“I FOUND OUT A LOT of things about you yesterday when I was walking around town,” Harold says, swiping a half-eaten brioche off an abandoned plate as we pass a café terrasse. He folds it in his cloth handkerchief and pockets it despite Veronica’s nose-quiver.

“About Wolfe?”

“Yes! About James Wolfe in his days as the general.”

He leads me around. It is strange, having him show me the obelisk bearing my name opposite that of Montcalm’s, the marquis facing downriver and Wolfe eyeing the Foulon. Just as Jenny Waugh wrote to me, the monument has a Latin inscription:

Mortem virtus communem

faman historia

monumentum posteritas dedit

“I believe I understand it,” Harold says. “After all, Latin and English have a lot of the same roots…Their virtue gave them a common death, and fame gave them a common history, and this monument, well, they’ll both have to share it.”

He leads me to a beautiful library where, up some cordoned-off stairs behind a balcony rail, stands a foreshortened statue of myself pointing past the stacks of books toward some undetermined goal.

“The librarian told me,” says Harold, “that a couple of butchers made the original shortly after you died, and mounted it over their shop, where people pelted it with rotten fruit and knocked it down onto the street so many times they had to make this new one. Even this one got stolen and carried around the world in a boat and stuck in front of an English pub until someone mailed it back here. To get it in the crate they had to hack off that pointing arm—you can see the mend….”

“He’s very short,” I complain.

“He is, isn’t he. I guess when you’re a butcher you’re not much of a sculptor and maybe you don’t really have enough wood. So the librarian told me that after the Falklands War an Argentinian student burst in here and flung a Molotov cocktail at you and set five hundred books ablaze and the staff had to throw you out the window into a snowbank to save you. So someone cares….”

We meander along the Grande Allée and I very much like the tasteful monument to myself in the spot where I died, in front of what is now a beautiful art museum, even if the monument has been blown up and replaced several times and bears traces of a great big red X through my name where rebels have obliterated it and city officials have gone at it with some sort of remedial acid wash. Not far from that monument is the very wellspring from which I received a drop of water as I lay wounded. On the plains behind my monument lies the exquisite sunken garden dedicated to Joan of Arc where I sat for a while yesterday, and we go there, Harold and I, to share his brioche with Veronica.