The Fire at Barzac Castle

The Fire at Barzac Castle is the catastrophic climax of a celebration that reunites the Castor and Pollux cameos: the château is consumed by an immense blaze, Charles de Castelmont and seven other people are reported among the victims, and the paired stones vanish beneath the ruins. The cause remains uncertain. For Loïc, the fire’s extraordinary force connects the cameos to a history of violence and suggests that their reunion may have released a destructive power, though the story never establishes this as fact.

A celebration built around reunion

The fire begins at the end of a sumptuous night at the Barzac estate. Charles has arranged a large sound-and-light show recounting the history of the château and its grounds. A string orchestra and a jazz group take turns on a makeshift stage in the gardens, while the two cameos, finally brought together, are displayed beneath spotlights in an armored case described as resembling a safe. The occasion makes the stones both the evening’s centerpiece and its most carefully guarded objects.

Jeff attends with Maggie, dressed casually but elegantly. He seems darker and less talkative than usual, while Charles introduces him to business and political acquaintances he wants to impress. Jeff also spends some time speaking privately with Mirbeau, then leaves early because he is due to fly back to New York City the next morning. These details place him at the celebration without resolving his connection to what follows.

The party lasts late into the night, its brilliance giving way to a vast fire. The blast is heard and seen from miles away, but the narrative offers no confirmed explanation for it. Electrical equipment used for the spectacle, with its many cables and connections, is raised as a possible cause, not identified as one. The movement from illuminated display to devastating conflagration makes the celebration’s elaborate apparatus an immediate object of suspicion, while leaving open whether the catastrophe can be explained by ordinary means.

News reaches Loïc

Loïc and Laurence are in southwestern France, not far from Barzac but too distant to hear the fire engines racing toward the estate. They have arrived at Albignac to help Laurence’s parents rearrange rooms in the château where the couple’s parents now intend to live permanently. Paris has come to seem increasingly unsafe to them, and they have put their apartment on Quai Saint-Michel up for sale. Their proximity to Barzac is striking, but they do not witness the fire.

The next morning, the commotion and the château owners’ voices wake the couple. The count tells Loïc that the Castelmont château has burned and that the news is everywhere. Loïc immediately turns to his tablet. News reports describe a disaster in the Bordeaux region and the death of a pomerol producer in a château ravaged from end to end. Images show the still-smoking ruins of Barzac, with only remnants of stone walls visible. Loïc and Laurence spend the day following the reports with her parents, trying to learn more.

The following day, the newspaper Sud Ouest gives further details. Charles and most of the seven other victims have been burned almost beyond recognition. The article includes a photograph taken by a journalist at the fatal party: Charles is displaying both cameos triumphantly. The image fixes the objects’ presence at the celebration, even as the fire makes their subsequent whereabouts impossible to establish.

The missing stones and the family’s history

The photograph troubles Loïc because the Castor cameo can be seen clearly enough for him to wonder whether it is the jewel of the Founder. That possibility conflicts with what Mathieu D’Anjou had told him: Mathieu had sent Charles a letter, and Charles had replied with an emphatic certificate claiming that the jewel in question was a counterfeit. The photograph therefore reopens an unresolved question about the stone’s identity and how Charles acquired it. Loïc considers whether it could have returned to the United States after passing through Cuba and then, by an obscure chain of reversals, ended up in Charles’s possession. The account presents this as speculation, not a solved provenance.

Nor can anyone determine whether either stone survived the collapse. The château has fallen in on itself, and the two cameos disappear together, perhaps crushed, pulverized, or destroyed. Charles seems to have had little time to display Castor beside Pollux. Loïc wonders whether the reunited stones, described as twin enemies, destroyed one another, and whether the Devil may finally have escaped from them. The fire thus converts their long-awaited reunion into another disappearance, leaving the central object of the celebration inaccessible beneath the wreckage.

An unexplained catastrophe

For Loïc, the blast’s scale echoes the collapse of the World Trade Center complex eighteen years earlier. In both cases, he sees a destruction that seems explosive and difficult to reconcile with familiar physical explanations. He also associates the Barzac fire with Ramondo Cardoso’s combustion in Cárdenas and with the mysterious traces reportedly found in the snow when the cameo came out of the ground at Touladi. These parallels are part of Loïc’s way of interpreting the event; they do not prove a common cause.

His intuition leads him to imagine that the energies of the two stones, reunited, might have produced an exceptional force of destruction, even one comparable to nuclear fission. He connects this possibility to the curse believed to have gathered around the cameos and to the hatred between the rival brothers that the stones may have absorbed like batteries. In this reading, violence held within the objects returns with multiplied force after a long accumulation. The novel leaves that explanation unsettled: the fire may have begun with the show’s electrical equipment, or it may exceed what Loïc understands as ordinary physical causation. What is certain is the reversal at its heart: the cameos are brought together for public display, and the celebration ends with both apparently lost and the château reduced to ruins.