Marthe D’Anjou

Marthe D’Anjou, a missionary nun and one of the surviving children of Élie D’Anjou, is the family’s keeper of secrets that unsettle its history. She tells Régis that the Founder was adopted and that he feared the stone he had hidden in his clothing and taken to his grave. Her memories also preserve the story of her sister Mathilde, whose rupture with their father left a different kind of silence in the family: one that Marthe herself answered by leaving home for religious life and distant missions.

Identity and Family Position

At the family gathering around the newly uncovered cameo, Marthe sits among the three surviving children of the patriarch. She has come from the monastery in Outremont by special permission. Her black coif and white habit, along with the narrator’s description of her as ascetic and deeply lined, set her apart from the men gathered at the table. Her place is not simply that of a religious observer: she is Élie’s daughter and, by family reputation, had been his favored child.

That reputation gives weight to what she remembers, but not unlimited certainty. Marthe had never seen the stone herself. Her knowledge came from a private conversation with her father, which took place as she prepared to leave for China in 1920. Élie had alluded to a fine stone he had kept, making Marthe a witness to his disclosure rather than an eyewitness to the object’s history or appearance.

The Secret of the Stone

Years later, while the family examines the cameo retrieved from Élie’s grave, Marthe breaks her silence. She explains that her father had asked her to keep what he told her secret because he expected not to see her again after her departure on mission. The stone, he said, was valuable and troubled him because it came from the United States, his country of origin. In the same conversation he disclosed that he had been adopted and knew nothing of his birth family. When Marthe asked whether the stone was connected to his origins, he did not answer.

The limits of that account matter. Marthe cannot identify where the stone came from before it reached Élie, and she cannot confirm the connection he left unexplained. What she can report is how he regarded it: he eventually feared the object as evil. He had hidden it inside his scapular, sewn into his habit, and wanted to be buried with it, without further discussion. The cameo’s emergence from the grave therefore turns a private confidence into a family crisis. The object had been concealed not only from view but from inquiry, and Marthe’s testimony makes clear that Élie’s silence concealed both his adoption and his unease about the stone.

Her disclosure does not resolve the family’s questions about the Founder’s origins. It establishes that Élie himself described his adoption and American birth to at least one child, while leaving his biological family and the stone’s relation to that history unknown. When asked whether anyone else in the family knew, Marthe says she does not know. The others speculate that their mother or Égide may have learned something, but Marthe supplies no confirmation. Her candor thus brings the secret into the open without making her an all-knowing authority over it.

Mathilde and the Family’s Other Silence

Marthe also carries the memory of Mathilde, her sister, whose rebellion against Élie followed their mother’s death in childbirth in 1889. Élie had refused a Caesarean section because the Church prohibited it. Mathilde broke with him over that death, and he renounced and cursed her. Marthe remembers the aftermath in a sharply personal image: Mathilde, trembling with fear and anger, sought refuge in the bed shared by her two elder sisters. By the next morning, she had disappeared.

That night marks a turning point in Marthe’s own life. She decided to become a missionary nun and to go far away as well. The account does not reduce her choice to a single motive, but its placement beside Mathilde’s flight links Marthe’s religious vocation with the family rupture she witnessed. Departure becomes a way of leaving the household’s reach, though not of forgetting what happened there.

Marthe later received news in secret that Mathilde had been living in Cuba for a long time. At the family gathering, Mathilde’s present whereabouts and whether she is still alive remain uncertain. Marthe’s fragment of information counters the family’s older story that the sister simply vanished: she had continued to exist beyond the family’s borders, even if the family could not say what became of her. Marthe is therefore a keeper of absences as well as revelations, preserving a trace without pretending to know the whole story.

Narrative Role and Significance

Marthe’s importance lies in the difference between what she knows and what she cannot know. She offers Régis the first reported link between the cameo, Élie’s American origins, and the Founder’s adoption; at the same time, she makes explicit that she never saw the stone and that Élie withheld an answer about its meaning. The revelation is consequential precisely because it is partial: it revises the family’s image of its celebrated founder, but does not replace uncertainty with a complete account.

Her recollection of Mathilde works in parallel. A family gathering prompted by a buried object opens onto another subject the family would rather avoid: a daughter cast out after challenging her father’s decision around their mother’s death. Marthe does not repair that rupture or explain Mathilde’s later life. Instead, she restores the missing sister to the family’s memory and shows how secrets endure through selective confidences, departures, and uncertain news. In both histories, her testimony gives voice to what Élie’s authority had kept hidden, while preserving the unresolved silences that remain.