So yes, I am sure James Wolfe asked Betty to make this dish whenever he felt low. Later, when he returned from battle, she made him a nice dish with potatoes thin-sliced with gold edges in a pot, but it was his French cook, François, who transformed potatoes into medicine.

“Don’t tell me,” François said, eyeing Wolfe. I hear François saying it: “I see by your colour: Je le sais exactement.”

François concocted a red-hot soufflé that was not so much nourishment as revivifying inspiration. He made it when…I could hold down no other food, the worst time being when I returned from the torment of our aborted assault on that windswept island off Rochefort, not long before I sailed for Quebec. If François had not been present at Blackheath then, and had not made his potato soufflé, or if a craze for turnips or parsnips had overtaken the country instead of everyone going mad over potatoes, I do not know that my victory at Quebec could have happened.

François’s potatoes steamed as I lifted their cover. The steam was blue and curled with swirling hoops over the chocolate hues of our dining room with its window looking out on my mother’s garden that had a coat of new snow. I was glad she had gone to Bath.

It meant I did not have to pretend robust humour. I was close to collapse. I found it shameful to return to England fresh from our army’s cowardice at Rochefort and had returned to Blackheath to keep away from the glare and questioning. I wanted to bring down my fever with diachylum and sink my foot in the warm fur of my dogs and hide for a month or two….

RIGHT OUTSIDE BONAVENTURE STATION IS downtown Montreal’s Le Petit Québec, where the poutine is cheap but good and does not have the artificial red gravy they give you at La Belle Province. At Le Petit Québec they give you squeaky cheese curds in gravy that’s brown and thick.

I set Madame Blanchard carefully on the Formica table.

The server has red hair like mine, subdued by a hair net. His nametag says Augustine. So the French here still name their sons after Catholic saints! Part of me wishes that with such a name, the youth might have been destined for a more auspicious job.

A rack near the door has yesterday’s paper languishing on its bottom shelf. I sift through it as I eat, looking to see if anything of importance has happened in the world, but someone has torn half the pages out. Still, what remains is hardly inspiring.

If I had to name my greatest disappointment regarding New French Britain, I might have to say it’s the inconsequential drivel I read in papers purportedly published by the country’s learned set.