Loïc Bolduc and Mathieu D’Anjou’s Cousinship

Loïc Bolduc and Mathieu D’Anjou are cousins whose connection becomes a channel for investigating the D’Anjou family’s disputed origins. Their kinship matters not simply as a personal tie: Mathieu advances a claim about their ancestry, while Loïc receives the documents and later weighs what they might mean for the cameos and the family history. The text identifies them as cousins but does not specify their exact degree of relationship.

Family history and the disputed ancestry

The genealogical question reaches back to Élie D’Anjou, born in the United States in 1842 and adopted by a French-Canadian couple. A Jesuit account describes a baby found after a woman had saved his life; a small, finely made cameo, tucked into a torn silk purse and fastened to the child’s swaddling with a large pin, was among the objects that might identify him. The account says the child was adopted and baptized, and records the uncertainty between the names Éloi and Élie, a discrepancy that could have arisen from the handwriting in the register. The infant later became the D’Anjou family’s founder.

Loïc’s own place in the family also involves adoption. After his birth, when his life was feared to be in danger, Guillaume and Marie-Louise took him into their home and decided to adopt him. This parallel does not, by itself, explain the precise genealogical link between Loïc and Mathieu, but it places Loïc’s identity within the same family history of adoption, uncertain origins, and questions of descent that Mathieu later brings before the Castelmonts.

Mathieu’s claim and the evidence he assembles

In October 2016, at Barzac, Mathieu sent Charles de Castelmont a registered letter proposing a comparative DNA test to determine whether his family descended from the Castelmonts. He set out the case that Élie, the American-born infant adopted by the D’Anjous, was in fact a Castelmont. The cameo attached to the baby’s swaddling was central to that argument, linking the family’s origin story to a physical object.

Mathieu supported his proposal with a copy of the Jesuit account discovered by Régis D’Anjou, the baptismal record, and a close-up photograph of the cameo found in the New York wreckage. He also enclosed a USB drive containing more recent, high-resolution photographs that could be enlarged for inspection. The proposed test could be conducted in France, Mathieu wrote, and he offered to pay for it himself. These details show him turning a family-origin claim into a proposed comparison of documentary, material, and biological evidence; the text does not say that the DNA test took place.

Cousins as links in the investigation

The cousins’ relationship is most visible through the passage of information. Loïc later knows the contents of Mathieu’s letter and Charles’s answer, which had categorically described the cameo in question as a counterfeit. In 2019, after seeing a newspaper photograph of Charles displaying two cameos at the Barzac celebration, Loïc recalls that Mathieu had told him about this exchange. The photograph unsettles him: the Castor cameo appears clearly enough for him to wonder whether it could be the Founder’s jewel, and how Charles could have obtained it if the earlier assertion of forgery were true.

The cousins thus occupy connected but distinct roles in the inquiry. Mathieu initiates the proposed DNA comparison and presents the evidence to Charles; Loïc receives the account of that confrontation and interprets later appearances of the stones against it. Their kinship allows the contested family past to travel between them, while the unresolved test and the uncertain provenance of the cameo keep both descent and ownership in question.