Guillaume D’Anjou's Death and Funeral

Guillaume D’Anjou’s funeral in autumn 1964 is both a public tribute to a widely loved man and a private rupture in Loïc’s life. The gathering displays the reach of Guillaume’s friendships beyond Touladi, while his death and the removal of the family cameo from the house signal the closing of an era for the D’Anjous there.

A funeral drawing mourners from afar

The day after the wake, limousines carrying Brunswick Company executives joined the Cadillacs of the Bolduc in-laws and the fine sedans of the D’Anjous from Québec. Together they formed an imposing funeral procession for the last heir of the Founder in Touladi. Régis D’Anjou could not attend: he was in California at a conference on cybernetics, sent by the government commission charged with reforming education in Québec.

The turnout made plain to Loïc how far Guillaume’s reputation and affection extended. People had come from hundreds of kilometres away to pay their respects. Two limousines, one grey and one black, had already brought figures Loïc had not seen for about a decade, men who had seemed like almost Hollywood heroes in his childhood. The Brunswick Company executives had travelled from Campbellton, Bathurst, and Saint John, remembering Guillaume as a trusted guide on many hunting and fishing expeditions.

Guillaume and Larry Durrell

Among the returning visitors, Loïc remembered Larry Durrell most vividly. A former superintendent at Cabano, Larry spoke fluent French with a distinctive accent and had been one of the closest and warmest of Guillaume’s companions. Their bond had grown through innumerable forest expeditions and acts of mutual service. Larry sometimes drank heavily on hunting trips, and Guillaume would look after him, bringing him home from deep in the woods; when Larry’s children were with him in the forest, Guillaume sometimes drove them home or took the wheel when their father was too drunk to drive.

The funeral therefore honours more than Guillaume’s standing in Touladi. The mourners’ presence recalls a form of practical loyalty built over years: Guillaume’s care for a friend whose wartime experiences continued to trouble him, and the friendship that endured through those difficult episodes.

Loïc’s loss and the end of an era

At the wake, Loïc had withdrawn to contemplate Guillaume’s body and the words he had never found the chance to say. He understood Guillaume as the uncle who had gently separated him from his dead mother in childhood and watched over him with devotion. The funeral fixed that intimate loss within a larger family history: with Guillaume gone, Loïc felt that a great stretch of his past was closing, and that Touladi itself was receding from him.

Soon after the burial, Georges D’Anjou removed the family cameo from the house and took it to Québec. Loïc objected not to the need to protect the jewel but to the timing and manner of the removal, which he experienced as disrespectful to Guillaume’s still-fresh memory. He also felt excluded from the decision, regarded as insignificant because he was young and did not bear the D’Anjou name. The death, the transfer of the cameo, and the earlier death of his grandmother Elisabeth together marked a break in Loïc’s ties to both Touladi and the D’Anjou family, and foreshadowed the family’s decline in the village.