Régis Discovers the 1842 Baby Rescue Record is the breakthrough that joins the family’s uncertain American origins to the cameo’s history: a Jesuit account records that the infant who became the Founder was found alive in 1842 with a cameo pinned to his swaddling. The discovery displaces theories of theft and wartime plunder with a more intimate, still incomplete history of rescue, adoption, and inheritance. Régis found the record in 1999; Loïc later encountered it among Régis’s papers and understood that the jewel had accompanied the Founder from the beginning.

The Cameo as an Unsolved Provenance

Régis’s archival discovery capped a long inquiry into an object whose damaged surface made its identity difficult to establish. An old scratch obscured part of the engraved figure, leaving open whether the image represented a mythological character or a real person. Close inspection offered only partial clues: traces of mythological attributes, the outline of clothing, and the style and period of the carving. The mark was not a minor defect; it impeded identification and made the cameo’s past harder to reconstruct.

Régis responded by studying stone engraving and consulting European specialists while presenting himself as an amateur interested in gems and lapidary art. He kept the family connection to the object to himself. His inquiries led him to date the cameo at least to the eighteenth century, possibly the seventeenth, and to identify its workmanship as Italian. He came to believe that it depicted one of the mythological twins, Castor or Pollux, and therefore belonged to a pair. A brief eighteenth-century catalogue entry he found at the Bibliothèque nationale de France supported that possibility: it listed Castor and Pollux cameos in the collection of the Duke of Orléans, but did not trace their later whereabouts.

The Paris exhibition that Régis attended supplied a further link. Photographs showed a pair of cameos depicting the Dioscuri facing one another, each holding a horse by the bridle and carrying a spear, with a star-topped, oval helmet. The exhibition record described five-layer onyx and said the pair had once belonged to the Regent’s collection before being separated after the Revolution. The surviving twin was in a private collection; the Castor cameo was considered lost, perhaps amid the upheaval of the Revolution. This clarified the family object’s likely aristocratic provenance, but did not explain how it had reached the Founder.

The Search in the Jesuit Archives

After learning in Paris that the cameo belonged to a lost historical pair, Régis told his brother Georges what he had found. Georges remained unconvinced that the discovery ruled out a Civil War-era origin: the stone might still have been taken as spoils from a dead officer or a wealthy Southerner’s home, or the family’s cameo might be an imitation. The unresolved question—how the jewel came into the family’s possession—sent Régis back to his research.

In spring 1999, he obtained permission to search Jesuit archives in Montreal. The breakthrough came through a separate archival trail. An American baptismal extract, which had been found by chance in the Founder’s safe, placed the ancestor’s baptism in Florissant, Missouri, in 1842. Régis knew that Belgian Jesuits had worked in the St. Louis region and that the priest who signed the extract had identified himself with the initials of the Society of Jesus. An earlier visit to Jesuit records in Montreal had yielded nothing. After retiring from the Senate, Régis renewed the search, secured an introduction to the provincial of French Canada, and was directed to a collection at Saint Louis University that could hold records from the Florissant parish.

There he found a stained, time-damaged manuscript, carefully written enough to remain legible. Its account described a living infant in the arms of a young woman who had died of exposure beneath the snow near St. Louis in 1842. Pinned to the baby’s swaddling was a silk purse containing a finely made cameo. The document thus placed the jewel beside the child before the Founder’s adoption and before the D’Anjou family’s later possession of it. Régis recorded his excitement in his journal on June 11, 1999, calling the manuscript the key to the Founder’s origins and the missing proof in the cameo’s history.

What the Record Established—and What It Left Open

The manuscript overturned two explanations that had persisted around the family jewel. If the cameo was pinned to the rescued infant, it was not simply a later acquisition taken from a battlefield or stolen from another owner by the Founder. Régis concluded that it was neither stolen property nor a war trophy. The record gave the object a documented association with the infant at the moment he entered the surviving family history, though it did not establish how the unknown woman had obtained it or identify the cameo’s owners before that point.

The account also changed the meaning of the Founder’s American baptismal record. The two documents, read together, placed him in Missouri in 1842 and connected his origins to a rescue rather than to an already-known family line. The baptismal extract had been concealed in his safe; its rediscovery had itself been prompted by the need to secure the cameo in Quebec after Guillaume’s death. The rescued child, the hidden paper, and the jewel therefore came together through separate acts of preservation and investigation, not through a single complete family record.

Régis’s account noted that the Jesuits had intended to baptize the child once they could find adoptive parents. The baptismal entry was dated December 1, only days after the rescue account. It named the child Éloi and recorded his adoption by a young French-Canadian couple, the D’Anjous, who had not yet had a child. The later form Élie D’Anjou appears to have arisen from uncertainty in the handwriting: the ink blurred the final vowels enough for the name to be read either way. Régis photographed the old register, preserving the evidence while exposing a small clerical ambiguity that would follow the Founder’s identity.

Loïc’s Reading of the Discovery

The discovery entered the novel’s later action through Loïc’s reading of Régis’s papers. He found the manuscript among his cousin’s documents and recognized it as the missing link proving that the Founder’s connection to the cameo began at birth. The record also gave historical substance to an image that had recurred in Loïc’s mind: a woman struggling through snow. What had seemed like a private, fantastical vision now corresponded to an archival account of a woman’s death and a child’s survival.

Régis’s journal allowed Loïc to follow not only the conclusion but the research that had produced it: the baptismal extract, the earlier failure to find supporting material in Montreal, the renewed search after retirement, and the redirection to the Saint Louis University collection. Loïc could then extend the inquiry using online records and newspaper archives through the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., resources Régis had not used. The record therefore closes one argument about the cameo’s arrival while opening a larger investigation into the unknown woman, the child’s origins, and the chain of events that brought both the infant and the jewel into the D’Anjou family’s history.