After Montreal, we headed further north to visit Quebec City, where 
neither of us had ever been. It’s a very beautiful city. On Sunday, we 
visited the still snow-spotted Plains of Abraham, where the British general Wolfe defeated Montcalm, the excellent general who had already won important battles at Fort Ticonderoga and Fort William Henry. The French held what seemed to be an impregnable position atop a high cliff that looms over the river. The British stunned the French by scaling the cliff, so much so that the French really blew what seemed to key advantages. They still held strong defensive positions, and winter was coming (it was already September); it seems like they could have waited the British out. Instead they 
launched a haphazard and ragged attack, which collapsed after about a half hour. Wolfe was killed and Montcalm sustained wounds that soon killed him, but the most important fatality was New France, which ended up being ceded to the British, and was soon turned into the nucleus of Canada. Overnight, we stayed in the elegant Hotel Manoir Victoria, which is located 
in the area that became the Irish neighborhood after the famine emigration. Befitting the arrangement, we ate twice at Irish pubs (both with live troubadors), and twice at the patisserie in the hotel. On Monday, we toured the city, seeing the statue of the great Champlain; the parliament building of the province of Quebec; the iconic Hotel Frontenac; and both the top and the bottom of the steep cliff above the St. Lawrence River on which the city was built.
