These movements of the English filled the French commanders with mingled perplexity, anxiety, and hope.  A deserter told them that Admiral Saunders was impatient to be gone.  Vaudreuil grew confident.  “The breaking up of the camp at Montmorenci,” he says, “and the abandonment of the intrenchments there, the reimbarkation on board the vessels above Quebec of the troops who had encamped on the south bank, the movements of these vessels, the removal of the heaviest pieces of artillery from the batteries of Point Levi,—­these and the lateness of the season all combined to announce the speedy departure of the fleet, several vessels of which had even sailed down the river already.  The prisoners and the deserters who daily came in told us that this was the common report in their army."[756] He wrote to Bourlamaque on the first of September:  “Everything proves that the grand design of the English has failed.”

[Footnote 756:  Vaudreuil au Ministre, 5 Oct. 1759.]

Yet he was ceaselessly watchful.  So was Montcalm; and he, too, on the night of the second, snatched a moment to write to Bourlamaque from his headquarters in the stone house, by the river of Beauport:  “The night is dark; it rains; our troops are in their tents, with clothes on, ready for an alarm; I in my boots; my horses saddled.  In fact, this is my usual way.  I wish you were here; for I cannot be everywhere, though I multiply myself, and have not taken off my clothes since the twenty-third of June.”  On the eleventh of September he wrote his last letter to Bourlamaque, and probably the last that his pen ever traced.  “I am overwhelmed with work, and should often lose temper, like you, if I did not remember that I am paid by Europe for not losing it.  Nothing new since my last.  I give the enemy another month, or something less, to stay here.”  The more sanguine Vaudreuil would hardly give them a week.

Meanwhile, no precaution was spared.  The force under Bougainville above Quebec was raised to three thousand men.[757] He was ordered to watch the shore as far as Jacques-Cartier, and follow with his main body every movement of Holmes’s squadron.  There was little fear for the heights near the town; they were thought inaccessible.[758] Even Montcalm believed them safe, and had expressed himself to that effect some time before.  “We need not suppose,” he wrote to Vaudreuil, “that the enemy have wings;” and again, speaking of the very place where Wolfe afterwards landed, “I swear to you that a hundred men posted there would stop their whole army."[759] He was right.  A hundred watchful and determined men could have held the position long enough for reinforcements to come up.

[Footnote 757:  Journal du Siege (Bibliotheque de Hartwell). Journal tenu a l’Armee, etc.  Vaudreuil au Ministre, 5 Oct. 1759.]

[Footnote 758:  Pontbriand, Jugement impartial.]