But he did not know that it had been stopped
by a British frigate above Pointe aux Trembles, and that
Wolfe's boats were taking its place and fooling the French
sentries, who had been ordered to pass it quietly.
Yet he knew Wolfe; he knew Vergor; and now the sound of
the cannonade alarmed him. Setting spurs to his horse,
he galloped down from Beauport to the bridge of boats,
giving orders as he went to turn out every man at once.
At the bridge he found Vaudreuil writing a letter to
Bougainville. If Vaudreuil had written nothing else in
his life, this single letter would be enough to condemn
him for ever at the bar of history. With the British on
the Plains of Abraham and the fate of half a continent
trembling in the scale, he prattled away on his official
foolscap as if Wolfe was at the head of only a few naughty
boys whom a squad of police could easily arrest. 'I have
set the army in motion. I have sent the Marquis of Montcalm
with one hundred Canadians as a reinforcement.'
Montcalm took up with him a good many more than the 'one
hundred Canadians' Vaudreuil ordered him to take, and he
sent to Bougainville a message very different from the
one Vaudreuil had written. What hero was ever more sorely
tried? When he caught sight of the redcoats marching
towards Quebec, in full view of the place where Vaudreuil
was writing that idiotic letter, he exclaimed, as he well
might: 'Ah! there they are, where they have no right to
be!' Then, turning to the officers with him, he added:
'Gentlemen, this is a serious affair.
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