Paris is a recurring hinge in the story: a place where the history of the Castelmont cameos becomes newly legible, where Régis D’Anjou’s stalled investigation advances, and where the jewel’s modern pursuit intersects with public catastrophe. From revolutionary-era imprisonment and execution to a private Christie’s exhibition and the 2019 Notre-Dame fire, the city links separate periods without resolving the dangers attached to the stone.

Revolutionary Paris and the Castelmont history

Loïc’s research leads back to Paris during the French Revolution. In accounts assembled from memoirs, journals, and correspondence, he reconstructs the fate of the Castelmont twins, Louis and Charles, whose family was attacked during the Revolution. Their mother, the Countess of Castelmont, was arrested in March 1794. The account connects her arrest to her close relationship with Louis XVI, then known to the revolutionaries as Citizen Capet. Paris is therefore not merely a backdrop to the family’s history: it is where the countess’s connection to the king becomes part of the danger facing her and her sons.

The cameo pair is woven into that history. A report relayed through the Marquise de Créquy describes the king giving the countess one cameo while retaining its twin as a token of friendship; later, Louis XVI secretly sent her the second, Castor. When she feared arrest, she entrusted one stone to each son and had them concealed in the boys’ clothing, binding the objects to the twins’ flight and separation. The family’s promise never to part with the cameos helps explain why their later disappearance carries more than monetary significance.

The countess was executed in Paris on May 21, 1794, at Place des Victoires. Loïc’s reconstruction places the execution in the public violence of revolutionary Paris, where a crowd gathered and the executioner carried out the sentence. The scene gives the city a stark place in the inherited story: the countess’s death follows the destruction of her family’s security, while the cameos pass into the precarious custody of her sons. The narrative presents this past through Loïc’s archival reconstruction, rather than as an event he witnesses directly.

Christie’s and Régis’s discovery

In May 1996, Paris becomes the setting for a decisive turn in Régis D’Anjou’s investigation into the origins of Le Fondateur. Régis has nearly abandoned the inquiry when a trip to attend a meeting of Francophone parliamentarians brings him into conversation with French senator Victor Bourdieu. Their discussion ranges from steam locomotives and the philosophy of machines to engraving on precious stone. Bourdieu’s enthusiasm for the subject leads him to mention an invitation-only exhibition of antique engraved stones, held alongside a Christie’s sale of jewels in Paris.

At the exhibition, Régis sees photographs of cameos whose whereabouts had been lost, then recognizes a paired stone resembling the one associated with his grandfather. Beside it is an old engraving of the cameo he understands to be Le Fondateur’s jewel, shown without the damage on the family object. The exhibition information identifies the pair as five-layer onyx depicting the Dioscuri, each figure holding a horse by the bridle and carrying a spear. It also records that the pair had belonged to the Regent’s collection before being separated after the Revolution: Pollux remained with a private French aristocratic family, while Castor was missing, perhaps lost amid revolutionary upheaval.

The discovery gives Régis a provenance for the family jewel, but not a complete account of its journey. He keeps his reaction guarded and voices uncertainty about what he has seen. His written record, which Loïc later reads, notes Bourdieu’s unusually keen interest and the suspicion it prompts. Régis has also taken a photograph of the Pollux cameo; Loïc later finds it among Régis’s papers. In Paris, the exhibition thus changes the investigation from an uncertain family tradition into a documented connection between the D’Anjou jewel and a once-paired object, while also introducing a reason for Régis to distrust the man who helped him find it.

A Paris connection in the 2001 pursuit

Paris also functions as a communications and business hub in the attempted recovery of the cameo in September 2001. Charles de Castelmont is at his château in Barzac, but the plan he has spent five years developing depends on contacts in Paris. Ten minutes before the attacks in New York, Pierre de Mirbeau calls from Paris to report that their agent and the agent’s assistant are waiting at the World Trade Center complex for Roger Bolduc. The location has been chosen to impress Bolduc, and Charles is waiting for the planned exchange to reach its conclusion.

When Mirbeau calls again with news that an aircraft has struck the World Trade Center, Charles turns at once to the fate of the arrangement and the jewel. He asks for news of Franck Aubry, the agent working in New York under the name Patrice Desbois. After several days, Charles decides to submit a formal request to New York authorities in case the cameo is recovered from the ruins. He plans to act through his Paris associate and to send a photograph and precise description of the object. Because Aubry is a widower without children, Charles also considers approaching Aubry’s brother to obtain a signature for the claim. Paris is not the scene of the catastrophe, but it is the relay through which Charles tries to preserve his claim before Roger Bolduc’s family can make a competing one.

Notre-Dame and the cameo’s return to Paris

On April 15, 2019, Paris brings the fire at Notre-Dame de Paris and the cameo’s separate, unexpected presence in the same narrative frame. Loïc has arrived from Montreal the previous day and is spending a day in the city before travelling to the Lot to join Laurence. From a rooftop terrace above Quai Saint-Michel, with a direct view toward Île de la Cité, he first sees smoke rising behind the cathedral’s towers. He initially thinks the fire in the scaffolding may soon be contained; as flames become visible, he turns on the television and calls Laurence to tell her what is happening.

Loïc goes down to the streets near the cathedral, where tourists and onlookers gather behind police barriers as firefighters work to save the building. After being jostled and repeatedly approached in the crowd, he returns to the terrace. Over the following hours he watches the fire with growing indignation, speaking by telephone with Laurence and his parents. He understands the destruction as an image of wider changes in society and as the loss of centuries of history. The city’s familiar streets and landmarks become a vantage point from which he watches a public disaster acquire personal and historical weight.

The novel then places the cameo elsewhere in Paris that same evening. At the Hemingway Bar in the Ritz, Place Vendôme, two men and a woman sit apart from the other patrons. One man, Charles de Castelmont, examines an object with a jeweller’s loupe while the woman asks whether it is what he sought. The scene establishes that the cameo is in Paris at the moment Notre-Dame is burning, though it does not identify the other people at the table in the evidence presented here. The contrast is central to Paris’s role in the novel: while Loïc watches a celebrated monument burn, Charles privately inspects the object around which generations of family history and pursuit have gathered.