Loïc et Guillaume D’Anjou

Guillaume D’Anjou is Loïc’s maternal uncle and adoptive father, the person who carries him from a precarious infancy into a protected childhood. Their bond joins biological kinship to deliberate care: Guillaume takes in his dead sister’s vulnerable newborn, raises him as his son, and shields him from competing family claims. When Guillaume dies, Loïc loses both a parent and the guardian who had connected him to the D’Anjou family.

Kinship and Adoption

When Loïc is born, his mother, Marie-Ange D’Anjou, dies, and the baby appears so frail that the family fears he may not survive. Guillaume and his daughter Laurette bring him to their home to care for him. Guillaume gathers his mother, wife, and three daughters and solemnly urges them, through tears, to look after Marie-Ange’s child. The immediate response is collective and practical: the newborn is taken to be baptized, with Guillaume and Marie-Louise D’Anjou as godparents.

With the birth father’s agreement, Guillaume and Marie-Louise adopt Loïc. The Bolduc relatives take responsibility for the other two children, while Loïc grows up in the household of his mother’s elder brother. Adoption therefore makes Guillaume more than an uncle by affection or custom: he becomes the parent who takes responsibility for the infant after maternal loss. Loïc’s place in the family remains complicated, however. He is raised by a D’Anjou but does not bear the name, and the family’s later treatment of him exposes the gap between being cared for within a lineage and being recognized as one of its legitimate heirs.

A Childhood Shaped by Care

Guillaume’s care extends beyond the initial decision to adopt. He watches over Loïc’s childhood and protects him from the Bolducs’ attempts to claim or draw him away. The relationship is remembered as gentle and protective: Guillaume is the uncle who had, in the narrator’s image, carefully detached Loïc from his dead mother and then jealously guarded his childhood. His guardianship gives Loïc a secure home, but it also ties his sense of family belonging to Guillaume personally.

A small childhood memory conveys the tenderness of that home. On a night drive through the forests and villages of the region, Loïc rides in Guillaume’s jeep beside Jane, the daughter of their friend Larry Durrell. Jane falls asleep against his shoulder, and Loïc resists sleep to prolong the closeness. The moment is not a declaration about fatherhood; its warmth instead rests on the ordinary circumstances Guillaume’s care makes possible: a child safe in his adoptive father’s vehicle, carried through the night after a day outdoors.

Protection, Silence, and Disclosure

At Guillaume’s wake, the doctor who delivered Loïc reveals that there had been another fetus in Marie-Ange’s womb: Loïc’s twin sister was stillborn. Loïc turns to Guillaume with reproach, asking why he had not been told. Guillaume explains that he had waited until Loïc was old enough to bear the shock and that he had not felt able to tell him sooner. The withholding is thus presented as an act of protection, but it leaves Loïc confronting a profound truth about his birth only after the person who could have explained it is close to death.

Loïc imagines his twin’s body in the grave beside their mother and recalls having sensed a presence during childhood. Though the discovery intensifies the mystery of his beginnings, he accepts that Guillaume can no longer be blamed: he nods, recognizing that there is now nothing to reproach him for. The exchange preserves the relationship’s complexity. Guillaume’s silence had kept a painful fact from a child, yet the same care that shaped Loïc’s upbringing also helps him understand why the truth was delayed.

Death and the End of a Family Anchor

Guillaume’s death, in the autumn of 1964, makes the cost of the bond unmistakable. Loïc grieves not only for an adoptive father but for the maternal uncle who had protected him throughout childhood. He feels the doors of time closing on a large part of his life, as though Touladi itself were receding with the loss of this childhood pillar. His grandmother Élisabeth had died two years earlier; now Guillaume’s death further weakens Loïc’s ties to the D’Anjou family.

The rupture is sharpened by what follows. Almost as soon as Guillaume is buried, Georges D’Anjou removes the family cameo and takes it to Québec. Loïc objects not to the transfer itself but to its haste and disrespect toward Guillaume’s newly buried body. Yet no one grants him a voice in the decision: in the family’s eyes, his youth and lack of the D’Anjou name make him negligible. The contrast defines what Guillaume’s relationship had afforded him. Guillaume had treated Loïc as a son and defended his place; once that protection is gone, Loïc’s adoption no longer ensures that the wider family will recognize him. Their bond is therefore both an intimate parent-child relationship and the support on which Loïc’s fragile belonging to the D’Anjous had rested.