A crone in a covered ruby scooter decorated with a silver balloon slobbers an ice cream cone as she retraces my glorious ascent. A cyclist hurtles down, his helmet the carapace of some exotic fly, pink zigzags emblazoning his tights. The asphalt is harder through my soles than the root and shale I climbed to defeat Montcalm.

I come to billboards bearing artists’ renditions of my battle. They depict me as Brigadier Townshend did—a cartoon—a poncey, wispy, tiptoeing lightweight, my pointy little nose in the air like that of an insect or a hummingbird. My nose and my sword vie for status as silliest proboscis. Here on these boards, as in Townshend’s sketchbooks, which I know have been preserved, I am ineffectual, effeminate, inept—not to be seen for a moment as anything remotely resembling a war hero. My spindly limbs akimbo, a face that simpers, “Mother, ready me a dish of tea and a currant bun—my battle was a dizzying dance and I fancy something sweet.”

Should I care that the woman with the silver balloon must believe Townshend’s cartoon?

I was never vain. I don’t waste time reacting to pettiness in others and my own failings are big, not small. Pettiness on my part is not the reason Townshend hated me.

The letter he concocted our night of the Foulon, minutes before we made our move, was nine lines long but can be paraphrased in two:

Sir—

Why haven’t you told me what the hell we’re doing?

The truth is, I confided in no one.

It is astounding how a seed-speck of insight flies straight into the heart of one’s enemy if you let a spark slip to the wrong man.

But the Foulon was my only chance. It was a crazy chance. It combined sheer impossibility with hope’s sole glint. It was a plan too desperate to entrust to anyone save myself.

That is the difference between myself and a man like Townshend. I am a man who can keep my own counsel and bear the resulting murderous loneliness, and face every consequence, whether success or failure. Risking failure has never been, for me, a problem. I look on it as life’s consummate thrill—wagering all for the sake of one doomed chance.

I grabbed the only chance I had. It was perfect. It was a point of precise illumination, a flash of clarity in a world of imperfection, a world sad and disorganized, broken and incomplete, as I am. What small-minded cartoon by Townshend, however long-lived, can obscure such an instant?

Now, as I descend the new Foulon, I resist any temptation to dismantle or deface his cartoons.