'Sir, being obliged to surrender Quebec to your armsI have the honour to recommend our sick and woundedto Your Excellency's kindness, and to ask you to carryout the exchange of prisoners, as agreed upon betweenHis Most Christian Majesty and His Britannic Majesty.I beg Your Excellency to rest assured of the highesteem and great respect with which I have the honourto be your most humble and obedient servant,MONTCALM.'
And then, his public duty over, he sent a message to each member of his family at Candiac, including 'poor Mirete,' for not a word had come from France since the British fleet had sealed up the St Lawrence, and he did not yet know which of his daughters had died.
Having remembered his family he gave the rest of his thoughts to his God and to that other world he was so soon to enter. All night long his lips were seen to move in prayer. And, just as the dreary dawn was breaking; he breathed his last.
'War is the grave of the Montcalms.'
Montcalm is, of course, a very prominent character in every history of New France. Parkman ('Montcalm and Wolfe') tried to be just, but the facts were not all before him when he wrote. The Abbe Casgrain ('Guerre du Canada, 1756-1760: Montcalm et Levis') was unfortunately too prejudiced in favour of Vaudreuil and Levis to be just, much less generous, towards Montcalm; but the Honourable Thomas Chapais's work ('Le Marquis de Montcalm, 1712-1759') based on much more nearly complete materials, does honour both to Montcalm and to French-Canadian scholarship. Captain Sautai's monograph on Ticonderoga ('Montcalm au Combat de Carillon') is the best military study yet published. An elaborate bibliography of works connected with Montcalm's Quebec campaign is to be found in volume vi of Doughty's 'Siege of Quebec'. The present work seems to be the only life of Montcalm written by an English-speaking author with access to all the original data, naval as well as military.
See also in this Series: 'The Winning of Canada'; 'The Great Fortress'; 'The Acadian Exiles'.