Laurette’s death brings an intimate loss and a family ending together: Loïc loses the adoptive sister who had cared for him since infancy, while the D’Anjou household disappears from Touladi. Her last illness is marked by a brief, lucid recognition of what is coming; her funeral is small, and the family home that held Loïc’s childhood is already gone. The sequence turns a death in one family into the visible close of its place in the village.

Identity and the bond with Loïc

Laurette is Loïc’s adoptive sister and, in practice, one of his first and most enduring caregivers. After his mother, Marie-Ange, died in childbirth, the frail newborn was taken to the family home so he could receive better care. Laurette carried him there; Guillaume gathered the household and urged them to look after Marie-Ange’s child. The infant was baptized soon afterward, and Guillaume and Marie-Louise became his adoptive parents. The scene establishes the care that would define Laurette’s later place in Loïc’s life: she had welcomed and tended him when he was most vulnerable.

That history returns to Loïc when he visits her in hospital. He finds her greatly diminished by illness, thinner than the round-faced sister he has always known. Her sight has also deteriorated: she follows his voice with her eyes, which seem to search the space around him before settling on his face. The encounter makes their bond palpable without turning it into a speech. Laurette recognizes his voice and smiles with joy; Loïc takes her hand and tries to comfort her, even as he privately understands that she is near death.

Illness and death

Laurette tells Loïc that she knows she does not have long. He answers with words meant to ward off the truth, while inwardly promising that she will never die in him. His thoughts reveal the depth of his dependence on her: without Laurette, he fears the dark and wonders who will bring light against it. When he leaves the hospital and is alone in his car, his composure gives way to violent sobbing.

She dies less than a month after their visit, sooner than Loïc expected. He returns to Touladi to clear her apartment in the village’s HLM. The furniture and small belongings are the mute witnesses of the life she has had to leave behind, and sorting them for distribution to neighbours makes the loss tangible. Loïc remembers that Laurette was the first to care for and gather him after his mother’s death. Her death is therefore not only the loss of a sister: it removes a person who had embodied maternal care throughout his life.

A life of devoted care

As Loïc sorts Laurette’s possessions, he measures what has been taken from him against what remains. He has lost much of his family, and sees little left beyond the village, relatives, and a few friendships, themselves entangled with old disputes, jealousy, and gossip. Yet he remembers Laurette’s exceptional memory, which kept Touladi’s births, deaths, and anniversaries alive; her beautiful voice, gradually roughened and veiled by cancer; and her intelligence, which her impaired sight had prevented her from developing through further study.

The narrative also gives the limits and particularity of her life. Born with albinism, she remained visually impaired; she was not physically celebrated, never married, and devoted herself to her parents and family, especially Loïc, the late-born child on whom she placed her maternal care. She rarely left Touladi. Even a short car ride made her ill, and her farthest journey was to Rivière-du-Loup in an ambulance. Her travels beyond the village came through television, rather than visits to Paris, New York City, or Montreal. Loïc’s inventory of these circumstances does not reduce her to what she missed: it emphasizes the distance between the modest reach of her life and the breadth of the care she gave.

Funeral and the end of the household

Laurette’s coffin is placed in the cemetery charnel house until the ground thaws. The discreet ceremony takes place beneath a veiled sun, attended by a handful of elderly friends who had stayed close to the last daughter of Guillaume. Relatives from Québec City do not come, a refusal of presence that Loïc does not conceal his displeasure about. Régis, away on a Senate mission in Australia, sends a large wreath and a tribute, which the priest reads from the pulpit. For Loïc, that public act of remembrance stands in for the absent family and gives Laurette a recognition the small gathering cannot provide by its numbers alone.

With Laurette’s death, Loïc’s adoptive family is, in the narrative’s stark formulation, erased from Touladi. The family home no longer exists, and the portrait of Le Fondateur has been moved to Québec City, to the judge’s home. The loss of a person and the disappearance of the household thus coincide: there is no longer a D’Anjou home in the village to which Loïc can return as a member of the family that raised him.

The fate of the Founder’s House had already been shaped by the family’s dispersal. After Marie-Louise’s death and Laurette’s move away, the ancestral house stood empty and badly deteriorated. Romuald Bolduc wanted to buy it, but the D’Anjous refused. A fire then destroyed the building. The D’Anjous suspected arson and believed Romuald responsible, as he was systematically acquiring village homes and properties, but his dominance of the local community made proof difficult to obtain. Loïc was left to sell the ruins and land to his wealthy uncle, reluctantly and with revulsion, because no other buyer appeared. The municipality, whose mayor was Romuald, pressed for the sale after the family declined to rebuild.

Memory and consequence

The family considered preserving the site with a memorial to the village’s founder, and agreed to sell the land on the condition that the municipality erect one. Romuald opposed the proposal and succeeded in having it rejected shortly before his death. The plot was therefore not marked by the commemorative stone the D’Anjous had sought. The sequence ends not with a public monument but with the family’s absence: its home burned, its portrait relocated, and its last daughter buried in the village cemetery.

For Loïc, Laurette’s death concentrates the novel’s recurring concern with what survives loss. Her bodily life has ended, but her care remains active in his memory, just as her knowledge of Touladi had preserved the village’s past. The funeral’s small attendance, the failed memorial, and the transfer of the family property to the Bolducs contrast private devotion with the forces that determine who remains visible in communal history. Laurette’s disappearance closes the D’Anjou household in Touladi, while Loïc’s grieving recollection keeps its most sustaining relationship from vanishing with the house.