Régis

Régis is a former member of the Order of Preachers, senator, writer, and family historian whose decades-long investigation links the D’Anjou family’s damaged cameo to an aristocratic pair and helps uncover the Founder’s origins. To Loïc, he is also a mentor and beloved older cousin: a formidable public intellectual whose political convictions strain their bond, and whose late life is marked by physical decline and a tenacious, painful faith. His story joins scholarly inquiry to the novel’s larger questions about inheritance, historical memory, and the forces—familial, political, and supernatural—that shape the living.

Public Life and Intellectual Reputation

Régis’s career ranged from religious life to public service and scholarship. A former cleric of the Order of Preachers, he later became a senator and took part in public efforts to reform education in Quebec. At the time of Guillaume’s funeral, he could not attend because he was in California for a conference on cybernetics, representing a government commission established to reform Quebec’s education system. To the young Loïc, who then knew him chiefly by reputation, Régis’s prestige in intellectual circles set him apart from the D’Anjou relatives Loïc instinctively disliked.

His writing made him a prominent critic of French-Canadian society. A book that had brought him several prizes in the early 1960s returned to public attention in a new edition decades later. Loïc described it as both a fierce dissection of that society and an exorcism of its inward demons, presenting Régis as a writer who sought to expose the conflicts beneath a collective self-image. When Loïc published an article about the reissue, Régis was less disappointed than surprised by the portrait of him reflected in his younger cousin’s reading, particularly its emphasis on his obsession with French-Canadian nationalism.

Régis’s intellectual interests were broad. Alongside his work on social and religious questions, he pursued mechanology, a philosophy of the machine, and studied contemporary art. His activities were not presented as a simple progression from religious tradition to modernity: he later regarded modernity as a force that dissolves transcendence, and recognized that he himself had been influenced by the changes he criticized. His career thus embodied a tension between reforming inherited institutions and fearing that reform could erode the sacred meanings they once carried.

The Cameo Investigation

Régis began investigating the family cameo in the 1940s. The stone’s damaged surface made its engraved figure difficult to identify: it might depict a mythological figure or a historical person, while the surviving attributes, clothing, and style offered only partial clues. Rather than rely on family lore, he systematically studied lapidary art and consulted European specialists during his travels, presenting himself as an amateur interested in gems and stone engraving without revealing that the object belonged to his family.

That research led him to conclude that the cameo was Italian in workmanship and dated at least to the eighteenth century, perhaps the seventeenth. He suspected that its figure was one of the mythological twins, Castor or Pollux, and inferred that it must once have belonged to a pair. In the 1960s, he searched written records at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. An obscure eighteenth-century catalogue placed a pair of cameos representing the twins in the collection of the Duke of Orléans, who became Regent after Louis XIV’s death. The catalogue did not establish what happened to the stones afterward. Régis considered whether they had entered the royal collection, disappeared during the Revolution, or been carried abroad by members of the royal family or other émigrés.

The investigation advanced decisively in Paris in 1996. Invited to a Francophone parliamentary gathering, Régis met the French senator Victor Bourdieu, whose conversation turned from steam locomotives and mechanology to engraved gems. Bourdieu invited him to a private Christie’s exhibition accompanying an auction of historic jewelry. Among photographs of cameos whose whereabouts had been lost, Régis recognized one that resembled his family’s stone. Beside it was an old engraving of the supposedly missing cameo—the very design he knew, but without the scratch that marked the family object.

The exhibition’s information identified the pair as five-layer onyx cameos, their upper layer dark, and showed Castor and Pollux standing opposite one another, each holding a horse by the bridle and a spear and wearing an egg-shaped cap topped with a star. The pair had belonged to the Regent’s collection before being separated after the Revolution. The Pollux cameo was in a private collection; the Castor cameo had vanished under unknown circumstances, probably amid revolutionary turmoil. Régis now knew the family stone’s aristocratic provenance, although the account did not resolve the full route by which it had reached the Founder.

After retiring from the Senate, Régis resumed his search for the Founder’s origins. A copy of the Founder’s Missouri baptismal record had already established an American connection, and the need to secure the cameo in Quebec after Guillaume’s death had brought that document to light. Régis followed the record’s reference to a Jesuit priest into archival research, first consulting Jesuit materials in Montreal without success. A French-Canadian Jesuit provincial eventually directed him toward records held at Saint Louis University, where he found a manuscript describing an infant discovered alive in 1842 in the arms of a woman who had frozen to death near Saint Louis. A small silk purse containing a finely made cameo had been pinned to the baby’s clothes.

