Roger and Charles de C…'s Cameo Deal Plan

Roger Bolduc and Charles de Castelmont’s cameo deal was an elaborate attempt to turn a family heirloom into a saleable original while leaving the D’Anjou family with a convincing substitute. Conceived over years and set in motion through intermediaries, the plan brought private greed, family symbolism, and the World Trade Center together on September 11, 2001, when the collapse of the towers abruptly erased the expected conclusion and made the cameo’s whereabouts unknown.

Background and Stakes

In September 2001, at Château de Barzac, Charles watched the vineyard from his office window and checked his watch: the meeting in New York was due soon. The scene places his scheme beside the ordinary rhythms of the estate. The grapes were ripening in unusually favorable sunshine, and the Château Barzac 2001 vintage might be exceptional; at the same time, Charles believed he was nearing the end of five years of machinations to recover a cameo that was invaluable to him and his family.

The object mattered for more than its market price. Charles understood that the D’Anjou family kept it as a symbol and would be reluctant to part with that emblem even if its financial value remained buried with it. His solution was to separate the cameo’s symbolic function from the original stone: the family could keep an apparently ancient likeness, while Roger could realize the value of the authentic object. The proposal thus depended on preserving the appearance of continuity while secretly removing what made the heirloom materially unique.

The Proposed Exchange

Charles arranged the negotiations through his friend Pierre de Mirbeau in Paris, rather than approaching Roger directly under his own name. A recorded conversation from early September shows the basic bargain taking shape: the Paris intermediary presented the cameo as dormant wealth, and Roger agreed with that assessment. Charles’s use of a go-between and false identity made the discussion part of a concealed operation, not a straightforward family sale.

The substitute was to be made by taking an impression of the original and casting a copy in glass paste, a technique known since antiquity. In Charles’s calculation, the method could produce a replica difficult to distinguish from the original without an expert eye. The copy was to reproduce not only the cameo’s aged patina but also its distinctive scratch. Those details were essential: resemblance had to extend to the visible mark that could identify the family’s familiar stone.

Charles anticipated that the cameo in D’Anjou possession might itself already be a cast copy. He therefore dispatched an agent who was also an expert in gemstones, Franck Aubry, to determine at first inspection whether it was authentic. If it passed that test, Aubry was to arrange an impression and have a New York artisan, whom Charles knew as a somewhat disreputable craftsman, make the replacement. The arrangement required that Roger receive the copy within a few days and take it back to Québec; Charles treated delivery as a firm condition, not an incidental service.

Payment was also conditional. Charles would have the money transferred to Roger’s account in Switzerland only after Aubry certified the cameo as genuine. Roger pressed for a substantial sum, and Charles signaled that they could reach agreement on the amount. The sequence reveals how the scheme tried to control each risk in turn: verify the original, manufacture a marked replica, return that replica to Roger, and release the payment only once authenticity had been established.

The New York Meeting

The planned encounter was deliberately staged at the World Trade Center complex. Pierre de Mirbeau had told Charles that their man and his assistant in New York were waiting for Roger in an office there, a setting selected expressly to impress the Québécois. The imposing venue was therefore part of the negotiation’s design, while the presence of the New York intermediaries connected the meeting to the practical work of inspecting, copying, and delivering the cameo.

On September 11, Charles believed the plan was close to fruition. At a quarter to three, he watched the time and thought the meeting would soon take place. He went out onto the terrace to relax, then returned to his office around three when the telephone rang. That call came from his friend in Paris, but the account stops before giving its contents. The text therefore establishes Charles’s expectation and the arrangement in progress, not whether Roger actually met Aubry or whether the cameo was inspected.

Collapse and Aftermath

The attacks transformed Charles’s anticipation into personal alarm. As news came from New York, he responded as though the disaster had struck at the heart of his own affairs: the men, the meeting, and the object he meant to recover were caught in the collapse of the towers. The expected exchange had no confirmed outcome. Charles did not know whether Roger had managed to meet Aubry before the disaster, and the cameo’s fate became inseparable from the question of what, if anything, would be found in the wreckage.

In the days that followed, Charles reconsidered the object’s disappearance. He had thought the cameo’s fate might be ominous, yet also reasoned that its loss could spare his family an embarrassment and protect the honor of its ancestors. That attempted consolation did not settle the matter: he kept asking himself whether the cameo might be recovered. The possibility made the lost heirloom newly actionable, even amid the catastrophe.

Charles listened several times to the recorded conversation with Roger, hearing the evidence of a deal that could implicate him. He removed the disc from the player and considered destroying it. Before doing so, he realized that a cameo recovered from the ruins might offer another opportunity to claim it, whatever condition it was in. Four days passed before he decided to act. Through his Paris accomplice, he planned to send New York authorities a detailed description and photograph of the jewel so he could recover it if it emerged from Ground Zero, and so that Roger’s family would not make the same claim first.

That effort carried its own complication: Aubry had been working in New York under the name Patrice Desbois, so Charles would have to proceed through Aubry’s family. Since Aubry was a widower without children, his brother was his closest relative. Charles’s intermediary could offer the brother a small reward in return for signing an official request to New York City authorities. The transaction that had begun as a covert exchange had thus become a contest over a possible recovery claim, with Charles still trying to secure the cameo after the original plan’s outcome had vanished into the ruins.