The Recovery of the Genuine Cameo from the Satanic Sect

The recovery of the Castor cameo from the Satanist Sect is the culmination of Charles de Castelmont’s decades-long pursuit of the missing twin to the Founder’s stone. In April 2019, John Robbart entered a building in Washington, D.C., stole the cameo, and left a counterfeit in its place. Charles received the recovered stone at the Hôtel Ritz Paris and believed it to be the genuine object; subsequent evidence, however, reopened the question of its authenticity.

The Cameo’s History and the Stakes

Régis D’Anjou’s investigation had established why the missing stone mattered. The Founder’s cameo was scratched badly enough to obscure the engraved figure, so Régis studied the carving under magnification, looking for remnants of mythological attributes, traces of clothing, and clues in the style. He then pursued lapidary studies and consulted European experts without revealing that the object belonged to his family. Their assessments led him to date it to at least the eighteenth century, possibly the seventeenth, and to identify its workmanship as Italian. He concluded that the figure was one of the mythological twins Castor and Pollux, and that the family stone must once have belonged to a pair.

A brief eighteenth-century catalogue had placed a pair of cameos depicting Castor and Pollux in the collection of the Duke of Orléans, later the Regent. Régis found no record of their subsequent fate in the royal inventory made during the French Revolution. He considered whether members of the royal family or other émigrés might have carried them abroad. In the 1960s, his research at the Bibliothèque nationale de France had produced a tantalizing mention, not a solution.

The decisive recognition came at a private exhibition organized by Christie’s with museums and private collections. There Régis saw a photograph of a cameo resembling the Founder’s and an old engraving of the Founder’s stone before it was scratched. The paired images showed the Dioscuri standing opposite one another, each holding a horse by the bridle and carrying a spear, with a star-topped, egg-shaped cap. The exhibition record described the stones as five-layer onyx, with a dark upper layer, and confirmed that the pair had once belonged to the Regent before being separated after the Revolution. The missing Castor had apparently vanished during the revolutionary upheaval. Régis’s discovery established a historical provenance, but not the later chain of custody that would lead to the attempted recovery.

Another document deepened the family mystery. Among Régis’s papers, Loïc Bolduc found a damaged manuscript describing a living infant discovered near St. Louis in 1842, in the arms of a young woman frozen to death beneath the snow. A silk purse containing a finely made cameo had been pinned to the baby’s swaddling clothes. Régis’s journal identified the account as the missing key to the Founder’s origins. The cameo was thus more than a lost aristocratic artifact: its possible connection to the Founder’s earliest history made its identity and provenance consequential to the D’Anjou family as well.

A Delayed Recovery Plan

Charles had set efforts in motion to recover the missing cameo after Régis’s visit to France, though Régis himself never learned Charles’s name. By the time the operation could proceed, the stone was no longer in Miami, where Jeff had known it to be displayed. Its disappearance raised the possibility that the sect’s leader had detected something or that the cameo had been moved to another lodge. Jeff and Charles had to establish that it was in Washington, D.C., and survey the site before attempting a theft. Charles’s legal troubles made caution necessary, and the uncertainty over the object’s location stretched the plan into months and then years.

Robbart’s access depended on an arrangement that kept the participants’ identities concealed. He was to enter the sect with help from an important, masked intermediary close to the FBI; the two would use pseudonyms, with Robbart called Gil. The operation’s apparent intelligence and secrecy did not remove its central obstacle: the target’s whereabouts remained uncertain. Once the cameo was understood to be in the capital, the recovery shifted from a stalled search to a carefully prepared break-in.

The Break-In and Charles’s Triumph

One night in April 2019, Robbart used concealed electronic listening devices to make sure the building was empty. With Jeff and Maggie keeping watch nearby, he disabled the alarm, entered, took the cameo, and substituted the counterfeit Charles had supplied. The exchange was designed to leave the theft undiscovered, at least initially: the genuine stone would be removed while its replacement occupied its place.

Jeff’s announcement that he had the cameo, followed by its delivery to Charles at the Hôtel Ritz Paris, turned a protracted pursuit into an apparent success. Charles examined the stone and believed it was the authentic Castor he had coveted for more than twenty years. The moment was presented as one of the great occasions of his life. His confidence rested not only on the recovered object but on the promise of reunion: the two cameos, separated since the Revolution, could now be brought together.

On July 7, Charles celebrated that reunion at Château de Barzac, on his fifty-ninth birthday. He had selected the guests with obsessive care. Staff in eighteenth-century clothing, including tricorne hats and wigs, served at outdoor tables as Charles used the gathering to display the recovered stone and impress political and business associates. Jeff attended with Maggie, spoke privately with Mirbeau, and left early to catch a flight to New York the next morning. The ceremony made the recovery public and triumphant, even as the object’s identity remained less secure than Charles believed.

The Authentication Reopened

The novel later complicates the apparent success. When Charles examined a clear photograph sent in connection with the D’Anjou family’s claims, he recognized the Castor cameo and its familiar scratch. Enlarging the image, he saw that the mark was recent and had been imitated. The D’Anjous, he concluded, had received the same counterfeit that he had received from New York in 2003. The evidence did not establish whether the cameo kept by the Founder’s ancestor was the genuine Castor; it returned the provenance question to its starting point.

That later discovery makes the 2019 recovery a turning point without making it a settled authentication. Robbart’s successful substitution establishes what the operation accomplished: a cameo was taken from the sect’s collection and delivered to Charles as the long-sought original. But the later counterfeit evidence leaves open whether the recovered stone was truly that original. The reunion feast therefore celebrates both a material acquisition and an unresolved claim, in which a scar once treated as a mark of identity can itself be reproduced.