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Miscellaneous Notes

The Names of the Battlefield. The name given to the battlefield arose from the fact that a part of the plateau, beyond the farms of Hébert and Couillard, was originally occupied for grazing purposes by a settler of the name of Abraham Martin, said to have been a pilot of Scottish descent. The name remains in Côté d'Abraham, the connecting sloping thoroughfare between the suburbs of St. John and St. Roch. The land owned by Maitre Abraham, as he was called by his neighbours, consisted of thirty-two acres to the west of what afterwards became the wall line of the city, and the site of the suburbs of St. Louis and St. John; and the name seems in early times to have been extended, by use and wont, to the sloping ground and plateau beyond, until finally it came to be applied to the whole tract as far as the Anse du Foulon and Dumont's Mill on the Ste. Foye Road, near where the Monument aux Braves now stands. The Ursulines eventually came into possession of part of these lands, and naturally enough, when they gave to the Imperial authorities in 1802 a ninety-nine years' lease of their property for reviewing purposes, the name clung to that part, as has been elsewhere explained, in connection with military reviews and other outdoor exercises. Elsewhere also a suggestion has been made as to the origin of the name Sainte-Foye. When the river Montmorency was first thus called is not known, but there is hardly any doubt that it was given in honour of the Duc de Montmorenci, the viceroy of New France in Champlain's day; although it must be remembered that Bishop Laval was a Montmorency, and that may have had something to do with the perpetuation of the name. There is no subject more interesting about Quebec than a study of the origin of the place-names within its environs, from the names of its streets to the names of the villages, streams and heights of land in its vicinity.

The Respective Numbers of the Armies. This is a vexed question with the historians, and is always being revised. The British army under Wolfe, taking part in the battle of 1759, comprised 4,829 rank and file, and 250 officers and staff. The total number of men in Wolfe's three brigades, which disembarked from the fleet on the Island of Orleans on the 27th of June, was 8,600. The numbers of the French army stationed along the lines of the Beauport defence from the city to Montmorency are variously computed at from 12,000 to 16,000, the fluctuation, whatever it was, being a corroboration of the number of desertions that took place before the 13th of September. It is safe to say that there were at least 7,500 of these present on the plains the morning of the battle. As Miles says: "The French accounts, except perhaps that of Bigot, leave us to infer that their forces were less numerous than the British." Then again, in the battle of Sainte-Foye, Garneau claims that there were 7,714 British soldiers in the field, though where they came from no one can tell, seeing General Murray declares that he had only 4,817 men who were not on the sick list in the city. If De Lévis' army grew to be 10,000 strong by the time he reached Quebec from Montreal, and Murray states what is true in his despatch over the affair that of the 3,000 men he had in the field with him he lost a third, we get as near to the comparative strength of the forces engaged as it is possible. Corroborative of Murray's statement in his despatch, the army roll shows that there were only 3,341 fit for duty four days before the battle. Of the killed and wounded in the repulse at Montmorency, there were 400 British and not more than 50 French; in the Battle of the Plains, there were 755 British killed and wounded, and 1,600 French; in the battle of Sainte-Foye there were 1,000 British killed and wounded and 2,500 French. The inequality between the armies was not so much in numbers as in training and experience, Montcalm having under him, beyond his Imperial brigades, a mixed force of colonial militia, Indian irregulars, and Canadian volunteers, who could hardly be expected to withstand an attack from the veterans of Louisbourg and the European battlefields except from behind such ramparts as those at Carillon and Montmorency.

The Natural Features of the Plains. The open spaces, as seen from the Buttes-à-Neveu in these days, were covered for the most

part with stunted shrubs and burr-bushes. These open spaces were interrupted by three noteworthy coppices of varied treegrowth-first, the one immediately outside the city walls not far from the site of the present Parliament Buildings; second, the Ste. Genevieve woods traversed by the Ste. Foye Road, near what is now called Sauvageau Hill; and the third, on what is now De Salaberry Street, and covering the present site of the grounds of the St. Bridget Asylum. Here and there, were several windmills, notably Dumont's Mill, and the one which occupied the site of the present Martello Tower, near the Grande Allée, where there is thought to have been a serious slaughter of those retreating, since many relics of soldiers' accoutrements were discovered on that spot in recent times, as if from the remains of soldiers buried in their fighting gear. The two main highways intersecting the plateau were then, as now, the St. Louis Road and the Ste. Foye Road, the former having more of a winding course, before the Grande Allée became a direct prolongation of St. Louis Street. The rock exposures reveal the argillaceous schists of the Silurian Period, whose weatherings have sometimes been productive of dangerous landslides around the face of Cape Diamond, where the crevices, being filled with the slaty detritus, have suffered expansion, and have often thrown the outhanging strata off their balance down on to the lower levels. The height of the rock near Cape Diamond proper, on which the Citadel stands, is a little over three hundred feet, while the highest point of the Buttes-à-Neveu, or Perreault's Hill, is over four hundred feet above the level of the river.

