The theft of the D’Anjou family cameo turns a treasured relic into evidence of betrayal, while leaving open the deeper question of whether the family ever possessed the authentic stone. Georges D’Anjou announced its disappearance to his family in Québec on September 14, 2001: when he checked the bank deposit box, the supposed heirloom proved to be a plastic imitation. The missing cameo had been recovered from the Founder of the D’Anjou family’s tomb and was regarded as a possible key to the family’s ancestry. Its disappearance implicated Roger Bolduc, who had traveled secretly to New York City and vanished around the September 11 attacks, but the investigation would complicate the family’s first conclusions.

Discovery and Immediate Suspicion

Georges explained that he had changed the bank deposit box the previous spring and transferred the cameo then. He had initially thought the relic was still there, but on a closer inspection found only the imitation. He showed the false stone to the assembled family and tossed it onto a side table in disgust. For Georges, the loss was not merely financial: the cameo was an irreplaceable part of the family’s heritage, bound to the mystery of its ancestor’s origins.

The family’s attention turned to Isabelle D’Anjou. Her husband, Roger Bolduc, had gone to New York secretly and had been missing since the attacks. The timing and secrecy made him an obvious suspect, and his disappearance offered no account of what he had done with the object or where it might be. Georges said he had already questioned Isabelle, who did not know the full extent of her husband’s dealings. Alain, her elder brother, responded with open contempt for the Bolduc family, giving the suspicion a long-standing family hostility as well as a practical cause.

Isabelle’s Part in the Theft

The suspicion against Roger was eventually supported by a more painful disclosure: Isabelle had not been simply unaware of his plans. Roger persuaded her that the cameo could make them rich, and she helped him get access to it by obtaining the combination to Georges’s safe from her mother. She had taken the secret while her mother was intoxicated. The theft therefore involved an intimate breach of trust inside the family, not only a vanished object and a missing husband.

Roger had represented the technology-market crash of 2000 as having nearly ruined him. The family later learned that he had kept modest accounts in Québec to mislead the tax authorities and perhaps Isabelle, while placing most of his money abroad. This discovery fed the suspicion that he had fled to begin a new life elsewhere, possibly using the World Trade Center meeting as a false lead. Isabelle herself wondered whether he had taken the money to enjoy the tropical destinations they had imagined visiting together. Their champagne celebration of his forty-second birthday, two days before his New York trip, acquired a bitter afterlife: what had seemed like shared anticipation of a fortune now suggested the possibility that he had planned to leave her behind.

Isabelle remained trapped between admitting her complicity and continuing to bear the family’s suspicions. She could not confess to her mother without also revealing that she had exploited her intoxication to get the safe combination; that disclosure could alienate both her parents. The theft thus continued to operate even in the cameo’s absence, as a secret that isolated the person who knew most about how Roger obtained it.

The Planned Substitution

Roger’s apparent role in the theft was connected to a scheme devised by Charles de C.... The proposed arrangement treated the cameo as both a family symbol and a saleable asset: the D’Anjous could retain a convincing substitute, while Roger would profit from the original. Charles understood that a cameo could be reproduced by taking a mold and using glass paste, a method known since antiquity that could make a copy difficult to distinguish without expert examination. The distinctive old scratch on the stone was to be reproduced as well, helping the replacement pass as the family’s relic.

Charles anticipated the possibility that the cameo in the D’Anjou collection might itself already be a copy. He therefore sent an agent who was also an expert in gemstones to examine it first. If it proved authentic, the agent was to arrange for an artisan in New York to make the copy and return it to Roger within days, as a condition of the agreement. Payment into Roger’s Swiss account would follow once Charles’s agent, Franck Aubry, certified the cameo as genuine. The plan made the theft a calculated substitution rather than a straightforward sale: its success depended on keeping the family’s symbolic possession intact while moving the valuable original beyond its reach.

Provenance and the Unresolved Original

The theft also reopened questions that Régis D’Anjou had pursued for decades. The cameo’s scratch obscured the engraved figure, so close inspection under a magnifying glass yielded only partial clues: traces of mythological attributes, the outline of clothing, and the work’s style. Régis studied stone engraving and consulted European experts while concealing that he was asking about a family object. He concluded that the cameo was Italian and dated at least to the eighteenth century, possibly the seventeenth, and that its figure represented Castor, one of the mythological twins.

Research in a Paris exhibition later strengthened the possibility that the stone belonged to a pair. Photographs and an old engraving showed two cameos depicting Castor and Pollux facing one another, each holding a horse by the bridle and carrying a spear. The exhibition identified the five-layer onyx pair as once belonging to the collection of the Regent; after the French Revolution, one was traced to a private aristocratic collection, while the Castor cameo was recorded as missing. This history gave the family object a possible European provenance, but did not establish the identity of the stone that had been stolen.

The uncertainty deepened when Charles examined later photographs of a cameo he had received from New York in 2003. He recognized the Castor design and its old scratch, but magnification showed that the scratch on the photographed stone was recent and imitated. The New York authorities, he realized, had sent two counterfeits, not one. That discovery returned the dispute to its starting point: the D’Anjous and Charles had received matching fakes, while the authenticity and whereabouts of the original remained unknown. The theft therefore leaves two linked absences—the missing heirloom and the truth of its provenance—rather than a settled account of what Roger took or what the family had guarded.