Cheval à la mode.
Escalopes de cheval.
Filet de cheval à la brochu avec une poivarde bien liée.
Semelles de cheval au gratin."
On the other hand, the English army had its own discouragements. Night after night, Canadian irregulars and Indians crept up to Wolfe's lines to murder and scalp the outposts and sentries. Fever invaded the camp, and, more than all else, the serious illness of the General himself depressed the spirits of his men. Ceaseless anxiety over a hitherto ineffective campaign had played sad havoc with the nervous, high-strung temperament of the English commander; and the grey, inaccessible city still rose grimly to mock his schemes. Only the most invincible spirit could have borne so frail a body through those weeks of hope deferred. A vague melancholy marked the line of his tall ungainly figure; but resolution, courage, endurance, deep design, clear vision, dogged will, and heroism shone forth from those searching eyes, making of no account the incongruities of the sallow features. Straight red hair, a nose thrust out like a wedge, and a chin falling back from an affectionate sort of mouth, made, by an antic of nature, the almost grotesque setting of those twin furnaces of daring resolve, which, in the end, fulfilled the yearning hopes of England.
August had nearly gone, and the gallant General, only thirty-two years of age and already touched by the finger of death, lay sick in a farmhouse at Montmorency. Success seemed even further away than it had been in the early summer. Yet, in consultation with his three brigadiers—Monckton, Townshend, and Murray—Wolfe had decided upon a new and desperate plan.
"I know perfectly well you cannot cure me," he said to the surgeon; "but pray make me up so that I may be without pain for a few days, and able to do my duty; that is all I want," To Pitt he wrote—and this was his last despatch: "The obstacles we have met with in the operations of the campaign are much greater than we had reason to expect, or could foresee; not so much from the number of the enemy (though superior to us), as from the natural strength of the country, which the Marquis de Montcalm seems wisely to depend upon. When I learned that succours of all kinds had been thrown into Quebec—that five battalions of regular troops, completed from the best inhabitants of the country, some of the troops of the colony, and every Canadian that was able to bear arms, besides several nations of savages, had taken the field in a very advantageous situation,—I could not flatter myself that I should be able to reduce the place. I sought, however, an occasion to attack their army, knowing well that with these troops I was able to fight, and hoping that a victory might disperse them....I found myself so ill, and am still so weak, that I begged the general officers to consult together for the general utility. They are all of opinion that, as more ships and provisions are now got above the town, they should try, by conveying up a corps of four or five thousand men (which is nearly the whole strength of the army after the Points of Lévi and Orleans are left in a proper state of defence), to draw the enemy from their present situation and bring them to an action. I have acquiesced in the proposal, and we are preparing to put it into execution."
Carrying out this new plan, Wolfe first abandoned his camp at Montmorency, and for the moment concentrated his strength at Lévi and Orleans. Then Admiral Holmes's division in the river above the city was strengthened, and on the night of the 4th of September ships and transports, carrying five months' provisions, silently and successfully ran the blockade of the citadel's guns and anchored off Cap Rouge. On the 5th, Murray, Monckton, and Townshend marched seven battalions overland from Point Lévi to the mouth of the river Etechemin opposite Sillery Cove; and on the 6th, Wolfe found himself cruising above the town with twenty-two ships and thirty-six hundred men.
Meanwhile, Montcalm and Vaudreuil were greatly perplexed and all unconscious of the new designs and movements of the enemy. The position at the Point of Orleans still seemed to be strongly occupied, for every day Colonel Carleton paraded his men up and down in full view of the camp at Beauport; the batteries at Point Lévi thundered with their accustomed vehemence, and Admiral Saunders's division still lay threateningly in the basin below the city. Thus the weakening of these camps by twelve hundred men, who marched up the south shore to join Wolfe, was not perceived by Montcalm. Above Quebec, Bourlamaque was not less perplexed by the mysterious movements of Holmes's squadron and the army transports. Up and down the river they sailed, now threatening to land at Pointe-aux-Trembles, now at Sillery, and greatly confusing the right wing of the French army by their complex movements.