Georges Moves the Founder's Cameo to Quebec

Georges Moves the Founder's Cameo to Quebec is the 1964 removal of the Camée du Fondateur from the family safe in Touladi to Québec City. The transfer was more than a change of custody: it reopened the artifact’s uncertain history, brought a hidden document to light, and sharpened Loïc’s sense that the D’Anjou family was leaving him behind.

Background: A Difficult Object to Identify

The Camée du Fondateur had long presented Régis with a historical puzzle. A scrape across its surface obscured the engraved figure, leaving open whether it represented a mythological being or a real person. Under a magnifying glass, however, details of possible mythological attributes, clothing, and style offered clues. Régis studied lapidary engraving and consulted European experts while concealing that he was investigating a family heirloom. He concluded that the Italian-made cameo dated at least to the eighteenth century, perhaps the seventeenth, and that its figure represented one of the mythological twins Castor and Pollux. He reasoned that it must once have belonged to a pair.

A catalogue Régis consulted at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in the 1960s recorded a pair of Castor and Pollux cameos in the collection of the Duke of Orléans, later Regent. Their subsequent history remained uncertain: the record did not establish whether they entered the royal collection, and the inventory made during the Revolution did not list them. The object Georges removed from the safe therefore carried an unresolved provenance as well as family significance.

The 1964 Transfer and Loïc’s Reaction

The removal followed Guillaume’s death. At his funeral, limousines belonging to Brunswick executives, Cadillacs belonging to the Bolduc brothers-in-law, and the D’Anjou family’s fine sedans formed an imposing procession for the last heir of Le Fondateur in Touladi. Régis could not attend because he was in California for a government commission’s conference on educational reform in Québec. Loïc knew him then only by reputation, as a celebrated former religious with standing in intellectual circles.

Guillaume had barely been buried when Georges took the Camée du Fondateur from the safe and brought it to Québec City. Loïc objected not to the idea of moving the heirloom, but to the timing and manner: to him, Georges’s haste was an impudent, disrespectful act toward Guillaume’s still-fresh remains. He experienced it as contempt. No one gave him a say in the decision; in the eyes of the family, his youth and the fact that he did not bear the D’Anjou name made him negligible.

The transfer revived an earlier plan. In 1951, after a heart attack left Guillaume near death, Jean D’Anjou had obtained Guillaume’s assent to move the cameo to Québec City and was preparing to collect it. Guillaume’s recovery and discharge from hospital ended that plan. In 1964, Georges carried it out after Guillaume was no longer there to protect the heirloom’s place in Touladi.

The Hidden Record and the Search for Origins

While taking the cameo from the safe, Georges found a folded, old paper concealed at the bottom. It was an extract of a United States birth record, apparently hidden well enough that Guillaume had not seen it. Georges kept the discovery to himself. The document later proved valuable to Régis’s investigation into the origins of Le Fondateur.

Régis’s subsequent research joined this birth record to a separate clue: a damaged manuscript account of a living infant found near Saint Louis in 1842, in the arms of a young woman who had frozen to death beneath the snow. The account said that a silk purse containing a finely made cameo had been pinned to the baby’s swaddling clothes. A baptismal record associated Le Fondateur with Florissant, Missouri, near Saint Louis. These clues placed the cameo in the story of the Founder’s origins from the beginning of his life, even as the transfer itself had been prompted by the need to remove it from Touladi.

A Family Rupture, Not a Final Authentication

For Loïc, the removal compounded the loss of Guillaume, the adoptive father and maternal uncle who had carefully detached him from his dead mother and guarded his childhood. With Guillaume gone, Loïc felt that a large part of his life was closing; Touladi seemed to recede, and his connection to the D’Anjou family weakened alongside Guillaume’s protection against the Bolducs’ claims. The death of his grandmother Élisabeth two years earlier had already diminished that world. The cameo’s departure made the change tangible and signaled the decline of the Founder’s family in Touladi.

The later history of the cameo also cautions against treating its movement as proof of authenticity. In 2003, Charles de Castelmont examined photographs of a cameo bearing what appeared to be the old abrasion, but concluded that the mark had been recently imitated. The images suggested that both he and the D’Anjous had received the same counterfeit from New York; they did not resolve whether the object preserved by Le Fondateur had been the genuine Castor cameo. The transfer thus carried the heirloom out of Touladi and released a crucial document from the safe, but it did not settle the artifact’s full history.