Outremont is the Montreal setting where Loïc confronts the death of Régis and works through the family papers Régis left behind. The place is rendered through specific, private spaces rather than a broad portrait of the neighborhood: an apartment in Outremont becomes both a site of mourning and a vantage point from which the family’s past is reconsidered.

Setting and Narrative Frame

The novel locates this sequence in autumn 2001, first marking the setting as Outremont, Montreal, and then specifying Loïc’s condo on rue Champagneur. These place markers anchor a narrative that moves between an intimate present and a history assembled from documents. Outremont’s importance lies in this conjunction: Loïc is physically settled in the city, but the papers draw his attention toward the older roots of the D’Anjou family in Touladi.

The Papers and the Family Search

As Loïc sorts through Régis’s papers, he becomes impressed by the sustained research and investigation his cousin undertook to discover the origins of the D’Anjou family of Touladi. The work appears to have been pursued after Régis’s retirement, and Loïc considers whether it also expressed an effort to reconcile himself with roots he had long sought to transcend, erase, or set aside. From the condo in Outremont, the family archive thus opens onto a larger question of Quebec identity: Loïc reads Régis’s genealogical inquiry as bound up with anxiety about the endurance and decline of a French lineage in North America.

Death and Immediate Aftermath

In the condo on rue Champagneur, Loïc paces, tries to think, and repeatedly finds himself staring out the window, absent. He has learned of Régis’s death from the morning newspaper and is still too shocked to give way to the grief rising within him. The news is especially jarring because Régis had tried to reconnect only days earlier: a letter laid across two postcards arrived the day before, and it said he planned to come to Montreal to meet Loïc. Loïc had tried to reach him by telephone and left a message.

The condo also frames Loïc’s encounter with the public appetite for details. A journalist from a newspaper where Loïc had once worked calls to ask about the mysterious circumstances of Régis’s sudden death, including whether he had health problems. Loïc says he knows no more than what has appeared in the press and that an autopsy will probably be held; he ends the call rather than speculate. In this private interior, grief and uncertainty meet the outside world’s demand for explanation, while Régis’s papers leave Loïc with a different, longer investigation to continue.