Mesplet was born in
Marseille, France, and was apprenticed as a printer in
Lyon. He emigrated to
London in 1773 where he set up shop in
Covent Garden. Both were arrested in 1779 for
sedition, and imprisoned for three years; on his release, Mesplet was $5,000 in debt but quickly dealt with his creditors. In 1785, he published
La Gazette de Montréal, now the
Montreal Gazette, the successor to the suspended
Gazette Littéraire. In total, he published some seventy or eighty works, in
French,
English,
Latin, and
Iroquois; ten of these ran to more than a hundred pages, and another seven were
almanacs. ==References==