“There was a lot of debate about the language in which the plaque should be written,” said the guide. “No one could decide whether to engrave it in French or English. So they wrote the words in Latin.”

The marble plaque is yellowed, discoloured, as if someone has held to it a torch or stained it with urine.

Dear Mother, I see Wolfe writing in a letter he then crumpled and discarded, let me go.

Dear Mother Country of Britain, let me go to the beauty that is France.

Dear Old Mother, let me go to all that is France, all that is New.

I walked across grass looking for the Plains of Abraham Museum. I saw a toddler with a plastic shovel planting bulbs in a tulip bed, watched over by his mother, who wore a Parks Canada Staff uniform.

Over by the stone fortifications a man said into his cellphone, “Bar codes can be printed with a regular laser printer on any of your products.”

I heard jackhammers and beeping trucks backing up all around the plains, from the main road to the docks, and in the green centre floated conversations, bicycle bells, and odd, fluting notes of passerine birds.

Around the ruined stone citadel on the plains stretches a moat with signs: Chute: Danger of Falling. There is serious construction going on: men in hardhats with jackhammers burrow rubble out of casement holes. I had no idea where the museum was, its signs having petered out. The construction racket was horrendous and reminded me of what all the history books say about sound on these plains—that the battle was deafening. Was it? Is that something, Jimmy, that you know?

I encountered a couple who had ascertained there was no museum where I was headed: they sought it, too. We stopped near an interpretive sign about the Ross Rifle Factory, Cove Fields and Arsenal Laboratory. Then the man spotted in the distance the orange sign, Plains Museum!

The plains really are beautiful, as my friend Raymond has said. They are not flat, but designed with curved paths, and stretch over hills and rises with trees on them. There is not a feeling of stretched-out desolate flatness as at Culloden: this does not feel institutional, but feels like someone’s homeland. The land is feminine and hummocked and curvaceous, not angled, linear, masculine or English at all.

The lines of land against sky rise and fall, dip and breathe: it might be a battlefield but this land is still alive.

The land tells me the French were far from vanquished.

Can I say it’s almost as if Wolfe has never been here at all?