Pierre-Joseph-Olivier Chauveau was one of nineteenth-century Quebec's greatest men of letters as well as one of its best-known public figures. Born in Charlesbourg, on the outskirts of Quebec City, he was the son of Pierre-Charles and Marie-Louise Roy Chauveau. His father died when he was four, and the young Chauveau was raised in the home of his maternal grandfather, Joseph Roy, a prosperous and well-connected Quebec merchant. As a student at the Quebec Seminary, Chauveau was evidently brilliant, so that great achievements were expected of him from an early age. He had just begun his legal studies in 1837 when the first Lower Canada Rebellion broke out. His first published work, the poem "L'Insurrection" (Le Canadien, 6 April 1838), praising the rebel patriotes, appeared the next spring. "L'Insurrection" and the few additional poems on the same theme that followed it indicate that the teenaged Chauveau was already an accomplished poet as...