Roger Bolduc—Charles de C...

Roger Bolduc and Charles de C... are joined by a secret, self-interested bargain over a family cameo: Charles plans to let Roger keep a convincing replica while recovering the original for himself. Their arrangement brings private family symbolism into collision with financial need, expertise, and deception. It never reaches a confirmed conclusion; the planned meeting in the World Trade Center complex is overtaken by the September 11 attacks, after which Charles tries to position himself to claim the jewel if it is found.

The bargain and its competing interests

By September 2001, Charles has spent five years scheming to obtain a cameo that he considers invaluable to himself and his family. Roger is the proposed seller, but Charles understands that the stone is not merely a marketable antique to the D’Anjou family: its symbolic significance makes them unwilling to part with it. The transaction is therefore designed to separate the object’s meaning from its material authenticity. The family would retain what appeared to be its cherished heirloom, while Roger would receive money for the original.

Charles puts this substitution scheme to Roger in a recorded telephone conversation made at the beginning of September. He presents it as a way for Roger to turn an asset kept buried and unproductive into financial security. Roger agrees that the cameo has substantial value, but insists that the payment must be substantial as well. The record establishes their willingness to negotiate, not the amount they settled on or that Roger ultimately received any money.

The proposal is calculated to satisfy two incompatible aims. Charles wants the authentic stone; Roger is offered a way to profit without leaving the D’Anjou family visibly deprived of its symbolic object. Charles even invokes the family’s attachment as part of his sales pitch, while treating that attachment as something the substitution can preserve and exploit. Their dealings thus depend on deception toward the family whose history gives the cameo its worth.

The planned substitution

Charles’s plan relies on making a copy difficult to distinguish from the original. He knows that an impression could be taken and a replica produced in glass paste, a method known since antiquity. The copy would need an aged appearance and, especially, a reproduction of the scratch marking the original. Because the D’Anjou-held cameo might itself already be a copy, Charles also builds authentication into the scheme: his own expert is to examine the stone before it is reproduced.

That expert is Franck Aubry, whom Charles dispatches to New York. Aubry is to determine at first inspection whether the cameo is genuine, arrange for an artisan Charles knows to make the impression and copy, and deliver the replica to Roger within a few days. Roger’s return to Québec without the copy is expressly made impossible under the terms of the proposed arrangement. Charles, meanwhile, is to have money transferred to Roger’s account in Switzerland once Aubry certifies the original as authentic. The authentication, fabrication, delivery, and payment are planned as linked steps; the evidence does not show that any of them was completed.

Charles avoids negotiating openly. He arranges for a Paris associate to conduct the discussions under a false identity, while the associate’s contact with him lets Charles follow the preparations. Ten minutes before Charles considers the New York meeting imminent, Pierre de Mirbeau calls from Paris to report that matters are proceeding as planned. Charles has been told that his man and an assistant in New York are waiting for Roger in a World Trade Center office chosen specifically to impress the Québécois. The setting, the intermediary, and the expert all belong to a carefully managed operation, not an informal sale.

September 11 and the broken transaction

On September 11, Charles is at Barzac Castle, in his office overlooking the estate’s vines. He checks his watch, anxious for the meeting’s outcome, and takes comfort in the approaching harvest and the prospect of an exceptional Château Barzac vintage. The cameo deal, five years in preparation, seems equally close to fruition. A telephone call around three in the afternoon brings him back inside from the terrace—but the New York encounter and the cameo’s fate are no longer matters he can control.

In the days after the collapse of the World Trade Center complex, Charles repeatedly wonders whether the cameo might be recovered. He cannot establish whether Roger had time to meet Aubry, so he does not know who might have been carrying the original, or where it might have been when the towers fell. The uncertainty matters: the plan has not produced a known transfer, and the catastrophe leaves the central fact of the transaction unresolved.

Aftermath and significance

Charles initially regards the cameo’s disappearance as perhaps a blessing in disguise. He fears that the object could prove embarrassing to his family and damage the honor of his ancestors. Yet he continues to wonder whether it might turn up in the ruins. After four days of hesitation, he decides to ask the New York authorities to notify him if it is found, sending a precise description and photograph through his Paris associate. He acts quickly in part to forestall a similar claim by Roger’s family.

Even this recovery effort requires another layer of indirection. Aubry worked in New York under the name Patrice Desbois, so the request must pass through Aubry’s family. Charles plans to secure the signature of Aubry’s accommodating brother by offering him a small reward. The proposed transaction therefore extends beyond buyer and seller: each attempt to secure the cameo depends on intermediaries, concealed identities, and competing claims to the object.

The relationship remains defined by a bargain whose completion is uncertain. Roger’s agreement to consider the substitution makes him a participant in Charles’s scheme, but the narrative does not confirm the meeting, the exchange, the payment, or the cameo’s recovery. The interruption also exposes the scheme’s central irony: Charles treats the jewel as both a prized family possession and a potential threat to family honor, while Roger is offered money to help detach its physical authenticity from its inherited meaning.