The driver regards me with barely concealed irritation. He does not know what I am talking about. I depart his cab and vow to ask someone in the streets what has happened to Montcalm.

Montcalm was more beautiful than I am: he was like his name, calm mountain. I secretly compare my nervous, starved spirit—hungry wolf, lone wolf, scrawny and smart, quicker than the calm mountain but not held in nearly as much affection by my country or by his.

Part of me loves Montcalm.

I turn up a lane whose name I recognize—Rue du Sault-au-Matelot. The afternoon sun is too bright and I keep to shaded parts. I pass an exquisite jeweller whose windows display filigreed silver, moonstones and sapphire. I linger at the window of Jacques Vaillancourt, Ébéniste, to admire a chair carved from cherrywood fluid as a glass of Guignolet. I pass geraniums in window boxes identical to geraniums whose petals fell like drops of blood in my hair in Paris. I finger hand-tooled boots on a sill, and want a mille feuille and a pain au chocolat.

The hill turns laborious. I see from below that the plains have been planted since my battle with numerous copses of many kinds of concealing trees.

I feel a familiar exhilaration as I climb, passing the funicular and the grand and monstrous Chateau Frontenac and the very cacophony of construction that Mrs. Waugh referenced in her letter, to where the plains’ main gates hang open on the Grande Allée. Young men kick a soccer ball on the grass. The plains museum bears canary-coloured banners.

I see that the plains have been incorporated into the life of this place—I had not expected that they would become part of the poetry of daily living in Quebec: in the sunken garden named after Joan of Arc, two lovers slice tomatoes releasing musk in the air and the juice runs down the young man’s forearm, which he licks. A bowl of silence lies in this garden, around which noises of the city rumble and push. Someone—a man named Fred whose bust bears a gossamer-glittering web spun from his nose to his ear—has redesigned the plains, so they lie no longer sere or even flat, but undulate: warm hills planted with every manner of beech and willow able to grow in New France. For this is New France: nothing British thrives here—unlike Montreal which has succumbed to so much British influence, an influence I have been trying—god help me—all my born days to outrun.

I come to an apple tree under which two marmottes share small, rosy crab-apples with gentle, animal goodwill, oblivious to me, in the spot where a young Redcoat fell—I see the youth crumpled there now, white-faced and bloodless, his hair the russet of mine, as was the hair of so many young Jacobites. It was for them I stopped covering mine with the white wig.