Marie Beaupré was born at Sainte-Julienne, Quebec, the paternal granddaughter of the town’s first mayor. Her father died when she was three years old and when her mother remarried into a rich Montreal family she was sent to study at Villa Maria Convent. Fluent in French, English and Italian, she worked as a translator for the federal government before writing for La Presse under the pen name Hélène Dumont. She was 32 when she travelled to the St. Louis World Fair with 15 other Canadian women journalists in 1904. During that journey on a Canadian Pacific Railway train the women founded the Canadian Women’s Press Club. In 1905 Balmer Watt became editor of the women’s page in La Presse, called Page des Dames, but she left that job in 1906. In 1907 she inherited a private school for girls from a former journalist and thereafter only wrote for Le Foyer for the next 25 years. Beaupré is buried at Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes, in Montreal.