Loïc D’Anjou—Marie-Ange D’Anjou

The relationship between Loïc D’Anjou and Marie-Ange D’Anjou is brief in lived time and enduring in consequence: she dies giving birth to him, leaving him motherless at the threshold of life. For Loïc, the bond is therefore not remembered as a sequence of shared experiences but reconstructed from bodily impressions, family silence, and a late revelation about the twin who did not survive. His understanding of himself grows around the absence of both mother and sibling.

Birth and Loss

Marie-Ange opens her eyes once more as the birth reaches its crisis. Her turquoise-blue eyes register astonishment and anxiety; her lips move, but Berthe cannot understand what she says. The priest has not arrived before Marie-Ange dies. The narration places the death and the newborn’s peril side by side: the baby, still unnamed and nearly breathless, lies bluish and bloodless beside his mother, whose life ends in her mid-twenties. One passage gives her age as twenty-four; another describes her as frozen in her twenty-fifth year.

The newborn’s condition makes the separation more than an ordinary bereavement. He seems suspended between life and death, and the narrative says that he sees death’s face at birth, an impression engraved in him as lasting despair. The description does not establish a conscious memory of the scene; instead, it gives figurative shape to the bodily and psychic inheritance Loïc later attributes to this beginning.

The night’s grief spreads beyond the room. Prince, the large German shepherd, raises his muzzle and howls; other dogs answer across the village, while owls and loons add their cries. The dogs become funeral mourners for the young mother, and the sound returns in the narration as a melancholy echo in Loïc’s inner life. The image makes his mother’s death both an intimate loss and the origin of a recurring, almost cosmic lament.

A Child Taken into Care

After Marie-Ange’s death, her brother Guillaume remains with his daughter Laurette to keep vigil over the mother and the fragile child. The family decides that Guillaume and Laurette will take the newborn home so he can receive better care. When Laurette brings him to the Founder’s House, Guillaume gathers his mother, wife, and three daughters and solemnly asks them, through tears, to care for Marie-Ange’s child.

Because the baby appears unlikely to live, he is baptized without delay. Guillaume and Marie-Louise serve as godparents and decide to adopt him, with the consent of his father, who is still recovering from drunkenness, and of the Bolduc family, which takes responsibility for the other two children. This arrangement gives Loïc a family and a chance of survival, but it does not undo the defining fact of his birth: his biological mother is absent from his life from its beginning. The narrative presents caregiving as an urgent, collective response to a nearly dying infant, not as a substitute for knowledge of the loss.

While Marie-Ange’s body lies in the family’s modest house, Prince continues to bark mournfully. The baby appears to emerge from his lethargy whenever he hears the dog. The detail links Loïc’s first fragile responsiveness to the sounds of mourning around his mother’s body, without suggesting that he can understand their cause.

The Twin and the Unspoken Story

For much of Loïc’s life, the circumstances of his birth remain obscure. Marie-Ange’s death is treated as a family catastrophe that cannot be discussed plainly; the silence turns the event into a taboo rather than a settled account. Loïc later describes his entry into the world as a night of darkness and anguish, an origin mystery he has learned to live with without fully accepting. The absence of a clear explanation becomes part of the relationship itself: his mother is at once the person lost and the figure around whom unanswered questions gather.

A doctor eventually tells Loïc that another fetus had been in his mother’s womb. The doctor had recognized it as stillborn but chose not to disclose this at the time, believing that the family already faced enough grief; the concealed knowledge had weighed on his conscience. The revelation changes Loïc’s understanding of Marie-Ange’s death. She did not merely die giving birth to an endangered child: the pregnancy also ended with the death of the other fetus, whose existence had been withheld from him.

Loïc’s later account identifies the lost sibling as his twin sister. He understands her not simply as a separate child who died, but as another part of himself—an invisible companion whose disappearance left him feeling divided. In his conception, she remains a bridge between him and Marie-Ange, joining the mother he never knew to the portion of his own beginning that the family’s silence had obscured.

An Inherited Wound

Loïc’s account of the relationship is retrospective and searching. He revisits what was said and what remained unsaid, trying to approach the moment of birth and recover what he calls the missing part of his being. The effort is not presented as a completed recovery: the origin remains mysterious, and the twin remains beyond the visible world. Instead, the act of writing gives form to a loss that cannot be remembered as ordinary personal memory.

The relationship’s significance lies in this tension between care and absence. Guillaume and Marie-Louise adopt Loïc, and the family acts to keep him alive; still, adoption cannot restore Marie-Ange or make the hidden twin’s death known from the start. Loïc’s sense of being unfinished grows from these distinct facts—his mother’s death, his own precarious survival, the sibling’s concealed existence—and from the long delay before he can connect them. Marie-Ange is therefore present in his life not through remembered speech or shared history, but through the origin he repeatedly tries to understand.