Loïc Bolduc and Laurence’s Partnership

Loïc Bolduc and Laurence’s partnership is both an intimate bond and a sustaining collaboration: her love helps Loïc feel that he exists, while her companionship accompanies his writing, his pursuit of the camée’s history, and the later shocks surrounding it. Across the novel’s closing years, they travel together, exchange urgent news, and face grief as a couple; Laurence is not simply beside Loïc’s investigation but one of the people with whom its meaning is tested.

Love, Companionship, and Creative Work

By the time Loïc is writing his account of the D’Anjou family and the fateful camée, Laurence has become his best reader and adviser. The manuscript combines memoir with novel, tracing both the family saga and Loïc’s inquiry into the object’s origins and movements. He writes with scruples about how to portray real people, particularly his great-cousin Régis, who had been his mentor and friend. Laurence’s role gives him a trusted reader with whom he can weigh the responsibilities of turning family history into literature.

The partnership also has an existential importance for Loïc. As the horizon of his future narrows, he writes while he still has breath and a hold on the world. The prospect of his own nothingness leaves him nearly paralyzed, but the love of Laurence, together with writing, restores his sense of being. He does not write for recognition; the act matters as a way of existing. Their bond therefore appears not as a decorative comfort beside his work, but as one of the few sources of presence and continuity available to him.

Shared Journeys and the Camée

In February 2015, Loïc and Laurence flee winter together for Cayo Largo, a small island in Cuba. Their stay at the El Pelicano hotel makes the investigation newly immediate when Rodrigo Lerbier arrives at their breakfast table to say that he has important news about the camée. He asks to meet that evening at their apartment, then announces that he knows where the object is. Laurence and Loïc react together in astonishment. The scene places her inside the circle to which the discovery is entrusted: Rodrigo comes directly to the couple, and the revelation is received by both.

Afterward, Loïc and Laurence discuss what the camée’s return means. Alone with her, Loïc concludes that the evil has returned to its source and that the stone has gone back to the devil; he also reflects that it might have been better had it remained buried in the Founder’s tomb or been lost in the Castelmont ranch ruins. Laurence, in turn, presses him with questions about the reported passage from Freemasonry to Satanism and whether the supposed initiate was truly a Freemason. Their exchange shows a partnership in which she does not merely hear his conclusions: she challenges the account and asks where its claims and connections hold together.

Grief and Shared Witness

Their closeness is also measured by the losses that reach them. In 2015, the terrorist attack at the Bataclan kills Thierry, their young cousin from the Lot, and his young companion. Thierry had helped Loïc with research on the camée and the Castelmonts and had begun a promising career as a journalist. His death is a shared shock to Laurence and Loïc; the novel links their bereavement to the investigation through the bitter coincidence that the band playing during the attack was called Eagles of Death Metal and its song was Kiss the Devil. Loïc later wonders whether the camée’s influence might somehow extend even to this distant tragedy, but that suspicion is his interpretation, not an established explanation.

In April 2019, the partnership appears across distance again. Loïc has arrived from Montréal in Paris and is watching Notre-Dame burn from a rooftop terrace above the Quai Saint-Michel. He calls Laurence to warn her of the catastrophe, then continues speaking by phone with her and his parents as the fire devastates the cathedral. Laurence is not physically present at the scene, but Loïc makes her one of the people with whom he shares the unfolding disaster. His stunned anger at the destruction of a monument and centuries of history is thus carried into their ongoing communication.

The Partnership’s Narrative Significance

The novel presents Loïc and Laurence’s bond through repeated acts of attention: she reads and advises on his work; they travel together; Rodrigo brings a crucial discovery to them as a couple; and Loïc reaches for her with both revelation and catastrophe. These episodes establish companionship without suggesting that Laurence’s role is limited to reassurance. She contributes judgment and questions, while Loïc’s calls make her a witness to events that overwhelm him.

By the final episodes represented here, their partnership endures through uncertainty rather than resolving the camée’s mysteries or shielding them from loss. The love of Laurence sustains Loïc as he writes against the fear of nonexistence, and their shared conversations keep the investigation, grief, and historical catastrophe within the space of a relationship. Their closeness is shown less through declarations than through the work of reading, listening, traveling, questioning, and telling one another what has happened.