The active career of François Hertel, poet, novelist, essayist, storyteller, philosopher, moralist, aesthete, and literary critic, spanned a period of some fifty years. It is especially as a poet, essayist, and philosopher that Hertel searched for truth without ever finding it, first through his religious "vocation" and later through his teaching and writing. A raiser of consciousness, a humanist in the broad sense of the term, a writer full of spirit of often of rancor, he stirred up intense reactions in the Quebec of the "great darkness."

Hertel, who signed all of his books with his pseudonym, was born Rodolphe Dubé in 1905 in Rivière-Ouelle, a village 120 kilometers downriver from Quebec City. The son of Joseph and Alice Lévesque Dubé, he studied at the Collège de Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pocatière and at the Séminaire de Trois-Rivières...