Rome

Rome enters the narrative as a prospective research destination, not as a setting for a completed episode. Régis hoped to study there after the war, carrying photographs of the family cameo to compare with catalogues of engraved stones and pursue questions about the D’Anjou ancestor’s origins.

A Planned Research Journey

When the cameo had been recovered, Régis proposed photographing it, in color if possible. The images would serve both as an insurance precaution and as material for his planned studies in Rome the following year, provided the war had ended. He intended to take duplicate photographs with him and look for comparable examples in catalogues of lapidary art.

Guillaume D’Anjou agreed to arrange the photography through a photographer in Rivière-du-Loup who already worked in color. The plan therefore linked a practical measure for safeguarding the object to Régis’s longer historical inquiry: a record of the stone could travel even while the original remained securely held.

The Vatican Library and the Cameo Inquiry

Régis identified the Vatican Library as a particularly promising resource, saying that it preserved many catalogues of engraved stones, perhaps hundreds. He hoped that a close comparison might yield useful leads about the cameo and, through it, the family’s ancestry. Rome’s importance in this passage lies in the possibility of research: the city is imagined as a place where a large body of specialist material might help turn resemblance into evidence.

The planned comparison belonged to a wider investigation into the object’s uncertain history. Régis was trying to establish its origin and identity, while the cameo’s worn surface complicated the reading of its carved figure. The text does not say that he carried out the proposed research in Rome, consulted the Vatican Library, or found a match there; those outcomes remain unstated.

Rome as an Uncompleted Route

The narrative later describes other stages of Régis’s inquiry, including consultation of experts during European travels and a search for documentation in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Those episodes do not establish that he went to Rome. Instead, the Rome plan marks one intended route among several through which he hoped to trace the cameo’s provenance and resolve the family’s historical mystery.