to Alain, yet the damage within his immediate family makes him question whether he is ready to leave the profession that has occupied his life.

Care, Decline, and Separation

The family’s strain later gathers around Lucille’s worsening Alzheimer’s disease. After she fails the driving test required to demonstrate that she remains fit to drive, she loses her licence and receives the diagnosis. Her confusion increases, and the anxiolytics prescribed to her interact harmfully with the alcohol she continues to drink secretly. Isabelle, who appears to have recovered from her depression, spends increasingly long periods in Cuba; she also begins to avoid the sight of her mother’s decline, considering a move away from the house after witnessing Lucille plead with Georges for a way to die.

At first Georges refuses to help Lucille end her life. She searches for the pistol he keeps locked in his office, and he angrily tells her that she cannot have it; even if she found the weapon, the ammunition is stored elsewhere. Her repeated pleas gradually wear down his resistance. By 2009–2010, his thinking has moved from an intrusive, almost unthinkable idea to a carefully considered project. He studies his mycology books and considers using the poisonous death angel mushroom, but learns that the initial poisoning would bring severe cramps, delirium, convulsions, vomiting, and diarrhea, followed by potentially prolonged suffering and irreversible organ damage. The method he had imagined as quiet and merciful would expose Lucille to a torment he is unsure he could bear to witness.

Georges’s deliberation does not become the cause or method of Lucille’s death. After Isabelle has again left for Cuba, Lucille wanders out of the house at night wearing a sheet over her nightclothes. In the December cold, she reaches the Plains of Abraham and is found dead there at daybreak. Her death leaves Georges and Isabelle on either side of a family catastrophe: he has watched his wife’s mind and body fail while struggling with the limits of care; Isabelle has withdrawn from that decline, just as she remains marked by her concealed role in the cameo theft. Their relationship is not resolved by confession or reconciliation. Instead, the novel presents it as a bond in which paternal concern persists, but cannot erase the secrets and losses that have divided the family.