Where Wolfe Died Victorious. It is mentioned in Col. Bouchette's Topography that one of the four meridian stones, put in place at Quebec in 1790, stood in the angle of a field redoubt, where General Wolfe breathed his last, thus verifying the exact position where the hero lay when the rout took place. This redoubt, whose ruins were removed when the jail was being built, was one of two redoubts which must have been erected by the British military authorities later than 1759, the other being situated a little beyond Maple Avenue on the St. Louis Road.

William Pitt. There were two English statesmen of this name who left the mark of their genius upon their country's prestige

sea.

among the nations-namely, William Pitt, the elder, who became the Earl of Chatham, and William Pitt, the younger, second son of the former. It was in 1755, upon the breaking out of the Seven Years' War, that William Pitt, the elder, assumed the leadership of the House of Commons, and became Secretary of State. Two years afterwards he was forced to resign on account of the king's opposition to his measures involving the re-organization of the British army and navy. It was on his return to office, that he became known as the "Great Commoner," from his resoluteness in thwarting the alliances of France against Frederick of Prussia, and in maintaining the efficiency of the British arms on land and By relieving Frederick of the care and expense of keeping up his garrisons in Western Germany against France, by capturing Canada, by upholding Clive's conquests in India, and by virtually sweeping France from the seas, Pitt became the greatest statesman in Europe of his day. When George III came to the throne, Pitt and the Earl of Bute, who was the king's favourite, were not at one on many public questions. Pitt's energetic military measures became obnoxious alike to "Farmer George" and his prime minister, and the "Great Commoner" resigned two years after the death of James Wolfe out at Quebec. We all know the story of his rheumatism and gout-how his greatest mental activity seemed to come to him while he was racked with pain, and sank within him during his years of relief by medical treatment. Nor is that remarkable scene connected with his last speech, denunciatory of the mistaken policy that had led to the Declaration of Independence in the American colonies, ever to be forgotten, in which his dying words were uttered in the hearing of the nation from his place in the House. At the close of his speech he fell back in his seat in a swoon, and a week afterwards his genius and fame were commemorated by a public funeral, in which his remains were carried to Westminster Abbey. He died in 1778.

The Pompadour Regime. The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1748, left the prestige of France somewhat discredited among the nations. In Canada she was allowed to hold Cape Breton, and to rebuild Louisbourg. Then occurred what has been called the succession of a young mistress to an old priest, when Louis XV came to the French throne. This young mistress was Madame

Pompadour, who rose to power and retained it for twenty years -a period in which France sank lower and lower in the scale of political influence—a period in which the forces that finally made for the Revolution began to seethe and find increment to their strength. During this period, up to 1774, the profligacy of court life, and the ruin of the nation's financial credit in France became the scandal of the world, and little wonder was it that the representations made of the peculations and profligacies of Bigot in New France, should have been ignored by those whose conduct he was only imitating. This was the age in which John Law had launched his scheme of a nation paying its debts with paper money and of Mississippi Bubbles-an age when the king forgot how to rule, as he ran into the wildest courses of open dissipation and spendthriftism, and left his concubines to make and unmake ministers, to undo treaties and to take their part in war counsels, amid a public revelry of loose statecraft and court extravagance which could not go on for long without bringing wrath and ruin in its wake as it certainly did. Pompadour died in 1768; Louis XV died in 1774, and the French Revolution was inaugurated in 1789.

The Bigot Venality. The lesson given in Old France by Pompadour was not lost on New France and its profligate Intendant; the worthless Bigot. Of all the officers sent out from France for the government of New France, the Intendant had the best opportunity of enriching himself. The office was of Richelieu's origination in France, before it was created in the colonies, and involved, at first, a mere supervision of public works and a general collection of taxes. But by the time the office was created in Quebec, its functional pretensions had expanded into a control over nearly every branch of the public service-political, judicial, and ecclesiastical. And in the case of Intendant Bigot it is difficult to say where his official duties in the colony began and where they ended. In his case, he seemed to be co-equal with the governor, presumptious enough at times to interfere in military affairs. And as the Pompadour-Louis carnival of profligacy in France was the prelude to the after carnival of bloodshed around the guillotine, so the shameless conduct of Bigot and his creatures was but the prelude to the bloodshed on the battlefields of New France, and the final change of masters in Canada. The story of this consummate libertine has been told again and again. His Intendant's Palace