Laurence

Laurence is Loïc’s partner in love, research, and writing, accompanying him through the investigation of the Founder’s cameo and the losses that gather around it. Their relationship moves from a planned marriage and a Caribbean escape into a shared life shaped by discoveries, creative work, and repeated encounters with the cameo’s destructive history. Laurence is not only beside Loïc as events unfold: she asks her own questions about what they mean.

A shared life and an unfinished promise

In March 2003, Laurence and Loïc went to Cuba to escape the grey weather, staying at the Meliá Las Américas in Varadero in a room overlooking the beach. They had already decided to marry, and imagined their fortnight together as both a deepening of that decision and a foretaste of a honeymoon; they were also considering ceremonies in Quebec and France. The account establishes a commitment and shared plans, but does not say that the ceremonies had yet taken place.

One evening at the Cueva del Pirata, Loïc recognized his cousin Isabelle dancing with a young Cuban. Laurence was watching the dancers too, but knew little about Isabelle. Loïc hesitated to approach: he did not want to intrude on what might be Isabelle’s tropical romance or draw Laurence into an awkward family encounter. His hesitation places their relationship within the scene as a consideration shaping his choice, even while the encounter’s immediate focus remains Isabelle.

On their final evening in Varadero, Laurence put her arm under Loïc’s as they walked slowly along the beach. They moved in silence beside the waves, their holiday nearing its end beneath a sunset of purple, pastel, and gold. The narration sets this quiet closeness against the cascade of revelations that had advanced Loïc’s inquiry in only a few days. Their shared journey is described as making events come to them as if they were one person: intimacy here means not that they have identical roles, but that discoveries entering one life also alter the other’s.

An equal presence in the investigation

Laurence participates in the inquiry at home as well as abroad. While the two were working together in a library, Loïc found a book about Louis XVII and the use of DNA evidence to establish the dead child’s identity. He brought the discovery to her excitedly as a possible lead on the Founder’s ancestry. Laurence recognized the book’s subject and recalled that her father had told her about the announcement in Le Figaro, probably in 2000. Her recollection connects a new research possibility to information already present in her family’s knowledge; the exchange presents their investigation as collaborative, with Loïc finding a clue and Laurence supplying a relevant memory.

Her engagement is also evident in the questions she asks about the cameo’s religious and institutional associations. After the story turns to Aurelio’s passage from Freemasonry to Satanism, Laurence says that the connection between the two has unsettled her. She also questions whether the supposed initiate who revered Lucifer was truly a Freemason, then discloses that her own father belongs to the Masonic fraternity. The juxtaposition makes the subject personal without resolving it: Laurence identifies a troubling overlap and asks for discernment rather than treating the apparent connection as settled fact.

In 2015, when Rodrigo Lerbier arrived at the El Pelicano hotel in Cayo Largo, Laurence and Loïc were having breakfast together. Rodrigo asked to meet that evening about the cameo; when he later announced that he knew where it was, both Laurence and Loïc exclaimed in surprise. Her response places her directly within the investigation’s renewed suspense, not merely as someone later informed of its results.

Writing, family grief, and public scrutiny

At a funeral reception, Isabelle welcomed Laurence and Loïc after the deaths of her mother and father and the damaging media attention directed at her family. Despite her grief, Isabelle remembered that the couple had recently published a novel together. Their co-written book had received favorable reviews, particularly in France, where they were delighted to see it displayed among the featured titles at the Drugstore des Champs-Élysées. Critics praised its fantasy and originality, calling it a literary UFO. The episode establishes Laurence and Loïc as creative partners as well as romantic ones, and their public achievement stands in contrast to the family scandal and mourning surrounding the reception.

Laurence and Loïc also receive news of losses connected, in their minds, to the history of the cameo. Thierry, their young cousin from the Lot who had helped Loïc research the cameo and the Castelmonts, was killed with his companion in the Bataclan attack on November 13, 2015. The narrative says the news struck both of them like a stray bullet. It records Loïc’s later unease about the song playing during the attack and the possibility of a distant effect of the cursed stone, but does not assign that interpretation to Laurence. Keeping the distinction matters: the tragedy is shared, while the text specifically describes Loïc’s response to its possible supernatural significance.

Witness to catastrophe and change

When Notre-Dame caught fire in April 2019, Loïc had arrived in Paris the previous day and planned to join Laurence in the Lot the next day. From the apartment terrace he watched the smoke and flames, called her to warn her of the catastrophe, and then went down toward the cathedral before returning to the terrace. In the hours that followed, he spoke often by telephone with Laurence and her parents. Loïc interpreted the destruction as an image of a wider social devastation; the passage locates Laurence within their ongoing exchange, without claiming that she shared his precise interpretation.

Later, Laurence and Loïc were in the southwest of France, not far from Barzac but too distant to hear the fire engines, when the Castelmont estate burned. They had just arrived at Albignac to help Laurence’s parents rearrange rooms in the château, where her parents now intended to live permanently with domestic help; they had put their Paris apartment on the market because the city seemed increasingly unsafe to them. The next morning, news of the fire reached the couple at Albignac. Their presence near another catastrophe is therefore also part of a transition in family life: they were helping Laurence’s parents prepare a new home just as the Castelmont château was being consumed by fire.

Across these episodes, Laurence’s role is defined by participation rather than by a separate, fully narrated investigation of her own. She shares Loïc’s planned future, helps him think through evidence, brings family knowledge to the research, co-authors a novel with him, and receives the news and upheavals that reshape their life together. Her questioning about Freemasonry keeps uncertainty visible, while the recurring scenes of walking, working, and speaking by telephone show the practical forms their partnership takes amid events neither can control.