Loïc’s Adoption after His Mother’s Death in Childbirth

Loïc’s adoption begins in the same crisis as his mother’s death: Marie-Ange D’Anjou dies just after giving birth, while her unnamed newborn lies blue, nearly breathless, and close to death. Taken in by Guillaume D’Anjou and Marie-Louise D’Anjou, he survives, but his place in the family is shaped from the outset by bereavement, fragile life, and uncertainty over who has the right to raise him.

Birth, Death, and Adoption

Marie-Ange briefly opens her turquoise-blue eyes, her expression caught between astonishment and anxiety. Her lips move, but Berthe cannot understand what she says; the priest does not arrive in time. The narration gives the newborn’s first experience a stark image: he lies beside his mother, who has died at twenty-five, as if he has seen death at the moment of birth. This is not merely the loss of a parent; it is the beginning of a life marked by a separation he cannot remember but that the story presents as an enduring wound.

The infant is in such poor condition that the family fears he will not live. Guillaume and his daughter Laurette take him to their home so he can receive closer care. Guillaume gathers his mother, his wife, and his three daughters and solemnly asks them, with tears in his voice, to care for Marie-Ange’s child. The family brings the baby to the church without delay. Father Rousseau baptizes him, with Guillaume and Marie-Louise as godparents, and the couple decide to adopt him. They do so with the agreement of Alcide Bolduc, the baby’s father, who is still recovering from his drunkenness, and of the Bolduc family, which takes responsibility for the other two children.

A Precarious Childhood and Contested Belonging

Survival is uncertain for days. Loïc is limp and bluish, takes in little milk, and remains curled inward, his unhealed navel rendered as an open wound and a broken link to the maternal body. He seems suspended between life and death, barely exchanging anything with the world. Nearby, Prince, the family’s German shepherd, howls while Marie-Ange’s body lies in the house. The newborn appears to stir whenever he hears the dog. The repeated cries bind the funeral vigil to the child’s struggle to live, making sound an early, physical connection between the dead mother and the surviving infant.

The adoption does not settle the question of custody. Some days after Loïc overhears his adoptive parents discussing the matter, rumors in Touladi say that Alcide, an aviator, will take his son back. Loïc’s brothers and cousins repeat the claim as if it were certain, and tension rises between the powerful Bolduc and D’Anjou families. The dispute exposes the difference between biological parentage and the family that is actually providing care: Loïc belongs by birth to Alcide’s household, but his immediate safety and upbringing depend on Guillaume and Marie-Louise.

Family Secrets and the Unfinished Story of Origins

Much later, the story complicates Loïc’s understanding of his birth by revealing that Marie-Ange had carried another fetus, which the doctor recognized as stillborn and chose not to mention at the time. His disclosure makes Loïc’s arrival part of a double loss: his mother died in childbirth, and the twin who shared her womb did not survive. The doctor says the concealment had weighed on his conscience, turning a decision made to spare the family further grief into a secret that endured for years.

Loïc’s adopted family also carries an older story of adoption. Marthe recalls that Le Fondateur had confided that he himself was adopted, knew nothing of his birth family, and wanted the fact kept secret. He had a valuable stone from the United States that troubled him because it came from his country of origin; fearing the object as malignant, he hid it in his scapular and clothing and wished to be buried with it. His descendants’ shock at learning of his adoption echoes the concealment surrounding Loïc’s own beginnings, while the stone ties the hidden question of ancestry to an object the family tried to bury with the past.

An archival account later traces Le Fondateur’s infancy to a baby found in the snow in 1842. A small jewel had been attached to the child’s swaddling, and a woman who had saved him was buried without a name as the community’s unknown saint. Loïc wonders whether she could have been his great-great-great-grandmother and whether the Founder had carried the cameo from cradle to grave. The account says the child was baptized Éloi and adopted by a French-Canadian D’Anjou couple; an unclear entry in the register may have turned Éloi into Élie D’Anjou. Loïc pursues the archival trail online, extending the family’s inquiry into a past that its own members had kept silent.

Significance

Loïc’s adoption is both an act of immediate care and a lasting uncertainty about lineage. Guillaume and Marie-Louise take in a child whose survival is doubtful, while the competing claims of the Bolduc and D’Anjou families make belonging a matter of both affection and family authority. Later discoveries connect his private history to a much older pattern of adoption, concealed origins, and disputed ancestry. The novel therefore presents his beginning not as a simple replacement of one family by another, but as a life sustained by adoption and repeatedly unsettled by what the family does not know—or has chosen not to say—about its dead and its origins.