Roger Bolduc Steals the Family Cameo

Roger Bolduc’s theft of the D’Anjou family cameo turns a missing heirloom into a family accusation: the original vanishes from a bank deposit box, a cheap plastic imitation takes its place, and the person best positioned to explain the disappearance has gone missing in New York. Isabelle D’Anjou’s concealed role makes the loss more than a mystery. She helped Roger gain access, then endured suspicion while keeping silent about the combination she had obtained for him.

Discovery and the false stone

On September 14, 2001, at the family’s house on Grande-Allée in Québec City, Quebec, Georges D’Anjou announced that the cameo had disappeared from its bank box. He had thought it was still there the previous week, he explained, but on checking more carefully that day he found that what he had taken for the family jewel was only a plastic imitation. He showed the false stone and flung it onto a nearby table with disgust. The substitution made absence tangible: the imitation was something the family could see, while the original—and its history—was beyond their reach.

For Georges, the loss threatened more than the value of an antique. The cameo had been found in his grandfather’s tomb and was considered a probable key to the family’s ancestry, as well as an irreplaceable part of its heritage. As he spoke, the family listened in shock. His gaze fell on the stern likeness of the Founder in a large portrait, linking the present scandal to the unresolved question of where the D’Anjous came from. The missing object thus carried both material and genealogical stakes: whoever possessed it had taken a family treasure and a possible clue to its origins.

Georges could not identify when the substitution had taken place. He said that he had changed bank boxes the previous spring and transferred the cameo then; at that point, nobody had yet touched it. That uncertain interval left the family without a precise account of the theft, but Roger’s secret trip to New York and disappearance after the September 11 attacks made him the leading suspect. The family wondered whether he had carried the cameo with him, how he could have removed it, and whether he was dead or had escaped. Those questions remained open even as suspicion gathered around his wife.

Access and complicity

The family’s discussion focused on the practical obstacle: how could Roger have reached the deposit box? Georges said that the key had been kept in the safe in his office. Alain D’Anjou asked which office he meant, at home or at his law practice, and Mathieu D’Anjou pointed out that Roger would have needed the safe’s combination. The exchange narrowed the mystery from a broad suspicion to a question of access. Roger’s apparent opportunity depended on knowledge held inside the family.

At first, the family looked to Isabelle for an explanation. Georges said he had already spoken with her at length and that she had told him all she knew; Roger had concealed many of his dealings from both his wife and her relatives. That account did not settle the matter. When the family again turned its eyes on her, Isabelle could no longer bear the implication that she was involved. She protested that she knew nothing about the affair and did not know how Roger could have done it, then broke down in tears. Her mother put an arm around her. The scene offered Isabelle immediate comfort, but not an escape from the family’s questions.

The later account reveals that the suspicion was justified, though the family did not yet know the full extent of her part. Roger had persuaded Isabelle that the cameo could make their fortune. She obtained Georges’s safe combination from her mother by exploiting her drunkenness, then passed on the access information that enabled Roger to take the jewel. Her assistance was not a direct confession in the family gathering: there, she denied knowledge; privately, she knew she had helped make the theft possible. The gap between her public denial and private guilt is central to the episode’s tension.

The planned fortune and its aftermath

The theft was tied to a shared expectation of sudden wealth. Two days before Roger’s trip to New York, Isabelle celebrated his forty-second birthday with him over champagne on the terrace of La Goéliche, on Île d’Orléans. They were excited by the prospect of the money they expected to make and imagined lavish cruises and stays on paradisiacal islands. In retrospect, the celebration sharpened into an image of complicity before the consequences arrived: Isabelle had participated in a plan that seemed to promise escape and abundance, only to be left with uncertainty about the jewel, the money, and her husband.

Roger had told her that the 2000 stock-market collapse of the technology bubble had nearly ruined him, but his hidden finances suggested otherwise. He had kept modest bank accounts in Québec, apparently to mislead tax authorities and perhaps Isabelle, while concealing most of his money abroad. The discovery intensified the family’s belief that he might have fled to start a new life, perhaps through dangerous international dealings. Some even suspected that his appointment at the World Trade Center had been fabricated as a false lead and that the September 11 attacks had offered cover for an escape. These remained suspicions, not established explanations; whatever Roger’s fate, the cameo was still missing, and he remained the person most likely to have taken it.

Isabelle’s knowledge made her position worse rather than safer. Her family’s discovery of Roger’s hidden accounts did not end its suspicions of her, and her own conscience added the burden of knowing that she had helped him. She could not simply confess to her mother, her closest confidante, because her mother believed she had never given Isabelle the combination. Admitting that she had taken advantage of her mother’s drunkenness risked alienating both parents. Isabelle therefore remained caught between revealing her complicity and continuing to bear the weight of a lie.

Significance of the theft

The episode makes the cameo’s physical substitution a miniature of the uncertainty surrounding the whole family. A plastic copy can occupy the box and briefly pass for the heirloom, but it cannot carry the original’s possible history or value. In the same way, the family sees an apparent explanation in Roger’s disappearance, yet cannot establish whether he stole the cameo and escaped, died in the attacks, or met some other fate. The substitution is confirmed; the object’s route and its taker’s final outcome are not.

The theft also converts family intimacy into a means of access. Roger’s plan depended not only on the cameo’s market value but on Isabelle’s trust, her mother’s confidence, and knowledge of Georges’s safe combination. The result is a double loss: the family loses the heirloom, while Isabelle loses the security of being believed by her relatives and the imagined future she had planned with Roger. The vanished original remains at the center of both mysteries, binding the family’s uncertain ancestry to its present mistrust.