Régis D’Anjou’s Manuscripts and Archives

Régis D’Anjou’s Manuscripts and Archives are both an inheritance and an unfinished investigation: four crates of papers that draw Loïc into the family’s history and make the obscure cameo a problem of evidence, provenance, and interpretation. Their contents do not provide a single, seamless account. Instead, notes, photographs, old records, and missing pages let Loïc reconstruct Régis’s long inquiry while exposing how much remains uncertain.

An Inheritance in Paper

Régis’s will directed that the four large crates be sent to Loïc, his cousin, former collaborator, and confidant. He asked that they be delivered unopened, describing them as valueless paperwork except, perhaps, to an intellectually curious reader who could separate useful material from the rest, discard what he had not managed to sort, and forward worthwhile documents to the National Archives. He also said he had taken precautions to keep the papers intact in transit. The bequest was thus not a finished collection with conclusions attached, but a transfer of unfinished work and responsibility.

Loïc received the crates only about a month before September 11. Recently retired, after work as a journalist, editor, translator, and senior public servant, he welcomed them as a particularly meaningful inheritance: a legacy of memory that also appealed to the historian in him. The timing soon gave the papers a new urgency. His foreboding around the attacks and the disappearance of the family cameo drove him back to the material he had initially examined only in passing.

The archive’s physical variety reflects its working character. It contains thousands of pages, mostly in Régis’s fine handwriting, mixed with typewritten sheets and arranged in ring binders or school exercise books with black covers. It is not, strictly speaking, a diary. The papers comprise notes, observations, reading reports, and drafts or outlines for articles and essays: fragments of an intellectual workshop rather than a continuous personal narrative. Loïc notices that some pages have been torn out. Alongside these writings is an entire crate of miscellaneous documentation about the cameo, the accumulated result of roughly half a century of research.

Régis’s Investigation of the Cameo

Régis had pursued the D’Anjou family’s origins and the jewel’s history for decades. His inquiry began in the 1940s. A damaged area on the carved stone obscured the figure, so he could not tell from the image alone whether it represented a mythological character or a real person. Under a magnifying glass, however, details of possible mythological attributes, clothing, and style offered clues. To assess them, he studied lapidary art systematically and consulted European experts while presenting himself as an amateur gem enthusiast, carefully withholding that the stone belonged to his family.

Those consultations persuaded him that the cameo was Italian in workmanship and dated at least to the eighteenth century, perhaps the seventeenth. He came to believe that its figure was one of the mythological twins Castor and Pollux, and reasoned that the stone must have had a companion. In the 1960s, he searched the written record at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. An obscure eighteenth-century catalogue listed a pair of Castor and Pollux cameos in the collection of the Duke of Orléans, later the Regent, but did not establish what happened to them afterward. The absence of the pair from a later inventory of royal possessions left Régis considering several possible routes through which the stones might have passed after the Revolution. His notes preserve this inquiry as a sequence of hypotheses, not a resolved chain of ownership.

A later exhibition in Paris provided a substantial advance. At an invitation-only display organized by Christie’s with private collections and museums, Régis found a photograph of a cameo closely resembling the family jewel, and beside it an old engraving of the cameo said to have disappeared—the Founder’s stone, shown without its later scratch. The images showed the two figures facing one another, each holding a horse by the bridle and carrying a spear, with a star-topped, egg-shaped cap. The exhibition record identified the material as five-layer onyx and said the pair had belonged to the Regent’s collection. One stone had entered a private collection associated with an old French aristocratic family; the Castor cameo was listed as missing, probably during the revolutionary upheavals. For Régis, the juxtaposition established the jewel’s aristocratic provenance more firmly, but did not explain how the missing stone reached the Founder.

The 1842 Record and the Family’s Origins

Among the papers Loïc discovers a photocopy of an old, weather-stained handwritten account. It describes a living infant found near St. Louis in 1842 in the arms of a young woman who had died in the snow. A silk purse containing a finely made cameo was pinned to the baby’s swaddling clothes. The account says that the woman, whose body bore marks of hardship, wore a small wooden cross and was buried without a name in the parish cemetery as a saintly unknown woman. These details prompt Loïc to wonder whether she might have been his great-great-great-grandmother; the document itself does not establish that relationship.

The discovery links the jewel to the Founder’s infancy in a way the family’s earlier speculations had not. Régis had already found a copy of the Founder’s Missouri baptismal extract, dated 1842 and associated with Florissant near St. Louis. The account of the baby and the baptismal record together support the conclusion that the Founder was born in the United States and adopted by a young French-Canadian couple. The baptismal entry also carries a small but consequential ambiguity: the child was named for the saint of the day, Éloi, but unclear writing and ink make the final vowels difficult to read. Loïc concludes that the name shifted in transmission to Élie, the name by which the Founder became known. Régis had photographed the old register, preserving evidence while leaving the handwriting’s uncertainty visible.

Other materials give the inquiry a visual trace of the Founder’s American years. A photograph shows him, about twenty years old, in a Union army uniform with two fellow soldiers in front of a tent. He stands behind them, identifiable to Loïc by his build, strong jaw, and height; he is also the only one without a beard. Régis treasured the image as the sole proof that the Founder enlisted in the Union army, but it answers none of the obvious follow-up questions: the unit, the date of enlistment, or whether he fought in major battles. As with the cameo, the surviving artifact confirms something important while leaving its surrounding history largely silent.

Evidence, Gaps, and Afterlife

Loïc’s relationship to the papers changes as events gather around them. At first, a translation deadline limits him to a hurried, diagonal reading. He then regrets having paid too little attention when Régis spoke about the jewel, and the newly learned disappearance of Roger Bolduc with the cameo makes systematic examination seem urgent. Loïc wonders whether an earlier study of the archive might have prevented the jewel’s theft, but cannot know whether that would have changed anything. The records intensify his sense of a history that might have been interrupted or recovered, without proving that any particular outcome could have been prevented.

The archive also preserves Régis’s interpretation of the Founder’s secrecy. He considered whether the cameo might have been stolen or looted and whether guilt could have led the Founder to conceal it, eventually sewing it into his scapular so that it would be buried with him. The jewel’s scratch, its possible mythological identity, and its journey into the family all feed the inquiry, but the papers do not turn those suspicions into established fact. Régis’s own research distinguishes clues from answers; Loïc’s reading sometimes adds new conjectures of its own.

That distinction matters when evidence about the cameo appears beyond the archive. Rodrigo shows Loïc a blurry photograph from an old wallet; its resemblance to the Founder’s cameo troubles him, but the image is too indistinct to settle identification. Later, a sharp printed photograph and a USB drive lead Charles de C... to recognize the old scratch—but also to see that the mark has been recently imitated. The image therefore points to a counterfeit, not proof that the original stone has been recovered. The documents have revived the search and supplied its historical framework, yet the distinction between the authentic object and its reproductions remains unresolved. As a narrative object, the archive makes inheritance an act of reading: the family’s past survives in material fragments, but every conclusion must contend with missing pages, ambiguous marks, and the difference between what a record says and what its readers infer.