Every September I come to Place d’Armes to try to understand what has become of my legacy, but am instead compelled to read a plaque extolling the heroism of Paul de Chomedey for slaughtering an Iroquois chief, on this spot, a hundred years before I lost Ned, and a hundred and twenty before I scaled L’Anse au Foulon. You’d think de Chomedey overcame the chief with his knuckles instead of firing his snazzy pistols. And you’d have no way of knowing I ever set foot in Quebec.

Plenty in the square extols how the French wrested Montreal from the Iroquois—bronze nuns tame savage children—is that Jeanne Mance bandaging the finger of a Mohawk child with a scrap of plaster from the chemist? Sergeant-major Lambert Closse crouches behind me, his dog and gun staring down a bronze Iroquois warrior, the most splendid of the bunch. There’s no English face among the statues unless you count the gargoyle masks wreathed in fresh-harvested grain, sticking out their grotesque tongues in a bloodcurdling cry of…victory? I fancy not.

Where’ve I seen these masks before?

They aren’t English, exactly, not in the way I am English—I suspect they’ve been added to the monument to frighten any English away.

Sophie would tell me to stop taking things so personally. “Loosen up. Go buy yourself a beer. But not in the first circle. You’ll have to catch a bus. Do I have to repeat everything?”

I recall perfectly well her explanation of Montreal’s circles. It happened the first year we met, when I went to the Mission to get rigged out with a few clothes. She found me a passable pair of boots in the basement, as not many men can use a size thirteen. From the donations pile she nabbed me a couple of shirts with sleeves nearly long enough, but hats were a different story. No one cared about hats any more. I’d tried proper hats on in the shop called Henri Henri only to find that a single one cost a month’s worth of my former pay.

“In the first circle…” and here she tossed me a six-pack of socks with the L’Équipeur label still on ’em, “you won’t find anything a person really needs. The first circle is for pastel caricatures of your girlfriend made while you wait. Amulets on blankets. Cupcakes covered in glitterballs four dollars apiece and each no bigger than my nose. My brother-in-law’s carvings marked up fifteen hundred percent. No bread except in fancy restaurant baskets. No toilet paper, no Dumpsters.”

“I did find a papeterie,” I confessed. What a place. State-of-the-art nibs and bottles of Venetian ink.

“Don’t get distracted, new kid in town. Don’t blow your wad on dumb trinkets.”