Buskers stay out in the rain. A flautist has claimed the alley to the old Hotel de Ville. He attempts Handel’s fourth sonata in G. Is that the first or the second movement? I never liked Handel’s pomposity next to the modesty of Jacques Hotteterre. Handel was all for glory and glory is what he got, making a present of his music to the Duke of Cumberland after we took Culloden—I thought that work fawning, nothing like what music should be or do….

But who am I?

Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed…Did Thomas Gray mean my hands? “Tool of the Empire,” Sophie calls me. Gray says there are humble men whose destiny is obscure, then there are men who read their history in a nation’s eyes.

The busker moves under an awning, his hands stiff in gloves with the finger-ends cut off. How graceful a flute-player’s elbows are, raised parallel to the ground at tender attention. This one falters over the first bars of—is it Mozart, the boy who was three the year I fell on the plains? Everyone talks of Mozart with a love they can’t feel for Handel, who elicits pageantry not tenderness.

I duck behind Pub DeVille. Nobody sits in the courtyard with its ceiling of fibreglass parasols down whose poles the rain cascades. In an alcove covered by ivy I sit on a waterproof cushion I untie from a chair. A grate blasts heat, making this a homeless man’s version of Gray’s sequestered vale. I could use a blanket, but I run Gray’s poem through my head instead. That poem did not save me when I recited it the night before my fatal battle, but by god, how it has come to my rescue since.

I know that outside Montreal the last country flowers have cooled to blue: vetch, chicory, aster. My ivy curtain moves and I remember the twinkle-shiver of a leaf in a glade when rain hits it. I listen to the flautist and try not to think about that house where I saw plain beauty any time I chose: Madame Blanchard’s sill with the glass paperweight, the lilac that tapped and kept me awake half the night; such a nuisance, yet when it bloomed who could resist opening the window and letting lilac perfume all the corners? This was poverty: the lilac’s glory, the wallpaper’s pagodas on their gold background and rose wallpaper beneath that and, if I rightly remember, a pattern of pale green trains under the roses.

Every book about my Quebec victory makes such a big deal about my reciting Gray’s “Elegy” to my soldiers before the dawn of September thirteenth.