Pain-de-Sucre is a forest landscape bound to Loïc’s memories of time with his adoptive father, Guillaume D’Anjou. It first appears as a place of shared excursions and longing, then as the destination toward which Guillaume set out alone shortly before he was found dead in the woods.

Setting and Recollection

During the previous summer and autumn, Loïc and Guillaume went hunting and fishing in the forest and walked through the company’s limits. After their political conflict, Loïc remembered those outings nostalgically and wished to return to Pain-de-Sucre, see the gatekeeper again, and look at his butterfly collection. The wish carried a practical uncertainty: Guillaume was still weakened by illness, spending his days moving slowly from bed to the living-room chair, so Loïc wondered when their excursions could resume. In December 1964, Guillaume went alone for a walk toward Pain-de-Sucre and did not come back. His jeep was found at the edge of the woods the next day; Guillaume lay farther inside, with his old hunting rifle fallen from his hands. The narrative does not identify the precise spot of his death as Pain-de-Sucre itself, but the forest destination joins the remembered outings to the loss that ended them.

The Forest as the Place of Death

The forest’s remembered paths acquire a darker meaning when Guillaume D’Anjou returns there alone. He set out toward Pain-de-Sucre and did not come back; the next day, his jeep stood at the wood’s edge, while he lay farther inside with his old hunting rifle fallen from his hands. Nearby, a male deer, its antlers in full growth, had been shot through the chest. The novel does not establish that Guillaume died at the exact destination, but the walk toward Pain-de-Sucre draws his final hours into the landscape of the family’s earlier excursions.

The death also echoes that of Guillaume’s father, Égide D’Anjou, who had died in the woods forty-four years earlier, almost to the day. The narration suggests an atavistic pull toward that setting, while giving a physical explanation: Guillaume’s chronically weak heart failed, and he had not brought his nitrate capsules in case of an attack. Whether that omission was deliberate remains uncertain. His death in the forest, silent and hidden, closes the possibility of returning to the walks Loïc had longed to resume.

The News Reaches Loïc

Pain-de-Sucre became inseparable from the end of Loïc’s hoped-for return to the woods. In Montreal, where he was finishing his classical studies, he found an urgent message slipped beneath the door of his room in the philosophy residence, asking him to call his family in Touladi at any hour. He immediately feared a death. By telephone, Marie-Louise told him in a broken voice that Guillaume had died; she hastened to forestall suspicion by explaining that his long-ailing heart had finally failed. The news reached Loïc far from the landscape he had wished to revisit with his adoptive father, making the interrupted excursions a last connection to a place that now held both their shared past and Guillaume’s absence.

Narrative Significance

Pain-de-Sucre functions as a hinge between two generations of loss: Guillaume’s final walk toward the forest recalls the earlier death of his father, Égide D’Anjou, in the woods. The parallel gives the landscape a family history without making it a simple symbol; Guillaume’s death remains grounded in his failing heart, while the suggestion of an atavistic pull leaves its meaning unsettled. For Loïc, the remembered forest outings consequently mark not just a past shared with his adoptive father but a return that can no longer take place.