The Culture of Death and Abortion

The Culture of Death and Abortion is a recurring interpretive frame through which the novel connects Loïc’s grief over an aborted pregnancy with his later confrontation with incurable illness, requests for death, and the limits of care. The connection is not a simple equation: the abortion is a decision made by Loïc and Brigitte, while Lucille (Alzheimer’s patient)’s decline and death unfold amid cognitive incapacity, dependence, and her repeated pleas to Georges D’Anjou. The narrative makes the language of death expansive and sometimes apocalyptic, but also grounds it in the specific consequences of intimate decisions and family care.

The Abortion and Its Afterlife

An unexpected pregnancy begins with a double ovulation that the Ogino method failed to prevent. Loïc and Brigitte quickly decide against having a child and proceed with an abortion. The compressed account of the decision gives way to a much longer emotional aftermath: Loïc remembers walking morosely through a freezing winter morning, between rows of dark trees that seem like mourners filing toward the nonexistent grave of the unknown child. The imagined funeral gives material shape to a loss that has no public burial or recognized body.

That absence becomes a source of persistent inner noise. Loïc imagines unborn children crying from prenatal limbo, their voices rising from a realm of non-memory and non-becoming, unable to reach the world. On nights during what he regards as a cursed year, their cries seem to strike the walls of silence. The writing enlarges his private remorse into a spectral chorus, but keeps its source clear: this is how Loïc experiences and imagines the abortion afterward, not an objective account of the dead speaking.

His imagery turns increasingly religious and mythic. He sees Satan at work and hears him laugh; he pictures missing Orpheuses and anonymous Eurydices among the aborted, while a pagan devourer consumes children offered as prey. These allusions make the abortion part of a wider imaginative landscape of sacrifice, loss, and punishment. They also show how guilt reshapes Loïc’s perception: the event becomes evidence, for him, of an evil that seems to recur throughout the world.

A Private Loss Made Cultural

Loïc’s distress eventually broadens into a judgment on his family, his generation, and his era. He thinks of an infanticidal age and a surrounding culture of decadence and death, interpreting the abortion as more than a painful relationship decision. That expansive diagnosis belongs to his bitter reflection; the novel establishes his feeling of condemnation without requiring the reader to accept it as a neutral social verdict.

The consequences in his own life are concrete. Loïc understands the abortion as bound up with the definitive end of his relationship with Brigitte. In the 1980s, he retreats to a chalet he has acquired in the Laurentides, set apart from the road beside a lake. He seeks solitude to recover, reconsider his life, and reconnect with the nature of his childhood and homeland. The withdrawal is also meant to keep him from seeking consolation in another romance. In this period he describes himself as socially stripped of his former identities, earning a living anonymously by translating administrative texts. The pregnancy’s aftermath thus extends beyond grief: it becomes part of a rupture with Brigitte and a crisis in Loïc’s sense of who he is.

Illness, Dependence, and the Wish to Die

The novel later places the language of death in a distinct and more demanding context: Lucille (Alzheimer’s patient)’s progressive illness. Her memory problems become unmistakable when, after turning seventy-five, she fails the examination required to continue driving and loses her licence. The loss restricts her independence and publicly exposes what a doctor diagnoses as Alzheimer’s disease. Her decline is further aggravated by prescribed anxiolytics combined with alcohol she continues to drink secretly; even going by taxi to the Château Frontenac becomes difficult, and walking risks her getting lost.

As confusion alternates with paranoia, Lucille (Alzheimer’s patient) sometimes becomes lucid enough to despair and say she wants to die. She repeatedly asks her husband, Georges D’Anjou, to find a way to end her life. At first he rebukes her, but her pleas wear down his resistance. She tries to enter his office because she knows he keeps a pistol there. Georges catches her and refuses to give it to her, explaining that the weapon is locked away and the ammunition stored separately. In a later desperate appeal, she tells him that she knows the Alzheimer’s disease is incurable, that she does not want to become lost in madness, and that she does not want her suffering imposed on her children and grandchildren. The scene gives her wish a personal and relational force, while also showing the distress and exhaustion surrounding the request.

Georges D’Anjou’s Deliberation and Lucille’s Death

In Québec in 2009–2010, Georges D’Anjou’s response develops from a vague, unwelcome thought into a project he considers with increasing precision. A former Superior Court judge, he struggles with the conflict between his identity as an officer of justice and the temptation to intervene in his wife’s inevitable decline. He reasons that death is approaching and imagines hastening it as an act of mercy that might spare Lucille (Alzheimer’s patient) and her family prolonged suffering. The narrative presents this reasoning as his deliberation, not as an uncomplicated ethical solution.

Georges considers using the death cap, a poisonous mushroom he knows from his earlier interest in mycology and has identified near their chalet in Pont-Rouge. He studies his mycology books again and discovers a serious obstacle to his plan: poisoning can begin with severe cramps, delirium, convulsions, vomiting, and diarrhea, while the later destruction of the kidneys and liver may take as long as three weeks. The method he had imagined as discreet would bring conspicuous and prolonged suffering. His detailed consideration therefore exposes the gap between an abstract wish to shorten suffering and the bodily reality of the means he contemplates. The supplied narrative establishes the plan and its moral and practical obstacles, but does not say that Georges carries it out.

Lucille (Alzheimer’s patient)’s death comes another way. A few days after Isabelle leaves again for Cuba, Lucille (Alzheimer’s patient) walks out of the large house at night while its alarm is disabled because of her illness. Barely dressed and wrapped in a sheet, she goes into the freezing December cold. No one sees her crossing the snow in the wind. At dawn she is found dead on the Plains of Abraham, at the place where Montcalm fell in 1759. Loïc later recognizes the location, and the novel places her death beside an image of another young woman found dead in the American Midwest with a baby wrapped in her arms. This ending gathers the book’s recurrent associations among snow, lost children, death, and collective memory, while leaving the relationship between Georges’s darkened intentions and Lucille (Alzheimer’s patient)’s final departure unresolved.