Maurice Bolduc

Maurice Bolduc, called Momo, is Loïc’s older brother and childhood companion. Raised by their Bolduc grandparents, he teaches Loïc to skate, protects him through the tenderness of an older sibling, and then falls gravely ill with dropsy. His early death becomes Loïc’s first direct encounter with mortality; a remembered moment of shared wonder at the sky gives Maurice’s brief life an enduring presence in Loïc’s memory.

Family and Childhood

Maurice grows up alongside Loïc, though the two brothers are raised by their Bolduc grandparents. Their closeness is established through ordinary winter play: they slide and play hockey together, and Maurice teaches Loïc to skate when Loïc is six. The lessons and games make Maurice a source of companionship and practical care before illness alters their shared routines.

Maurice also shares Loïc’s first flight. In the narrow compartment of their father’s seaplane, Loïc sits pressed against him as the floats race across the lake and the aircraft lifts away from the ground. Maurice asks whether Loïc is afraid, smiling with the protective assurance of an older brother. The flight is Loïc’s first departure from his native land, but the scene is also a small portrait of their bond: Maurice’s attention remains on his younger brother even amid the excitement of taking to the air.

Illness and the Brothers’ Changing Roles

In the winter of 1953, dropsy strikes Maurice. Loïc is about six and a half when his brother becomes too weak and quickly tired to continue playing. The change is stark against their former life of skating and hockey: the boy who had taught Loïc to skate can no longer keep up with the games they shared.

As Maurice’s strength fails, Loïc sees their cousins and playmates begin to mock him and even try to mistreat him. Loïc takes Maurice’s side. Their relationship thus shifts from the older boy’s instruction and protection of his younger brother to Loïc’s effort to defend Maurice as illness makes him vulnerable. The novel presents that reversal through concrete childhood circumstances rather than an abstract declaration of affection.

A Moment of Shared Perception

Loïc remembers Maurice as increasingly absent and inward as his illness progresses. Maurice never complains. At times Loïc finds him silently watching falling snow or the violet dusk, his face calm and seemingly illuminated, with a faint smile. Loïc interprets this stillness as a sense that Maurice understood something beyond his own experience, perhaps that he was nearing another world; this remains Loïc’s impression, not an explanation supplied by Maurice.

One remembered evening gives that impression a more intimate form. The brothers lie in cut grass and watch clouds change color at sunset, at Maurice’s suggestion. Maurice gently places his hand on Loïc’s fist. Loïc feels time stop and experiences the sky and clouds as newly present, as though they enter him and he enters them; color multiplies into a beauty and joy he cannot put into words. The experience marks Loïc deeply, then disappears from his conscious memory for years before returning with exceptional force. Maurice’s gesture is small, but in Loïc’s recollection it opens onto an expansive perception that outlasts the moment and, eventually, Maurice himself.

Death and Lasting Significance

After Maurice dies, his small body lies in state for three days in the Bolduc grandparents’ living room, where relatives and neighbors keep vigil. It is Loïc’s first time beside a dead person. Maurice seems changed in the coffin: pale and waxen, sunk into white satin, with flattened hair and joined hands resting on a rosary. Loïc cannot reconcile this stillness with the brother he knew and imagines that the body might not be Maurice at all, that his brother could wake, open his eyes, and speak.

Loïc suddenly wants to touch Maurice’s hands. Their coldness shocks him and provokes frightening thoughts. He wonders whether death is an endless winter, an idea that conflicts with the religious teaching about the fires of hell; he cannot imagine Maurice in hell. When he hears their grandmother say that Maurice’s father has come to take him, fear overtakes him. The vigil therefore brings together the sensory fact of death, childhood disbelief, and the religious language through which the family tries to understand a loss it cannot undo.

Maurice’s presence in the novel is brief, but his effects on Loïc recur across time. His illness turns shared play into an early experience of helplessness; his death makes the body and the idea of an afterlife immediate; and the sunset memory returns as a powerful, belated recollection. Through Maurice, Loïc’s childhood is marked both by the cold finality of the coffin and by a remembered moment in which the world seemed to open beyond ordinary time.