I stand on the riverbank, its pack of industrial cranes and containers groaning and crashing between myself and Point-Levis from where my army levelled Quebec to rubble. I walk the edge of the horrendous industrial zone in the traffic-din on the road named after Champlain until I spot the tip of Île d’Orléans, and next to it the white cataract of Montmorency Falls whose waters have been crashing down those rocks incessantly every minute and second over the two and a half centuries since I last saw them. It was a mystery to me as a boy to think how waterfalls did not run out of water: surely they must run dry even if they came from some mountain pond fathoms deep. I used to ask my father about this, but he never answered me directly or satisfactorily, and I don’t think he knew the answer, for he was not a man I could imagine ever, out of mere curiosity, following a mountain stream to its source.

But I have done it.

I followed the waterfall behind our house in Westerham—up its chute and along its thin stream into the hills. The stream widened but not very much, then narrowed to a trickle that ran for miles. I followed it thinking that at any moment it would dip and widen into the lake that must surely be wide and deep. But instead of widening into a lake, my childhood stream thinned to a needle of silver and then, under ferns and peat and shale, disappeared in the ground. I had not known underground springs existed, invisible yet apparently inexhaustible, unnamed and awarded no credit for having fed the waterfalls below.

Now, at the bottom of my Foulon, I am weary. Here is another billboard bearing a caricature of myself: I read a portion of its caption, written to explain my Foulon victory, but can read no more once I ascertain its tone: I won not through any virtue or discipline of mine, but through accident, par hasard—sheer good fortune that overshadowed Montcalm’s misfortune and his abandonment by a France that cared nothing for her colony but left it orphaned, neglected and unprotected, able to be taken by even an ungainly fool such as myself.

Now Quebec sees me as ridiculous and who am I to argue?

How graceful she is, the City of Quebec—like Paris. Its heights and low areas stack atop one another like a city in an intricate dream.

Dear Mother, I want to write—but where have I put my pen and paper?

I want to describe that jet-black bust of Louis XIV in the square, unlike any English monument, hardly a monument at all—more a curl of night-ocean scooped with loving hands and bestowed on the street. You can glide past it as a bird over the wave.

Dear Mother, J’adore all things French!

—