"Few hours, my lord."
"So much the better," answered Montcalm. "I shall not live to see Quebec surrendered."
Before daylight, he was dead. Wrapped in his soldier's cloak, laid in a rough box, the body was carried that night to the Ursuline Convent, where a bursting bomb had scooped a great hole in the floor. Sad-eyed nuns and priests crowded the chapel. By torchlight, amid tears and sobs, the body was laid to rest.
Both generals had died as they had lived,—gallantly. To-day both are regarded as heroes and commemorated by monuments; but how did their governments treat them? Of course there were wild huzzas in London and solemn memorial services over Wolfe; but when his aged mother petitioned the government that her dead son's salary might be computed at 10 pounds a day,—the salary of a commander in chief,—instead of 2 pounds a day, she was refused in as curtly uncivil a note as was ever penned. Montcalm had died in debt, and when his family petitioned the French government to pay these debts, the King thought it should be done, but he did not take the trouble to see that his good intention was carried out. It was easy and cheaper for orators to talk of heroes giving their lives for their country. There are no better examples in history of the truth that glory and honor and true service must be their own reward, independent of any compensation, any suffering, any sacrifice.
Though the panic retreat continued for hours and Quebec was not surrendered for some days, the battle was practically decided in ten minutes. The campaign of the next year was gallant but fruitless. In April, before the fleet has come back to the English, De Lévis throws himself with the remnants of the French army against the rear wall of Quebec; and as Montcalm had come out to fight Wolfe, so Murray marches out to fight De Lévis. Both sides claimed the battle of Ste. Foye as victory, but another such victory would have exterminated the English. Lévis outside the walls, Murray glad to be inside the walls, each side waited for the spring fleet. If France had come to Canada's aid, even yet the country might have been won, for sickness had reduced Murray's army to less than three thousand able men; but the flag that flaunted from the ship that sailed into the harbor of Quebec on the 9th of May was British. That decided Canada's fate. De Lévis retreated swiftly for Montreal, but by September the slow-moving General Amherst has closed in on Montreal from the west, and up the St. Lawrence from the east proceeds General Murray. De Lévis and Vaudreuil had less than two thousand fighting men at Montreal. September 8th they capitulated, and three years later, by the Treaty of Paris, Canada passed under the dominion of England. Officers, many of the nobility, Bigot and his crew, sailed for France, where the Intendant's ring were put on trial and punished for their corruption and misrule. Bigot suffered banishment and the confiscation of property. The other members of his clique received like sentences.
Spite of the hopes of her devoted founders,—like Champlain and Maisonneuve,—spite of the blood of her martyrs and the prayers of her missionaries, spite of all the pathfinding of her explorers, spite of the dauntless warfare of her soldier knights,—like Frontenac and Iberville and Montcalm,—New France had fallen.
Why?
For two reasons: because of England's sea power; because of the unblushing, shameless, gilded corruption of the French court, which cared less for the fate of Canada than the leer of a painted fool behind her fan. But be this remembered,—and here was the hand of overruling Destiny or Providence,—the fall of New France, like the fall of the seed to the ready soil, was the rebirth of a new nation. Henceforth it is not New France, the appendage of an Old World nation. It is Canada,—a New Dominion.
To-day wander round Quebec. Tablets and monuments consecrate many of the old hero days. Though the British government rebuilt a line of walls in the early eighteen hundreds, you will find it hard to trace even a vestige of the old French walls. Mounds tell you where there were bastions. A magnificent boulevard tops the most of the old ramparts. An imposing hotel stands where Castle St. Louis once frowned over the St. Lawrence. Of the palace where the Intendant held his revels there are not even ruins. If you drive out past Beauport, you will find at the end of a nine-mile forest path the crumbling brick walls of Château Bigot, the Hermitage, half buried, in the days when I visited it, with rose vines and orchard trees gone wild. That is all you will find of the court clique whose folly brought Canada's doom; but as you drive back from Beauport there towers the city from the rocky heights above the St. Lawrence,—chapel spire and cross and domed cathedral roofs aglint in the sunlight like a city of gold. The church, baptized by the blood of its martyrs, is there in pristine power; and the fruitful meadows bear witness to the prosperity of the habitant on whom the burden fell in the days of the ancient régime. Who shall say that habitant and church do not deserve the place of power they hold in the government of the Dominion?