Loïc Bolduc

Loïc Bolduc is both an investigator of his family’s history and its would-be chronicler: as he traces the path of a dangerous cameo, he comes to ask whether its curse has shaped his own life. His arc joins concrete acts of recognition and research to a more unsettled question about inherited influence, free will, and the stories people make in order to exist.

Encounters in Cuba

In March 2003, while vacationing with Laurence in Varadero, Loïc recognized his cousin Isabelle D’Anjou dancing in a nightclub. Her auburn hair caught his attention before he could make out her face; the recognition brought its own complications. Isabelle was the wife of Roger Bolduc, who had disappeared in New York, but she was dancing with a young Cuban man. Loïc hesitated to approach her, not wanting to intrude on what looked like a new romance or make Laurence uncomfortable by suddenly introducing a cousin she scarcely knew. He kept the recognition to himself.

The next evening, Loïc saw Isabelle again at a Yoruba religious ceremony. Her hair was covered with a white headscarf, and the same young man was beside her. Both cousins noticed one another and turned away, tacitly choosing to spare each other an awkward encounter. The private embarrassment of the nightclub thus gave way to a more consequential coincidence: unbeknownst to them, three descendants of the family’s founder were in Havana that night, while the family cameo was only a short distance from the ceremony.

After the performance, Manuel introduced Loïc and Laurence to Rodrigo Lerbier, a babalao. As they walked toward the bus, Loïc felt an immediate kinship with Rodrigo that seemed to exceed a shared Latin background. Their conversation about Yoruba religion led Loïc, on a sudden impulse, to ask whether stones could contain harmful forces. Rodrigo answered that stones could concentrate powerful energies, both positive and negative, while privately wondering whether Loïc knew about the cameo’s history in Cárdenas or had some connection to the CIA or FBI. Loïc disclosed part of his family’s story, carefully describing a jewel without saying that it was a cameo.

A recollection then connected the family history to Cuba: Loïc remembered that a daughter of the founder had fled her father’s home and apparently made her way there. He recalled her name, Mathilde, and asked Rodrigo whether it was D’Anjou. The coincidence of a family member’s flight, Isabelle’s presence, and the jewel’s Cuban history turns Loïc’s trip into an unexpected extension of his investigation.

The Cameo and the Work of Investigation

Loïc’s meeting with Rodrigo also corrects a central assumption about the family jewel: it had not disappeared in New York. To establish whether the object Rodrigo meant was the family cameo, Loïc first asked him to describe it. Rodrigo produced a small, somewhat blurred photograph from an old wallet. Loïc could discern only a vague resemblance to the family object, but the similarity troubled him enough that he did not immediately admit its force. The exchange makes his investigation a process of testing likenesses and claims, not simply accepting a dramatic lead.

The cameo becomes more than a missing heirloom in Loïc’s thinking. He wonders whether its occult influence has weighed on the directions his life has taken, and whether passions or emotions may be inherited without a person knowing it. He entertains the possibility that free will is an illusion, while acknowledging that the argument associated with Spinoza is imperfect. His inquiries therefore pursue two linked mysteries: the object’s origin and route, and the extent to which its supposed curse can account for the lives caught in its history.

Family Decline and Writing

The later decline of the D’Anjou family gives Loïc’s research a personal urgency. Alain, Georges’s eldest son, already in his sixties and worn down by the family’s misfortunes, decides to retire early and sell the D’Anjou and Sons law firm. Once absorbed into another firm, it will eventually lose its name. A century after the founder’s son established a law practice that became one of Québec City’s most prestigious, a later generation is liquidating it. Loïc reads that reversal as part of the family’s apparently cursed history, one he has devoted himself to tracing.

He begins writing a work that mixes memoir and novel, about the fateful cameo and his investigation into its origins and movements. Laurence becomes his best reader and adviser. Writing is not effortless: Loïc is held back by scruples about portraying real people in partly fictionalized form and about what he can reveal, especially concerning Régis, his older cousin, mentor, and friend. The difficulty is ethical as well as artistic; to tell the family’s story, he must decide how to expose the lives of people to whom he remains bound.

For Loïc, writing also becomes a response to a fear of nonexistence. As the horizon of his future seems to narrow, he writes while he still has breath and a foothold in the world. Apart from Laurence’s love, writing restores a sense that he exists. He does not write to win recognition, now or later, but because literature and art have become necessities of being. This gives his book-within-the-book an existential purpose: it is an attempt to make a life legible without pretending that its meaning can be completely mastered.

Loss, the Curse, and Its Reach

The deaths associated with the cameo extend Loïc’s inquiry beyond his own family. Rodrigo tells him by email that Aurelio has been murdered; Rodrigo and Loïc suspect revenge by the sect, and Rodrigo fears for his own life. Loïc never knew Aurelio, but mourns him as another apparent victim of the malevolent stone and worries that Rodrigo, already blinded in the cameo’s wake, may meet the same fate.

Another loss reaches Loïc and Laurence months earlier. Their young cousin Thierry is among the 137 people killed in the Bataclan attack in Paris on November 13, 2015, dying with his young companion. Thierry had helped Loïc research the cameo and the Castelmont family, and had gone on to become a journalist. Only weeks before his death, he confided that he felt increasingly constrained at his newspaper, where subjects including Islamist radicalization in the suburbs and church arson and desecration had become taboo. Loïc is struck by the grim coincidence that the band playing during the attack was called Eagles of Death Metal and its song was Kiss the Devil. He wonders whether the cameo’s influence could extend across time and distance, though the suspicion remains a question rather than proof.

Notre-Dame and the Limits of Knowledge

In April 2019, Loïc is in Paris, having arrived from Montreal, Quebec, the previous day. From a rooftop terrace overlooking the Seine and the Île de la Cité, he sees smoke rising behind Notre-Dame de Paris. At first he assumes a fire in the scaffolding will be quickly controlled; as smoke thickens and flames appear, he turns on the television, calls Laurence, and goes down to the street. Behind police barriers, he watches the crowd grow as firefighters work to save the cathedral. The fire makes the city’s helplessness palpable, but the cameo’s presence in Paris at the same time is unknown to him: it is there only in passing.

The crisis opens into an inward confrontation with evil. Loïc connects the force he experiences to the death-saturated terror he remembers from birth, beside his dead mother, and calls for help in prayer to Jesus Christ. The icy sensation passes, but he remains shaken and turns to thoughts about a world where power and money tower above ordinary people, who must cling to love and hope. He understands that people can act as stones of Satan by spreading destructive influence without knowing it; they may even believe themselves good. The image broadens his theory of the cameo from a cursed object into a way of thinking about harm transmitted unconsciously.

At the same time, Loïc doubts his own role in the investigation. He wonders whether Satan has manipulated him by exploiting his ego, and whether the entire pursuit has been a trap designed for him. His questions qualify the certainty with which he has sought to expose the curse: he cannot know whether he is deciphering a malign force or being drawn into its design. A subsequent vision reverses that fear. He comes to feel that the stones of Satan cannot overcome humanity, imagining human souls rising from centuries of suffering and sweeping away evil. He then falls into deep sleep. The ending offers a moment of spiritual consolation, not a demonstrated solution to the cameo’s mysteries; Loïc’s search continues to hold together historical investigation, personal vulnerability, and a hope he cannot secure by reason alone.