Roger Bolduc—Isabelle D’Anjou

Roger Bolduc—Isabelle D’Anjou is a marriage transformed into a conspiracy around the D’Anjou family cameo. Roger’s promise that the jewel could make their fortune draws Isabelle into helping him obtain it; after he vanishes, the secret they shared becomes the reason she is suspected, isolated, and increasingly unable to bear her own guilt.

Marriage and the Cameo Plan

Roger convinced Isabelle that the cameo could make them rich. She helped him by obtaining the combination to her father Georges D’Anjou’s safe from her mother, exploiting her mother’s drunkenness to get the secret. That act enabled Roger to take the family jewel. Isabelle was not simply a spouse kept outside his schemes: in this central undertaking, her knowledge and assistance made the theft possible.

The couple’s anticipation of the planned windfall had a vivid, intimate setting. They celebrated Roger’s forty-second birthday with champagne on the terrace of the La Goéliche inn on Île d’Orléans, two days before his trip to New York. They were excited by the money they expected to make and already imagining fabulous cruises and stays on paradisiacal islands. In retrospect, the celebration became inseparable from the plan: the shared dream of escape stood just before Roger’s departure and disappearance.

Secrecy and Disappearance

Roger’s journey was clandestine, and Isabelle’s early account of his absence did not resolve where he had gone. When Loïc called her in Québec, she sounded nervous and worried, said Roger was away travelling, and explained that she could no longer reach him on his mobile phone. She told Loïc he had gone to Toronto. Later, the D’Anjous treated Roger’s secret journey to New York, rather than that initial account, as a suspicious part of the case.

Roger’s disappearance after the September 11 attacks deepened the family’s suspicions. The relatives wondered whether he had taken the cameo to New York and what had become of both him and the jewel. Georges said Isabelle had already told him what she knew, while also explaining that Roger had hidden many of his affairs and dealings from her as well as from the family. Her knowledge was therefore both consequential and incomplete: she had helped secure the cameo, but the evidence did not establish what Roger did with it afterward or whether he survived.

The discovery of Roger’s hidden finances further damaged the trust surrounding the marriage. He had suggested that the 2000 technology-stock crash had nearly ruined him, yet he had kept only modest accounts in Québec to mislead the tax authorities and perhaps Isabelle, while concealing most of his money outside the country. The family consequently considered whether he had fled to begin another life, perhaps in international dealings, and even questioned whether his World Trade Center appointment had been invented to misdirect them. These remained suspicions, not confirmed explanations; what endured was the missing cameo and Roger’s role as the person most likely to have taken it.

Complicity and Aftermath

Isabelle could not escape suspicion by pointing to Roger’s secrecy or the hidden accounts. Her conscience tormented her because she knew about his plan and had helped him. She remembered their birthday celebration with growing bitterness, now seeing the champagne, the expected profit, and their imagined holidays through the knowledge of what she had done and the possibility that Roger had taken the money to enjoy those destinations alone.

Her predicament was also bound to a second secret: she could not confess to her mother, who believed she had never given Isabelle the safe combination. Telling the truth would expose Isabelle’s deception and risk estranging both her mother and her father; remaining silent meant continuing to bear the weight of the lie and the family’s suspicions. She felt trapped between confession and concealment, without the courage or moral strength to resolve the dilemma.

In autumn 2001, Isabelle’s existing tendency toward alcohol worsened. Alcohol no longer sufficed, and she began using cocaine. In early 2002 she nearly died of an overdose and was sent to rehabilitation. Georges suspected that Roger’s disappearance was not the only cause of her condition, but, as both her father and a judge, he struggled to find a way to release her from the burden of the crime that was consuming her. The novel thus presents the marriage’s consequences not as a settled account of Roger’s fate, but through the stark imbalance left behind: he disappears with the jewel and hidden wealth, while Isabelle remains with complicity, suspicion, and its devastating effects.