Everyone says, Oh, Montreal’s the place for that—full of wonderful cafés!

Not this strip in front of Archambault’s.

How I wish now for my spot where the Marquis de Montcalm and I confided in quiet.

Montcalm named our place Le Café Bouleau after the old birch at its tranquil centre. He would lay his cloak on a patch of ground softer than the tight roots woven all around, where Vaudreuil’s ten-year-old Indian slave had been buried the previous summer. On his cloak he set brandy and demitasses of strong coffee he brewed on a brazier the size of his hand. Our homesickness abated the moment we smelled the dark roast.

He esteemed me more than did my brigadiers Monckton, Townshend and Murray, being of my rank and with the same to lose. The nature of our mutual loss was a mystery that intrigued us both. That goal in whose pursuit we each engaged—how golden it had shone at first, like the pears, so unattainable, in stories we had both heard told to La Pompadour by her smart little attendant in a fern-green dress. We’d been fed, the Marquis de Montcalm and I, on identical fairy-tales.

We reminisced on the extravagant details of these stories in our green shade, in lulls between our musket fire and my house-burnings down the shore. Veiled from carnage we stole an hour and a half here, two hours there, and—one Sunday in the deepest heart of my physical infirmity and Montcalm’s grief over the news of his dead daughter—an entire dappled afternoon, in which we settled on our final and most covert pact: inaudible though ants perceived it, invisible yet pulsing in the hot blue of a dragonfly on my sleeve as Montcalm grasped me by the hand.

We neither whispered nor wept.

We believed ourselves unobserved.

But it’s true what they say about little birds, and plenty of little birds surrounded us. I don’t doubt now, when I see my history written in books so plain and definite, that the birds kept our confidence in their breasts. No telegram or seaway bore our secret, nor later did any highway or railroad transmit it.

Little birds could be trusted, then as now, to keep our downhearted treachery to themselves, to bear our sorrows aloft, to change and uplift a man’s suicidal despair—or that of two men—over the Indian slave’s burial place and into a New World: and to render that world hopeful by birdsong, tiny notes sprinkling free of any foul thing mankind might hatch, blowing like pollen, waiting for men below to catch its light and love.

Yet anything Montcalm and I agreed upon at our Café Bouleau was personal and did not undermine our capacity for military cunning. Each general remained the other’s most dangerous adversary.