Quebec Superior Court

The Quebec Superior Court is presented through the office and influence of Judge Georges D’Anjou, rather than through court proceedings. Its significance lies in the way judicial authority enters private crises: it can lend weight to a request for police action, shape what a judge might investigate, and make Georges’s claims credible to authorities abroad. In the novel, the institution stands at the boundary between public law and a family’s secrets, without resolving the uncertainties that surround them.

Institutional presence and authority

The court first appears as a possible source of leverage in the effort to prompt police action. When Loïc discusses the matter with Isabelle D’Anjou, she suggests that a judge of the Quebec Superior Court might be able to help move the police. Isabelle ends the conversation before Loïc can tell her what the stone he saw falling from the sky looked like, so the exchange leaves both the proposed intervention and the stone’s significance unexplored. The court is invoked not as a venue for a case, but as an institution whose senior judicial authority might command attention.

That authority becomes more concrete through Georges, whom the narrative identifies as a judge of the Quebec Superior Court. He telephones Loïc after learning that Isabelle is not in a state to speak. The news is that Roger Bolduc was in New York on September 11, 2001: travelling toward Toronto, he changed direction in Montreal and boarded the overnight bus to the American metropolis. His reason for doing so is unknown, and investigators cannot establish whether he was at the World Trade Center that morning. Georges stresses that the information is strictly confidential. Loïc finds the judge’s emphatic manner offensive, but agrees not to tell anyone. The call thus pairs an active investigation with an insistence on secrecy, showing the court’s authority as personal and consequential even though Georges is speaking outside a courtroom.

The missing cameo investigation

On September 14, 2001, Georges addresses the assembled family in the salon of his imposing home on Grande-Allée and announces that the cameo has disappeared from its bank vault. The family’s alarm gives the revelation the force of a public pronouncement, although it is made within the household. Georges later recounts that he had to press the police to search for information. From a folded notepad sheet taken from his inner jacket pocket, he reads what he has learned about Desbois: apparently a contract employee or European associate of Berkshire Funds, he had sometimes rented an office for New York business, and the investment company had offices in the World Trade Center.

The episode makes Georges a channel between police inquiry and family knowledge. He brings the results of his insistence to the family, connecting the missing jewel to a person and a business address at the disaster site. Yet the information remains qualified: Desbois’s status is uncertain, and the account does not establish what happened to him or the cameo. Judicial standing gives Georges a means to press for investigation, but it does not turn circumstantial clues into a settled explanation.

Judicial office and private power

The court’s authority also shapes Loïc’s retrospective reasoning about the sudden death of Georges’s brother, Régis D’Anjou. Loïc considers whether Georges, if convinced that Régis had been poisoned, could have examined his brother’s belongings and papers to look for a motive and trace a connection to Paris. Police had sealed Régis’s effects after discovering his body and before the will was opened. But Loïc reasons that Georges, as a Quebec Superior Court judge and the executor of Régis’s will, would have had the authority and latitude to inspect them, particularly if a crime were suspected.

This is not presented as a court ruling or a confirmed investigation. It is Loïc’s question about what Georges could have done, and why he might not have done it. The papers might have contained clues: Régis had mentioned Senator Bourdieu and an exhibition of engraved stones in Paris, where he had discovered a twin of the Founder’s cameo. Georges had learned of the Pollux cameo from his brother, giving him reason, in Loïc’s view, to suspect a connection with Régis’s death. But there was no certainty that Régis had been deliberately poisoned; fatal mushroom fragments, if that was the cause, might have entered his drink or food accidentally. The court’s powers make the absence of a clear answer more pointed, not less uncertain.

Public standing beyond Quebec

Georges’s judicial office carries weight beyond the family and its local police contacts. After the cameo is found at Ground Zero and stolen, two different claims arrive in New York, one from Georges and one from Charles de Castelmont in France. Georges has also sent the genetic profile of his son-in-law, Roger, whom he believes may have been among the World Trade Center victims. American authorities initially wonder whether the competing claims might be a fraud. After checking the claimants’ identities, they establish that Georges is an important jurist and a judge of the Quebec Superior Court, while Charles is a prosperous French winemaker. The claimants are therefore treated as credible, and authorities consider informing them that the cameo has been recovered from the rubble, while warning that it has been stolen.

The court is not itself involved in the American investigation, and Georges’s title cannot establish who owns the jewel or what became of Roger. Its function is narrower but telling: it helps make Georges legible to foreign authorities as a serious claimant. Across the novel’s episodes, the institution lends him procedural reach and public credibility, while leaving the central mysteries—the missing man, the stolen cameo, and Régis’s death—unsettled.