The Reunion of the Twin Cameos

The reunion of the twin cameos is both the culmination of a decades-long pursuit and the prelude to catastrophe. On July 7, 2019, Charles de Castelmont displayed the Castor and Pollux cameos together at a lavish celebration at Château des Castelmont. Before dawn, an enormous explosion and fire had destroyed the château, killed Charles and most of the other victims, and left the stones’ survival uncertain. The reunion that Charles meant to make triumphant instead becomes the occasion for a final, unresolved mystery about the cameos’ power and fate.

The return of Castor

The celebration followed a theft and substitution carried out the previous April. While Jeff and Maggie kept watch nearby, John Robbart used concealed electronic surveillance to make sure the building was empty, disabled its alarm, and entered to take the cameo. He replaced it with a counterfeit supplied by Charles. The operation brought Charles the genuine Castor cameo he had pursued for more than twenty years: Jeff first told him the jewel was in hand, and Charles confirmed its authenticity when it was delivered to him at the Ritz.

Charles resolved to mark the stones’ reunion with a party at Château des Castelmont. The gathering took place on a Sunday, which was also his fifty-ninth birthday. In the bright afternoon, carefully selected guests arrived for aperitifs among outdoor tables. Waiters in gleaming eighteenth-century costumes, complete with tricorne hats and period wigs, moved between them, balancing trays overhead with a juggler’s skill. The elaborate staging made the reunion a public display as well as a private triumph.

A spectacle built around the stones

That evening, Charles commissioned a large sound-and-light show recounting the history of the château and its estate. A string orchestra and a jazz group took turns on an improvised platform in the gardens. Beneath spotlights, the two reunited cameos were displayed together in a reinforced glass case as secure as a safe, made conspicuous at the center of the celebration.

Charles moved among the guests with the stateliness of Louis XIV at the Palace of Versailles, flanked by a young, effeminate man wearing an earring and mascara. The narration suggests that this companion may have been a gift from Jeff, though it does not establish that as fact. Jeff attended with Maggie in smart-casual clothes, but seemed more withdrawn and less talkative than usual. Charles introduced him to business and political figures he hoped to impress. Jeff also spent time apart in conversation with Mirbeau, then left early: he was due to fly back to New York City the next morning. The narration pointedly wonders whether he suspected that police would be waiting for him at LaGuardia Airport, where his days would be numbered.

The celebration becomes a disaster

The party remained magnificent and flamboyant late into the night. Then a gigantic fire broke out. The account raises the sound-and-light installation—with its many cables, cords, and connections—as a possible cause, but does not settle the question. The explosion was so powerful, and the fire so destructive, that both could be seen and heard from miles away.

Loïc and Laurence were in the southwest of France, not far from Château des Castelmont but too distant to hear the sirens or the fire engines speeding toward the estate. They had arrived at Albignac to help Laurence’s parents rearrange rooms in the château where the parents planned to settle permanently with domestic help. Paris seemed increasingly unsafe to them, and they had put their apartment on Quai Saint-Michel up for sale. From the heights of the Lot, Loïc and Laurence might have seen a red glow in the western sky; the narration leaves even that possibility uncertain.

The next day, a regional newspaper reported that Charles and most of the seven other victims had been burned almost beyond recognition. Its account carried a photograph taken by a journalist at the party, showing Charles triumphantly holding the two cameos. The image unsettled Loïc: he could see Castor clearly and wondered whether it was the Founder’s jewel. His cousin Mathieu D’Anjou had already shared the letter he sent Charles and Charles’s categorical reply, which identified the jewel Mathieu had asked about as a counterfeit. The photograph therefore sharpened, rather than resolved, the question of how the genuine stone had reached Charles.

The cameos’ disappearance and its meaning

It remains unclear whether the stones survived beneath the wreckage. The château had collapsed, in a manner Loïc compared with the destruction of the World Trade Center eighteen years earlier, and the account evokes what seemed like explosive detonations. Charles had barely had time to exhibit Castor beside Pollux. The reunited stones might have remained intact, or been crushed, pulverized, or destroyed; no recovery is reported. Loïc wonders whether the hostile twins destroyed one another and whether, with them, the devil might finally have escaped from the stones. These are his conjectures, not confirmed explanations.

The scale of the explosion and fire seems to Loïc inexplicable under the known laws of physics. He associates it with two earlier mysteries: Ramondo Cardoso’s combustion in Cárdenas and the strange traces in the snow said to have appeared when the cameo came to light at Touladi. He imagines that the stones’ combined energies might have released an extraordinary destructive force, perhaps comparable to nuclear fission. In this reading, the cameos have stored the hatred of the hostile brothers like batteries; after violence has accumulated for generations, its release returns with the force of a boomerang.

The reunion thus offers no secure restoration or happy return. The stones are brought together in a carefully staged public display, but the celebration ends in death and ruin, and their disappearance together leaves their history unresolved. The contrast between the protected case and the collapsed château makes the promised triumph fragile: Charles can reunite and exhibit the cameos, but neither he nor the guests can master what the stones may carry.