I continued on, then, into the museum. An employee at the desk provided me with a little map that showed, on the far side of the plains, a path—the very path leading up from L’Anse au Foulon that was taken at night by Wolfe and his army to surprise and defeat Montcalm; a path that has remained obscured by rock and overhang and forest for the 257 years since Wolfe climbed it at four o’clock in the morning in silence and stealth. The path has been revamped, said the clerk, so that for the first time in history you can walk on it and see it for yourself.

“When did it open?” I asked.

“Two weeks ago.”

Jimmy, I walked to your L’Anse au Foulon path. In fact, I have walked all over Quebec City and have been persuaded to look at the history of this place in a mysterious new way, a way that moves me to tears.

My heart broke in the museum over the French colonial soldier’s overcoat. It has its tails turned back at front and rear so that the corners meet in a little bow-shape at the soldier’s sides. The coats were made of cloth woven in Marseilles. It had a blue collar and cuffs, but was mainly of greyish-white wool, with eighteen wrought pewter buttons down the front. Once he put on the coat, the French colonial soldier also donned a hat trimmed with silver lace. This did nothing to prevent him from being mistreated or killed by his own superiors if he complained, or his wife complained, about the bread made with ground peas, or the rancid horsemeat that he had to eat, provisions being scarce for all the ordinary men, though the French officers and corrupt governor Vaudreuil and his henchman Intendant François Bigot dined on roast game and brandy, imported Gruyère, goose legs, olives and honey.

But it’s those jaunty upturned coattails that sadden me, secured at such a proud slant at the thigh, as if the coat has been imbued with power to stride all by itself, untenanted, in a New France made for earnest young men, ever hopeful for their futures, ever starry-eyed about a soldier’s life and worth.

It came to me then, that every monument, every object in the plains museum, every rose and bleeding heart nodding its head in the Joan of Arc garden bejewelling the Plains of Abraham, every citizen and every ship and bird and fish in and on the river, attest to the continued life in Quebec of the people of Wolfe and Montcalm, standing on the same ground but, like the names on the plinth overlooking the river, never seeing each other.