“Off their heads. They packed trenches with manure to make hotbeds, and they grew pineapples in the manure’s heat. Pineapples became a symbol of exotic opulence and people presented them to each other with great ceremony. There’s a famous painting of King George being presented with a pineapple by his gardener, a man named Rose….”

Dear Heather and the unkempt Mrs. Waugh moved away from the study area ranting about pineapples and I tuned in from afar with the aid of a hearing augmentation cone I made out of my souvenir map of Culloden battlefield; they seemed not to notice me listening in.

I observed that into her battered briefcase Mrs. Waugh had crammed several books about me, written by military historians. They all boasted that painting by Benjamin West on their covers: my battle scene, with me perishing while attended by my battle-mates. On my second Montreal September I read in a fat new history book at the Grande Bibliothèque that a literary person called Margaret Atwood claimed West made me appear like a dead, white codfish, and I had to agree. Evidently Mrs. Waugh had acquainted herself with the extinguished codfish: she’d dog-eared the books beyond redemption.

“Unreasonable and odd relationship with his mother,” I heard Mrs. Forest say.

“My former companion—an eighth-generation francophone Québécois, a Beauvilliers—told his tante Claudette what I’m up to, studying these letters,” said Mrs. Waugh, “and she had a fit…Le cochon! Le maudit chien anglais! She said Wolfe burned whole villages along the Saint Lawrence. This was at a family dinner with all the Beauvilliers brothers…”

“I can well imagine,” said Mrs. Forest. “The dog, the pig, the Wolfe…”

“But after Claudette’s outburst the brothers were silent. Ghislain, the eldest, brought up Voltaire…”

Voltaire! My scorched villages! My succulent pineapple!

I began to think that perhaps Mrs. Waugh was more perceptive than I’d believed. How sick I’d become of people parading the same tales about me over and over again. You could pretty much make a paper doll in my likeness—a James Wolfe paper doll, I mean—and manoeuvre him on the end of a stick like a child’s puppet: have him cross the ocean and float up the Saint Lawrence River and shimmy across L’Anse au Foulon and mosey on up the cliff and fire off a few musket-balls on the Plains of Abraham and get hit three times and slowly expire while ascertaining victory was certain and exclaiming, “Well then, I can die in peace.” You could do the whole thing in four minutes.