The poet Gonzalve Desaulniers was born in 1863 in the village of Saint-Guillaume d'Upton, Quebec, on the same day that Quebecois celebrate their national holiday: 24 June, the feast of St. John the Baptist. The son of a medical doctor, Antoine-Lesieur Desaulniers, and of Hélène Letellier Desaulniers, he was educated first at Collège de Sorel and then at the Jesuit Collège Sainte-Marie de Montréal, from which he graduated at the age of twenty-two.

Initially Desaulniers's interests were in journalism and politics. At the age of fourteen he became one of the three editors of the Journal d'Arthabaska, an ephemeral Liberal daily begun with the purpose of promoting one of Wilfrid Laurier's early electoral campaigns. Later he was active as a writer for two noteworthy Montreal journals of the late nineteenth century: the Monde Illustré and the Revue Canadienne. In...