The Cameo’s Disappearance from the Bank Vault

The Cameo’s Disappearance from the Bank Vault turns a missing heirloom into a crisis of family history: the stone was treated as both priceless property and the likeliest key to the D’Anjou family’s ancestry, yet its identity and route of transmission remain uncertain. The loss first came to light when Georges D’Anjou found a plastic imitation in place of the cameo in the family’s bank box. Subsequent inquiries connected the disappearance to Roger Bolduc and the World Trade Center attacks, but the apparent recovery of the jewel from New York proved to be another deception rather than a resolution.

Discovery and the First Suspicions

On September 14, 2001, at his Grande-Allée home in Québec, Georges announced to the assembled family that the cameo was gone from its bank box. He had thought it was there the previous week, but on checking more carefully that day, recognized that the object he had mistaken for the heirloom was a plastic imitation. He displayed the false stone and flung it onto a nearby table. The missing piece, he stressed, was the cameo associated with his grandfather, reportedly recovered from the ancestor’s grave and regarded as a probable key to the family’s origins.

Georges could not say when the substitution had taken place. He believed it was recent: the previous spring, he had changed the bank box and transferred the cameo, and, as he understood it, no one had touched it at that time. That account established a possible interval, not a proven date or method of theft. The family had an imitation in hand, but no clear evidence of who had replaced the original or when.

A Relic Bound to the Family’s Origins

The loss mattered because the cameo’s family significance had accumulated around an incomplete history. Marthe D’Anjou recalled that Le Fondateur had confided that he was adopted, had been born in the United States, and knew nothing of his original family. He kept a valuable stone in his safe, feared it as something malign, and eventually hid it in his scapular, sewing it into his clothing so that he could be buried with it. The object’s return from the grave thus linked family memory to a secret the ancestor had wanted left undisturbed.

Later archival research made that connection more concrete without settling every question. A damaged manuscript found among Régis D’Anjou’s papers described a living infant discovered in 1842 near St. Louis, Missouri, beside a woman who had frozen to death. A well-made cameo in a torn silk purse had been pinned to the baby’s swaddling clothes. Loïc connected the account to Le Fondateur: the infant was baptized Éloi and adopted by a young French-Canadian D’Anjou couple, and the name appears to have shifted to Élie through an ambiguity in the baptismal record. The manuscript therefore linked the cameo to the founder from infancy, while leaving the woman’s identity and the stone’s earlier history unresolved.

The Cameo’s Uncertain Provenance

Régis’s investigation had treated the stone as an object whose appearance could offer clues but not a complete history. An old scratch obscured the engraved figure, making it difficult to determine whether it represented a mythological figure or a historical person. By studying lapidary work and consulting European experts, Régis concluded that the piece was Italian and dated from at least the eighteenth century, possibly the seventeenth; he came to believe it represented Castor and belonged to a pair with Pollux.

A catalogue entry he found described a pair of Castor-and-Pollux cameos once held in the collection of the Duke of Orléans, later the Regent. Their subsequent passage was unknown, and the royal inventory made during the French Revolution did not list them. At an invitation-only Christie’s exhibition in Paris, Régis saw an old engraving of a cameo resembling the family stone and a photograph of its apparent twin. The display identified the pair as five-layer onyx and said that they had been separated after the Revolution: the Pollux cameo had entered a private collection, while the Castor cameo was believed lost. This evidence gave Régis a persuasive account of the family object’s possible origins, but it did not establish an unbroken chain of ownership or prove that the stone in the family’s possession was the original.

New York, Counterfeits, and the Unresolved Loss

After the disappearance, Georges sent New York authorities photographs and a precise description of the cameo, together with information about its historical and family value, to supplement the file concerning Roger Bolduc. The family considered whether Roger might have encountered the mysterious Patrice Desbois at or near the World Trade Center complex and whether the jewel might be among the wreckage. Georges also tried to keep the matter from the press, fearing that public scrutiny would expose both the family’s history and the disappearance of the object.

The search produced a misleading appearance of recognition. When Rodrigo Lerbier showed Loïc a small, blurred photograph of a cameo, Loïc could discern only a troubling resemblance and withheld his certainty. Later, Charles de Castelmont examined a clearer photograph of the stone he had received from New York in 2003. Its conspicuous scratch looked recent and imitated, not like the old damage on the family cameo. He concluded that the D’Anjous had received the same counterfeit he had received: New York authorities had apparently sent two false cameos in response to separate claims.

That discovery reset the investigation rather than closing it. It suggested that someone in New York had taken an ancient jewel and substituted replicas, but neither the thief nor the genuine stone’s present location was identified. The D’Anjous’ missing cameo, the apparent recovery sent to them, and the object received by Charles could no longer be treated as interchangeable evidence. The loss remained unresolved, and the central question persisted: whether the cameo once kept by Le Fondateur was itself the authentic Castor cameo, or another link in a history of separation, imitation, and uncertain possession.