Loïc et Régis

Loïc and Régis share more than distant kinship: Régis acts as an intellectual guide, while Loïc becomes a reader and interpreter of his work. Their relationship is marked by affection and respect, but also by a rupture Loïc later regrets, shaped by political differences and their contrasting responses to public life. Their final meeting in Ottawa in 1994 brings the possibility of reconciliation close, only for Régis’s death to leave it unresolved. Afterward, the documents Régis leaves to Loïc turn their personal bond into an investigative legacy.

Kinship and intellectual guidance

Régis is Loïc’s older, distant cousin, and their connection extends beyond family ties into a sustained exchange of ideas. In a letter written during Loïc’s passionate relationship with Brigitte, Régis urges him to be wary of women who become muses or spiritual guides, invoking Montaigne in support of his warning. The advice reflects Régis’s suspicion of charismatic claims to special access to spiritual truth. He explains that he was scandalized to learn that a theologian he revered had devoted himself to a woman who, like the classical nymph Egeria, claimed to receive messages directly from Heaven.

Loïc does not simply take Régis’s counsel as a rule for his own life. He is absorbed in the relationship and, at the time, cannot find words for the force of his attachment. The episode nevertheless establishes Régis as someone who tries to intervene when he sees Loïc caught up in a passion he distrusts. Their closeness includes frank counsel, even when Loïc is not ready to follow it.

Integrity and political distance

Their bond is complicated by disagreement about politics and by Loïc’s discomfort with political manoeuvring. During a critical period at the National Assembly, colleagues are ready to turn against a weakened leader. Loïc refuses to join them, although the leader has become only a shadow of himself. His sense of integrity, the narration suggests, is poorly suited to the social tact and opportunism that can help a person advance. He wonders whether this principled rigidity makes him resemble Régis.

That comparison points both to kinship and to distance: Loïc recognizes a shared moral inflexibility, even as political differences have helped divide them. Régis’s own public work includes a sharp dissection of French-Canadian society and an intense preoccupation with its nationalism. In 1994, Loïc writes about the republication of Régis’s best-known book, describing its author as an exorcist of the community’s inner demons. Régis is not offended by the interpretation, but is surprised by the image of himself it reflects back—especially Loïc’s emphasis on his nationalist obsession. The exchange reveals that Loïc’s criticism is also an effort to understand the older man, while Régis remains alert to how his ideas and character are being read.

The last meeting in Ottawa

In the spring of 1994, Loïc visits Régis at his house beside a park along the Ottawa River. A violent storm delays him on the expressway, an ominous prelude to a meeting he will later remember with emotion. Régis’s body has grown frail: his gait is markedly slower, his frame thinner and more stooped, his white hair sparse, and his hand deformed by arthritis. His speech and laughter have diminished, but his mind remains lively and his memory sound. His indignation is still vigorous, particularly when he speaks of what he sees as the degradation and spreading barbarity of the age.

Régis says he wishes he could disappear rather than endure the decline he feels approaching. Against this background of physical weakening and continuing intellectual force, Loïc is anxious about the article he has written and opens by worrying that he may have disappointed his cousin. Régis reassures him: he is not disappointed, but surprised by Loïc’s reading of the book and by what it reveals about his preoccupation with French-Canadian nationalism. The conversation makes room for frank appraisal without erasing their differences. For Loïc, its significance becomes inseparable from what follows: he remembers the visit as his last meeting with Régis and as the last opportunity to repair a rupture he himself had helped bring about.

An unfinished reconciliation and a legacy

A few days before his death, Régis tries to reach Loïc. In a note, he says that he wants to see him again and put an end to their estrangement; he plans to contact him about meeting in Montréal, where he expects to travel soon. The account presents the proposed meeting as more than a family courtesy. As questions surrounding the cameo grow troubling, Régis may have felt an urgent need for a reliable ally. Roger’s sudden and startling curiosity about the object adds to the unease surrounding this late attempt to reconnect. Régis dies before the planned meeting can take place, leaving the reconciliation desired by both men—or at least sought by Régis—uncompleted.

The relationship continues after Régis’s death through the papers he leaves Loïc. In June 2000, Loïc learns from Georges that the inheritance consists of several crates of documents. More than a year passes before they are delivered, and Loïc does not examine them closely until after September 11. Régis’s notes then help Loïc reconstruct events and investigate the cameo’s history; Loïc also pursues lines of inquiry his cousin could not, using online archives and records in the United States. In this way, the inheritance becomes both a material link between them and a continuation of their intellectual relationship: Loïc takes up the questions Régis left behind, while still carrying the regret of the conversation and reconciliation they did not have time to finish.