The Cameo’s Connection to the Castelmont Family

The Cameo’s Connection to the Castelmont Family is the history of a pair of carved stones whose division binds the Castelmont twins to one another and, eventually, links one branch of their story to the D’Anjou family. A gift from Louis XVI becomes an inheritance, a concealed means of survival, and a material clue in a later investigation. Yet the cameos also expose the limits of family claims: documents and likenesses establish a persuasive history, while the identity and authenticity of the stone received in New York remain contested.

A Royal Pair and Its Earlier Provenance

Régis’s investigation traced the cameos to an eighteenth-century collection. A catalogue consulted at the Bibliothèque nationale de France recorded a pair representing Castor and Pollux among the possessions of the Duke of Orléans, who became Regent after the death of Louis XIV in 1715. The catalogue did not explain what happened to the jewels afterward. Régis could not establish whether they entered the royal collection or who held them during the upheavals of the French Revolution. Their early provenance was therefore suggestive rather than complete: a documented pair, followed by a gap in the record.

The images and the stone itself supplied another kind of evidence. In the 1940s, Régis began researching the family cameo, whose surface was scratched badly enough to obscure the engraved figure. He studied lapidary art and consulted European experts while presenting himself as an enthusiast rather than disclosing that the object belonged to his family. Their assessments placed it in the seventeenth or eighteenth century and identified its workmanship as Italian. Details visible under a magnifying glass—including traces of mythological attributes, clothing, and the style of the engraving—helped him conclude that the figure was one of the mythological twins. If the family stone represented one Dioscurus, Régis reasoned, it probably belonged to a pair.

That hypothesis acquired powerful confirmation in Paris. At a private exhibition organized by Christie’s with European museums and private collections, Régis saw a photograph of a cameo resembling the one associated with his grandfather, alongside an older engraving of the family jewel before it had been scratched. The exhibition showed the two figures standing opposite one another, each holding a horse by the bridle and carrying a spear, with a star-topped, egg-shaped cap. Its records described five-layer onyx with a dark upper layer and stated that the pair had once belonged to the Regent. After the French Revolution, one stone had entered an aristocratic family’s private collection; the other, identified as Castor, was considered lost, probably amid revolutionary disturbances. The display confirmed the pair’s history more clearly than it resolved the route by which either stone had traveled.

The Castelmont Twins and the Division of the Stones

The later family tradition connected the pair to Delphine de Castelmont, a close childhood friend of Louis XVI. A letter copied by Loïc from the correspondence of Louis-René Chaussegros de Léry reported that the king had presented a pair of cameos to a countess whose name the writer recalled uncertainly as something like Castelmaure. The gift celebrated the birth of her twin sons. Another account, found in the memoirs of the Marquise de Créquy, recalled the countess’s wish to present her quarrelsome twin boys to the king. Together, these fragments supported the identification of Delphine as the recipient, though the surviving accounts did not provide a single, uninterrupted record of the gift.

The stones gained a second significance as the family faced the French Revolution. In 1794, after the Castelmont household had been massacred at Château de Barzac, Delphine was arrested because of her association with the deposed king, Louis XVI. Before her execution, she entrusted one cameo to each son and made them promise never to part with the stones. She had the jewels sewn into their clothing. Louis received the Castor cameo; Charles received Pollux. The paired objects thus became both family inheritances and practical emblems of a divided household: each boy carried one half of a history that their mother had tried to preserve.

The twins escaped separately and remained divided by more than geography. Louis fled to England and then crossed to America, eventually settling in Missouri near Carthage, while Charles joined the émigrés in Germany before returning to France. During the Bourbon Restoration, Charles recovered the family’s European lands, believing his brother gone for good. Louis later returned to press his claim, relying on his right of primogeniture because he had been born minutes before Charles. Charles rejected his identity and inheritance claims and, according to the records Loïc pieced together, made repeated attempts to have him killed. The brothers’ rivalry made the cameos’ separation part of a larger conflict over recognition, property, and who could legitimately represent the family.

From the American Branch to the D’Anjou Founder

The proposed route from Louis to the D’Anjou family rests on a sequence of clues rather than an unbroken chain of ownership. Louis returned to America after the inheritance dispute and settled in Missouri. Loïc’s reconstruction suggested that Charles may eventually have found his brother there and arranged an attack on his ranch, possibly using intermediaries and Sioux assailants. That account remains an inference: the surviving material did not prove that Charles ordered the assault or that recovering the cameo was its purpose. Loïc considered the possibility that the attackers searched the property, found nothing because a servant had escaped with the child and jewel, and then set the ranch on fire.

The cameo’s appearance with the child who became the D’Anjou Founder gave the family connection a documentary anchor. In a manuscript account Loïc found among Régis’s papers, a Jesuit described a living infant discovered in 1842 in the arms of a young woman frozen beneath the snow near St. Louis, Missouri. A small silk purse containing a finely made cameo was pinned to the baby’s swaddling clothes. The woman, buried without a name in the parish cemetery of Saint-Ferdinand, was remembered by the Jesuits as an unknown saint. Loïc wondered whether she might have been his ancestor and whether the Founder had therefore been accompanied by the cameo from the cradle to the grave.

The baptismal record helped identify the child as the future Élie D’Anjou. The Jesuits had sought adoptive parents, and a French-Canadian couple, the D’Anjous, took in the infant. The name entered in the register appears to have shifted from Éloi to Élie, perhaps because the handwriting and ink made the final vowels hard to distinguish. The manuscript and baptismal record established the child’s American beginnings and the cameo’s presence at his discovery; they did not, on their own, settle every step connecting that object to the Castelmont pair. Régis’s Paris research and Loïc’s archival discovery made the proposed connection compelling, but the narrative preserves the difference between evidence of an object’s appearance and proof of every prior transfer.

Claims, Copies, and Unresolved Authenticity

Within the D’Anjou family, the cameo was both a historical puzzle and a guarded secret. The Founder reportedly told Marthe that he had been adopted, knew nothing of his birth family, and kept in his safe a valuable stone from the United States, his country of origin. He feared the object as malignant and concealed it in his scapular, sewn into his clothing, intending to be buried with it and to end discussion of it. This testimony ties the stone to his private knowledge of his origins, while also showing how secrecy delayed the family’s understanding of its own history.

Centuries after the twins’ separation, the two family lines again converged around competing claims to a cameo. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, Charles de Castelmont claimed the recovered stone in his own name, presenting documentation that Desbois was his agent and supplying a photograph of the Pollux cameo that had remained in the family’s possession. But when Charles later examined a clear photograph of the Castor cameo received from New York in 2003, he recognized the familiar old scratch and saw that it had been imitated recently. The D’Anjou family, too, had received a counterfeit. The matching fakes restored the question to its starting point: the family histories explain why both branches claimed the object, but the New York substitution left unresolved whether the stone held by the Founder had been the genuine Castor cameo. The pair functions at once as a sign of kinship and as an imperfect test of it—an inheritance whose meaning is clearer than its final material identity.