Day was scarcely breaking when the English army occupied the Heights of Abraham. A skirmish had sufficed to put to flight the French detachment charged with guarding them. The Marquis de Montcalm viewed his enemies from afar. "I see them plainly where they ought not to be," said he, "but if we fight with them I shall crush them." The English were already on the march; before the break of day the French were routed, Montcalm was dying, and Quebec was lost.
General Wolfe had murmured the last of Gray's lines—"The path of glory leads but to the grave." He had received three mortal wounds as he was encouraging his grenadiers to charge. Already his eyes were veiled by the eternal shadows, when an officer who was attending him exclaimed, "See, they fly!" "Who?" asked Wolfe, raising himself up painfully. "The enemy; they yield at all points." The hero let himself fall back on his couch. "God be praised," said he; "I die content." He was not yet thirty-four years of age.
Montcalm died also, eager even to the last moment to give his orders and arouse the courage of his soldiers. "All is not lost," he repeated. When the surgeons announced to him that he had only some hours to live, "So much the better," said he; "I shall not see the surrender of Quebec." He was buried in the hole scooped by a ball in the middle of the Ursuline church. It is there he still sleeps. On one of the squares of the town, which became English without the effacement of the tender memory of France, Lord Dalhousie had a marble obelisk erected bearing the names of Wolfe and Montcalm, with this inscription: "Mortem virtus communem, famam historia, momumentum posteritas dedit." Their courage has given them a common death; history, renown; posterity, a monument.
Parliament decreed a magnificent tomb in Westminster Abbey to the great conqueror of Quebec. The whole of England wore mourning. With Quebec France had lost Canada. The impotent despair of M. de Vaudreuil and the Duke de Levis, who were incapable of defending Montreal, led them vainly to attempt to again seize the capital. For a second time the Heights of Abraham were witnesses of a bloody combat. The French troops blockaded the place. On both sides, the arrival of reinforcements asked from Europe was being awaited. The invincible hopefulness of our nation deluded the Canadians. The English vessels entered the river. On the night of the 16th to the 17th of May, the little French army raised the siege; on the 8th of September, Montreal, in its turn, fell into the hands of the conquerors.
At the same period, after long alternations of success and reverse, England achieved a conquest in India which assured to her forever the European empire of the East. An entire people, passionately attached to the mother-country, had struggled in Canada. In India, some eminent men had dreamed of establishing the French power on the most solid foundations. They had prosecuted their aims at the cost of all sacrifices, and one after another they had fallen victim to their devotion as well as to their reciprocal jealousy. Mahé de la Bourdonnais, governor of the Isle of France, a clever, enterprising, honest man, and the conqueror of Madras in 1746, had unfortunately engaged in a rivalry with Dupleix, then governor-general of Pondicherry, which had led both into grave errors.
Death Of Wolfe.
The peace of Aix-la-Chapelle gave Madras to the English, but La Bourdonnais, destitute, suspected, and consigned to the Bastile, finally died of vexation, having used the last remnants of his energy to disseminate suspicions against Dupleix, which were soon to bear fruits fatal to that French greatness in India to which M. de la Bourdonnais had formerly consecrated his life.