Laurette's Death and Funeral

Laurette’s death from advanced cancer ends the adoptive family life that had sheltered Loïc in Touladi. She had been more than his sister: after his mother died in childbirth, Laurette was the first to care for and gather him in. Her illness therefore removes both a beloved family member and one of the people most closely bound to his earliest survival. The quiet funeral, attended by only a handful of elderly friends, makes her personal loss inseparable from the disappearance of the D’Anjou family from the village.

Diagnosis and the Hospital Visit

The news reaches Loïc by telephone at about seven in the evening, just as he and Brigitte are preparing to go to a restaurant. A cousin from Touladi tells him that Laurette has become unwell, been taken to hospital, and received a diagnosis of advanced cancer. The call abruptly changes the evening’s course and sends Loïc back toward the village and the family history he had left behind.

When he enters Laurette’s hospital room, he is struck by how much the disease has altered her. He had always known her as round-faced and stout; now she is wasted and shrunken at the far end of the bed. She recognizes his voice, turns toward him, and greets him with a smile of joy. Because her sight has deteriorated, her reddish albino eyes seem to search around his head before settling on his face, as if she were trying to read his expression and understand what the illness had in store for her.

Her pallor, added to the white hair she has always had because of albinism, makes Loïc feel that she is becoming transparent, already fading toward a realm of shadows. He has to close his eyes briefly to push away the startling impression. The doctor has not said plainly that she is about to die, but Loïc understands the prognosis. Laurette herself acknowledges that she has little time left. He takes her hand and offers the familiar reassurances people reach for in the face of death. Outwardly he denies the approaching loss; inwardly, he thinks of the promise those words cannot make: she will remain alive in him. His fear is not only of losing her, but of being left without the person who had helped keep darkness at bay. He holds back his tears beside her, then breaks down in violent sobs when he is alone in his car.

A Life of Care and Confinement

Laurette’s death recalls the scale of what she gave and the narrowness of the life available to her. Born with albinism, she had impaired vision that kept her from pursuing the education her intelligence and exceptional memory might otherwise have supported. She never married and devoted herself to her parents and family, eventually directing her maternal care toward Loïc, the child who came into the family after his mother’s death. He sees her as someone whose life of service deserves a memorial grander than any public tribute could provide.

Her world was largely Touladi. Travel made her ill, and her longest journey beyond the village was to Rivière-du-Loup in an ambulance. Television offered a substitute for travel: through it, she could see places she had never visited, including Paris, New York City, and Montreal, Quebec. Loïc’s wry reflection on this limited reach does not diminish her life; it sets her quiet, local devotion against a culture that prizes mobility, consumption, and display. The person who had rarely left the village had nevertheless become indispensable to the family’s memory and care.

The timing of her illness is later joined to another loss in Loïc’s mind. He discovers in his journal that the conception of the child he and Brigitte later abort took place on the same day, almost at the same hour, that Laurette was rushed to hospital. He recalls Brigitte at home that day, and the ordinary intimacy that preceded the conception, without being able to distinguish that encounter in memory from others. The life beginning in Brigitte and the cancerous growth advancing in Laurette become opposed forms of cell multiplication: one initiating a human life, the other killing the woman Loïc loves. The parallel does not resolve the events into a simple moral lesson; instead, it binds birth and death together in his troubled understanding of loss.

Death, Funeral, and the End of a Family

Less than a month after the hospital visit, Laurette dies, sooner than Loïc expected. He returns to Touladi to empty her apartment in the village’s public-housing building. The furniture and smallest household objects had silently witnessed her life; now she has had to leave them behind without warning, taken away by ambulance on a cold February morning. As he sorts her belongings and gives most of them to neighbors, his eyes fill with tears. The work of clearing the apartment makes bereavement physical: her life is being dispersed through the building while he tries to comprehend that she will not return.

Loïc thinks of the Gospel warning that what a person has may also be taken away. He has lost family and modest possessions, and what remains in Touladi—kin, friendships, and the village itself—is entangled with old disputes, jealousy, and gossip. Yet Laurette possessed riches that could not be cleared from an apartment: a remarkable memory that kept the births and deaths of Touladi alive, and a beautiful singing voice, gradually eroded and veiled by the cancer near the end of her life. Her virtues and limitations are presented together: she was devoted and intelligent, but restricted by poor eyesight, illness, and a life that rarely carried her beyond home.

Her coffin is placed in the cemetery charnel house until the ground thaws. The discreet ceremony takes place under a veiled sun, attended by a handful of elderly people who had remained friends with the last daughter of the late Guillaume D’Anjou. Relatives from Québec City, Quebec, do not attend, a failure that Loïc resents. Régis D’Anjou, away on a Senate mission in Australia, sends a large floral arrangement and a tribute that the priest reads from the pulpit. For Loïc, this public act of remembrance honors Laurette more fittingly than empty ceremony could.

With Laurette gone, Loïc’s adoptive family is entirely erased from Touladi. The family home no longer exists, and the portrait of Le Fondateur has been moved to Québec City, Quebec, to the judge’s residence. The funeral thus closes more than one life: it registers the disappearance of a family presence from the village and leaves Loïc with memory as one of the few remaining ways to keep that presence alive.