Jean-Aubert Loranger was born in Montreal, in Saint-Jean-Baptiste parish, on 16 October 1896. His father, Joseph-Thomas Loranger, a young medical student, had married Lucie Beaudry earlier that year in the same parish. Four years later, on 30 August 1900, the young doctor (professor at Bishop's University and physician associated with Notre-Dame and the Sisters of Providence Hospital) died of typhoid fever at the age of twenty-seven. (Jean-Aubert's mother lived until 15 April 1960.) The education of the now-fatherless boy was entrusted to tutors, so that he attended neither primary nor secondary school, though he did go to Mont Saint-Louis and Le Plateau for some higher education. By then, however, he was already passionately in love with art and French literature, especially the work of Marcel Proust and Jules Romains.

It was then that his cousin, the archivist and writer Robert de Roquebrune, introduced him to the architect Fernand Préfontaine and the poetmusician...