La pierre du Diable

La pierre du Diable is the fearful name given to the D’Anjou cameo by La Grébiche, who insists that the object should be returned to the grave from which it was taken. The phrase follows the stone from a public warning in Touladi into Loïc’s childhood perceptions, family history, and later reflections on catastrophe. Its force lies partly in what remains uncertain: it may name a supernatural influence, a family curse, or the way fear and memory gather around an object whose history is only partially known.

The Name and the Warning

In November 1944, after the cameo has been removed from a tomb, La Grébiche pursues Guillaume D’Anjou toward his home, demanding that he rebury it. She warns that robbing the dead brings misfortune; when Guillaume puts the cameo in his pocket and continues home, a crowd forms along the route, and people try to stop him. La Grébiche remains outside the house and cries that the stone is the Devil’s, repeating her warning of disaster. The name is thus attached to a concrete act: the removal of a burial object and the refusal to return it.

A few days later, the warning becomes more elaborate. While the D’Anjou family examine their mysterious jewel indoors, La Grébiche’s cries sound outside like sinister howling. She predicts misfortune for Guillaume, his family, and his descendants, extending the threat to the end of time; Donat Côté repeats her words in a distressed echo. The contrast between the family’s examination of the object and the crowd listening outside makes the naming a public contest over how the cameo should be understood. To the family it is a mysterious jewel; to La Grébiche it is a source of inherited danger that must be put back in the earth.

An Inherited Image in Loïc’s Memory

The phrase reaches Loïc not only as a warning but as a childhood recollection. He is both a Bolduc through his father and a D’Anjou through his mother, and he grows up in the house of Le Fondateur, where the cameo has an occult magnetism for him from an early age. What he has once been told returns in memory as a cry from the lost depths of childhood: the Devil’s stone. The wording binds the family object to Loïc’s own unusual sense that events vibrate beneath ordinary appearances, a faculty he believes lets him sometimes foresee or enter those hidden patterns.

That childhood impression later acquires a more specific shape. During a period of fantastic experiences, Loïc perceives a sinister radiance extending from Le Fondateur’s house and seeming to enfold the village, especially his own home, in enormous black tentacles. He understands the ray as the cameo’s diabolical magnetism, something no safe-deposit box could contain. In his vision, its influence singles out the foundations and cellar, where stillborn children lie; the hidden space is filled with cavernous echoes and vermin, while forces both visible and invisible seem to erode what appears solid. The scene gives the old name an imaginative geography: the stone’s threat is not limited to the jewel itself but appears to reach into buried family history and the foundations of the house.

Yet Loïc’s knowledge of this radiance does not remain continuously available to him. It sinks into his subconscious, and the magical or surreal experiences eventually disappear into locked regions of memory. He wonders whether their end coincided with television’s arrival, his departure for school, his removal from the village, Guillaume’s death, or the cameo’s move to Québec. The text leaves the timing unresolved. In that uncertainty, La pierre du Diable names not only a feared object but also a memory whose source and persistence Loïc cannot fully establish.

Curse, History, and Doubt

The name returns in Loïc’s thoughts after the September 11 attacks, when he imagines that his cousin may have jumped from the North Tower shortly after the airplane struck. He wonders whether his cousin might have thought of the cameo’s curse during the fall, or even hoped that the stone could save him. Loïc recognizes the bitter contradiction in imagining salvation through a stone associated with the Devil. Later, in an awake-dream, he thinks he sees it shining among the wreckage and asks himself whether it might have survived the explosions at the World Trade Center complex. These are not confirmations that the cameo was present or that it possessed protective power; they show how the old warning has become entangled with Loïc’s effort to imagine his cousin’s fate.

The curse also shades Loïc’s understanding of political division. On the night of the 1976 Québec election, while he waits in the Langevin Building for the result, he feels caught between his Québec identity and his loyalty to Régis D’Anjou, who has made him a close collaborator. The same emotional division recalls the earlier conflict between his fathers, which had been preceded by an earthquake. Loïc wonders whether this recurrence is a form of fatality and whether it is linked to the cursed stone. The question does not establish a causal connection; it shows how the family’s language of inherited misfortune offers him a pattern through which to read otherwise distinct ruptures.

The Disputed Meaning of the Stone

Régis’s papers make the curse more than a childhood superstition for Loïc, without settling whether it is true. In a handwritten entry dated July 5, 1999, Régis laments a fatality that has weighed on the family for generations, says that it has brought many misfortunes and may bring more, and warns that the stone provokes dangerous covetousness. He believes it should have remained buried with his grandfather. The entry links the danger not only to supernatural force but also to human desire for the object. Its date and Régis’s death soon afterward give the note particular weight when Loïc reads it amid the aftermath of New York.

Elsewhere, Loïc directly asks Régis whether the cameo is the Devil’s stone, as La Grébiche claimed. Régis answers that no one can know for sure, adding that the old woman saw the devil everywhere. But his dismissal is not complete: he also credits La Grébiche with shrewdness, unusual vitality, verbal force, and a keen understanding of people and things. The exchange keeps competing interpretations in play. The warning may be the language of an eccentric village figure, an expression of folk wisdom about dangerous desire, or testimony to a force the rational observer cannot verify.

Across these recurrences, the name gathers meanings without resolving them. It recalls the act of disturbing the dead, the family’s buried losses, Loïc’s uncanny childhood perceptions, Régis’s fear of the cameo’s covetous power, and the disasters through which Loïc searches for patterns. The stone remains at once a material heirloom and an uncertain explanation: feared, remembered, and repeatedly invoked, but never conclusively shown to cause the misfortunes attached to it.