Old Québec is where Régis D’Anjou dies alone in July 1999, and where the novel transforms his death from a private disappearance into a grotesque circulation through the city. In a heat wave, his body lies undiscovered in a bachelor apartment while flies feed on it and carry minute fragments outward. The district’s cramped domestic spaces, neighboring courtyard, and nearby café make the scene at once intimate and public: the dead writer’s remains pass, invisibly, into the everyday life of the city.

The death in the bachelor apartment

Régis has been dead for two days when the scene opens. His rigid body lies in a room in his bachelor apartment, eyes open, as flies enter through a partly open window. The July heat intensifies the decomposition, and the stench begins to trouble neighbors across the interior courtyard. Old Québec is not merely a backdrop to the discovery: its close-set urban arrangement brings the private room and the surrounding residents into uneasy proximity.

The narration lingers over the flies’ work. They gather on Régis’s paling, bluish face and consume the flesh, especially around his eyes; their feeding is rendered as a physical transformation rather than a discreet sign of death. Eggs, bacteria, and maggots continue the process, making the body the site of successive generations of life. The grotesque detail gives the apartment the force of a sealed chamber, while the open window lets the process escape its boundaries.

From one room into the city

The flies carry traces of Régis beyond the apartment. Minute droplets and fragments fall wherever they land: onto an apple eaten by a little girl in the rear courtyard, a neighbor’s salad, and the rim of a beer glass raised by a United States tourist at the café Au Temporel. Cars and buses extend the possible route farther still. The passage imagines the dead writer’s body dispersed through ordinary acts of eating and movement, so that the district becomes a conduit between an isolated death and a wider, unconscious sharing of its material remains.

This dispersal also complicates the idea of a writer’s work as something separate from the body that produced it. Régis’s mouth is left open in an image of final silence, while his flesh is distributed through the city in fragments. The scene makes circulation brutally literal: what was once an individual body becomes part of other people’s surroundings without their knowledge. Old Québec’s familiar courtyards and café life thus acquire a disturbing second meaning, not through a supernatural event but through the physical reach of decomposition.

Death, secrecy, and belated knowledge

The death’s public account differs from what is later disclosed. After an autopsy, Georges D’Anjou learns that Régis may have died from a delayed-acting poisonous mushroom, powdered and mixed with sugar to mask its taste. The medical examiner alerts police discreetly, and the possibility of poisoning is kept out of the media. Officially, Régis dies in his sleep of heart failure. The uncertainty surrounding the cause turns the apartment into the starting point of a concealed investigation, though the evidence does not establish who, if anyone, poisoned him.

Régis’s funeral takes place at the Basilica of Québec, attended by the premiers of Québec and Canada, and he is buried in the family vault in the cemetery at Sillery. Loïc avoids the front ranks, grieving too deeply to make his mourning a spectacle, and withdraws from journalists seeking interviews. He considers telling the D’Anjous about the posthumous postcards he received from Régis, but changes his mind amid their hostility toward him and their resentment of the older man’s affection for him.

After the funeral, Loïc finds in Régis’s notebooks an admission of regret over the political rupture that began around the 1995 sovereignty referendum. Régis writes that Loïc had become a true son to him and wishes he had made peace despite the strain such an encounter might place on his heart. Loïc, in turn, remembers his unsuccessful letters and calls and regrets the essay in which he had openly argued for Québec’s independence. The death in Old Québec therefore leads not to reconciliation but to its painful recognition after it is no longer possible: the city’s scene of physical dispersal frames a final separation that had already taken hold in life.