Together with the Kamchatka Peninsula in Siberia and the coastal mountains of British Columbia, Canada’s Saint Lawrence Valley is among the snowiest places on earth. Winter in southern Quebec can last five long months, during which time as much as four meters of snow may fall on the streets of Montreal. The thermometer will drop to thirty below zero and stay there for days on end; evenings of raging wind and blowing snow can turn a walk to the corner dépanneur into a full-scale expedition. If winter defines much of our vision of the Quebec landscape and culture, there are compensations: Montreal, which is on the same latitude as Venice, is among the sunniest of winter cities, with an average of 350 hours of sunshine in the three months between winter solstice and spring equinox, transfiguring the blanket of snow with revivifying brilliance.

During the winter of 1947–48, a young woman endured a pregnancy through weather that was unusually harsh, even by Quebec standards. She gave birth in the spring, in Quebec a short-lived season of ever-changing skies, a prelude to the heat of summer. In Montreal on April 14, 1948, her son was born, taken from her, and placed in an orphanage, where he would remain for the next two and a half years. It is the first and perhaps most poignant fact of Claude Vivier’s biography that we do not know who this young woman was, not her name, her age, her ethnic origin, or her destiny. She is to us what she was to her son: a phantom who has left no trace on the historical record.

The young Claude was an abandoned child, one of roughly 3,000 born to “unknown parents” in Quebec in the year 1948 (3,000 is the official statistic; the actual number is almost certainly higher). Following his birth he was placed in La crèche Saint-Michel run by the Soeurs Grises (Grey Nuns), a religious community that had been founded in Montreal in 1737 by a young widow named Marguerite d’Youville, the aim of which was to take care of the elderly, the infirm, and orphans, and to provide education. According to one early document in the Vivier family, the young boy was known as “Claude Roger.” He was baptized in the church Saint-Enfant Jésus du Milen, on rue Saint-Dominique.