The manuscript transformed the family’s account of the object: it suggested that the cameo had been with the Founder from infancy, rather than being stolen or acquired as war plunder. The infant had been baptized as Éloi and adopted by a young French-Canadian D’Anjou couple in Saint Louis; an unclear entry in the register may have allowed Éloi’s name to become Élie, the name by which the future Founder was known. Régis photographed the old register. He recognized the discovery as a major clue, but not a final solution: it opened a new path to the Founder’s origins while leaving further questions unanswered.

Loïc: Kinship, Politics, and Regret

Régis’s relationship with Loïc makes the investigation intimate as well as historical. The two were distant cousins, but Régis became Loïc’s mentor and friend. Their political differences, however, created a breach that Loïc later remembered with remorse. During a period of crisis at the National Assembly, Loïc worked for the sovereigntist party and did not want Régis to know. He feared encountering Georges D’Anjou or another member of the Quebec family who might recognize him, though he had scarcely been seen by them for years. Régis’s political commitments and Loïc’s divided loyalties placed the family relationship under pressure without erasing its affection.

Their meeting in Ottawa in the spring of 1994 became their last. A violent storm delayed Loïc on the expressway, and he arrived at Régis’s home beside a park along the Ottawa River to find his cousin visibly aged: thinner, more stooped, with sparse white hair, an arthritic hand, a slower voice, and less frequent laughter. His mind and memory remained sharp. His indignation was sharper still when he spoke of what he saw as the degradation and encroaching barbarism of the age. He wished to disappear rather than endure the coming infirmities and what he believed was the world’s worsening condition.

The meeting also brought Loïc’s article about Régis’s reissued book into the open. Loïc had worried that his interpretation would disappoint his cousin, but Régis said that it had surprised him, especially in its reading of his nationalism. The exchange offered a late moment of candor between mentor and younger writer, but it did not undo the rupture Loïc believed he had caused afterward. When recalling the encounter, Loïc felt remorse return like a tide.

Faith, Decline, and Afterlife

In old age, Régis’s religious life became a struggle rather than a consolation. Theological books no longer comforted him, and his earlier fervor seemed spent. He nevertheless distinguished the loss of spiritual consolation from the loss of faith: in his understanding, faith had not abandoned him. He had been disappointed by theologians he admired, some of whom, as he saw it, moved toward denying Christ’s divinity. He also judged that the modernizing reforms in which he had participated helped weaken the sacred and transcendence in Quebec’s church. His anti-modern convictions were therefore shadowed by the knowledge that his own writings and actions had helped usher in changes he later feared.

Loïc watched his cousin as a pilgrim moving through an increasingly dark night of faith. Régis continued to regard Christ as his only hope and salvation, and held fast to the doctrine of the Incarnation as an absolute novelty. He imagined himself like Job on a heap of ashes, blaming himself for the world’s sins. His persistence was neither serene nor triumphant: faith remained the one possible refuge, held onto amid spiritual desolation and a sense that the culture around him was losing its way.

By 2011, Régis was dead, and the circumstances of his death were described as suspicious but not explained. At Georges D’Anjou’s funeral, Georges thought of his brother Régis and of his suspicious death while wondering whether the family’s misfortunes were part of the cameo’s curse. Loïc, meanwhile, remembered Régis as one of the dead who appeared to him during a near-death experience, radiant with intelligence and affection, urging him to return to earthly life because his work was unfinished. The vision extends their bond beyond Régis’s death and turns the investigator into a continuing presence in the very story he had helped Loïc pursue.

Régis’s inquiry survives as both family research and an inheritance passed to the next generation. After the D’Anjou family’s fortunes collapsed, Loïc believed he was the last person able to recount its saga and continue the search. He began writing a work that mixed memoir and novel around the fateful cameo and his investigation into its origins and journey; Laurence became his best reader and adviser. He wrote cautiously, troubled by what he could reveal about real people, especially the cousin who had been his mentor and friend. In this final handover, Régis’s legacy is more than a set of archival clues: it is the unfinished task of making a family’s silences, political divisions, faith, and losses intelligible through writing.