The young French leaders and their soldiers were valiant, skillful and enduring--they had proved it again and again on sanguinary fields--but they could not prevail when they had to receive orders from a corrupt and reckless court at Versailles, and, above all when they had to look to that court for help that never came.
His reading of the books in the slaver's chest told him that folly and crime invariably paid the penalty, if not in one way then in another, and he remembered too some of the ancient Greek plays, over which he had toiled under the stern guidance of Master Alexander McLean.

Their burden was the certainty of fate.

You could never escape, no matter how you writhed, from what you did, and those old writers must have told the truth, else men would not be reading and studying them two thousand years after they were dead.

Only truth could last twenty centuries.
Bigot, Cadet, Pean, and the others, stealing from France and Canada and spending the money in debauchery, could not be victorious, despite all the valor of Montcalm and St.Luc and De Levis and their comrades.
He remembered, too, the great contrast between Quebec and New York that had struck him when he arrived at the port at the mouth of the Hudson with the hunter and the Onondaga.

The French capital in Canada was all of the state; it was its creature.