Régis Finds Clues to the Founder's Origins in Jesuit Archives

Régis’s discovery in Jesuit archives gives the family’s enigmatic cameo a documented point of origin: in 1842, a living infant was found near St. Louis with a cameo attached to his swaddling. The record connects the stone to the Founder from the beginning of his life, recasts the family’s account of its ancestry, and turns an object long treated as a possible theft or war trophy into evidence of an adoption whose full circumstances remain uncertain.

The Cameo and the Questions of Provenance

The investigation began decades before the archival breakthrough. From his first research in the 1940s, Régis recognized that the Founder’s cameo appeared European and was likely associated with an aristocratic family, but its route to the Founder was unknown. It might have remained with its original owner, passed through several hands, been sold, or been stolen on its way to America. An old scratch complicated the inquiry: it obscured the engraved figure, leaving Régis to decide from partial mythological attributes, clothing, and style whether the image represented a mythological figure or a historical person.

Régis pursued the question as a specialist would. He studied lapidary, or the art of engraving stones, and consulted European experts during his travels while presenting himself as an amateur interested in gems and stone carving. He withheld the fact that the object belonged to his family. These consultations persuaded him that the cameo was Italian and dated at least to the eighteenth century, perhaps the seventeenth. He came to believe that it depicted one of the mythological twins Castor and Pollux, and inferred that the family stone must once have belonged to a pair.

In the 1960s, Régis searched the Bibliothèque nationale de France for written records of engraved stones. An eighteenth-century catalogue listed a pair representing Castor and Pollux in the collection of the Duke of Orléans, who would become Regent after the death of Louis XIV. The catalogue did not trace the pair’s later history. They might have entered the royal collection after the Regent’s death in 1724, but the inventory of royal possessions made during the Revolution did not mention them. Régis considered whether the brothers of Louis XVI had taken the stones into exile, or whether the pair had passed to another princely or aristocratic family in Germany or England. The possibilities multiplied while the provenance remained open.

Paris Reveals the Missing Twin

A later exhibition at Christie’s brought Régis closer to an answer. Organized with private collections and museums in France and elsewhere in Europe, it displayed engraved stones and photographs of cameos whose whereabouts had been lost. Among them, Régis saw a photograph of a cameo that closely resembled the one associated with his grandfather. Beside it was an old engraving of the supposedly missing stone, showing the Founder’s cameo without its familiar scratch. The image brought back Régis’s memory of examining the family object after it had been exhumed from the Founder’s grave.

The paired images made the relationship legible. The two figures stood facing one another, each holding a horse by the bridle and carrying a spear; both wore egg-shaped caps topped with stars. The exhibition described the stones as five-layer onyx, with a dark upper layer, and confirmed that the pair had belonged to the Regent’s collection. After the Revolution they had been separated: one remained in a private collection belonging to an unnamed family of the old French aristocracy, while the Castor cameo was considered lost, probably amid the revolutionary upheaval. Régis now knew the family relic’s aristocratic provenance, but the exhibition could not explain how it had reached the Founder.

The discovery sharpened rather than settled the question. After returning, Régis told his brother about the Paris evidence, but Georges continued to argue that the cameo might have been taken as plunder during the American Civil War. He also questioned whether the stone attributed to Élie D’Anjou might be an imitation. In the spring of 1999, the new lead sent Régis back to the archives. His research had connected the family object to an aristocratic pair, but a documentary link between the cameo and the Founder was still missing.

The Jesuit Manuscript

Régis had already found a copy of the Founder’s baptismal entry in his safe. It recorded an American origin in Florissant, near St. Louis, in 1842, and bore the signature of a priest marked with the initials of the Society of Jesus. Régis had once consulted Jesuit records at Collège Sainte-Marie in Montreal without success. After retiring from the Senate of Canada, he resumed the search and arranged to meet the new provincial of French Canada, whose favorable opinion of Régis helped direct him to an archive at Saint Louis University, where records concerning the parish of Saint-Ferdinand might survive.

There he found a damaged but carefully written manuscript describing an infant discovered alive in 1842 in the arms of a young woman who had frozen to death beneath the snow near St. Louis. Pinned to the baby’s swaddling was a silk purse containing a finely made cameo. The account described the woman as bearing the marks of hardship and noted a small wooden cross at her neck. The parish community buried her without a name in the cemetery of Saint-Ferdinand. The manuscript regarded her as the baby’s rescuer and planned to baptize him once adoptive parents could be found.

In his journal entry of June 11, 1999, Régis recognized the record as the missing evidence. The account showed that the cameo had accompanied the infant, not that it had been stolen from an aristocratic owner or taken as battlefield plunder. It also opened a new path into the Founder’s origins while leaving the identity of the dead woman and the circumstances that brought her and the child to the snow-covered area unresolved. The archive supplied a crucial link, not a complete biography.

Adoption, Naming, and the Record’s Afterlife

Loïc later read the manuscript among Régis’s papers and followed its details into the family’s history. He connected the unknown woman to his recurring mental image of a woman struggling through snow, which had seemed fantastical until the archival account gave it a historical setting. The document says the infant was baptized on December 1 and adopted by a young French-Canadian couple from St. Louis, the D’Anjous. It records the child’s name as Éloi. Loïc reasoned that the later form Élie may have arisen because the writing in the baptismal register was unclear and ink had blurred the final vowels; the Founder was thereafter known as Élie D’Anjou.

The new evidence also clarified the importance of a family secret. The Founder had told Marthe that he was adopted, knew nothing of his birth family, and did not want his origins discussed. He said that a valuable stone in his safe troubled him because it came from the United States, his country of origin. He feared the object as malign, hid it inside his scapular, and sewed it into his clothing, intending to be buried with it and have the matter forgotten. The manuscript makes the connection between the infant and the cameo explicit, while the Founder’s account preserves his lifelong unease about the object and his unknown beginnings.

Régis’s discovery thus changes both the family’s understanding of the stone and the shape of the investigation. A scratched object first approached through stylistic clues and conjectured ownership becomes part of a documented rescue and adoption. The manuscript does not identify the dead woman or prove every detail of the Founder’s ancestry, but it relocates the mystery: the question is no longer simply how a European aristocratic cameo crossed the Atlantic. It is also who carried it with the infant, and what history lay behind their arrival in Missouri. Régis established the archival link; Loïc’s later work, including searches of digitized judicial records and newspapers through the Library of Congress, continued the inquiry beyond what the manuscript could say.