Philippe Aubert de Gaspé

Philippe Aubert de Gaspé (1786–1871) was a French-Canadian writer and seigneur born in Quebec City into one of the old families of New France. He trained as a lawyer, served as sheriff of Quebec, fell into debt and spent nearly four years in prison for it, then retired to his manor at Saint-Jean-Port-Joli on the St. Lawrence. At seventy-six he published Les Anciens Canadiens, a novel of the British conquest of 1759 crowded with the legends, songs, feasts and customs of the old colony, which became the most popular book of nineteenth-century French Canada and was translated as Cameron of Lochiel. His Mémoires followed in 1866.