With Murray beaten back inside the city, Lévis did what a victorious commander is supposed to do: the day after the battle, on April 29, he laid siege to Quebec. But this is where the French victory began to come apart, because Lévis had won a battle he did not have the tools to cash in. To take a walled city you need a siege train, the heavy guns and the mountains of powder and shot that batter a breach in the walls. Lévis had brought only about twelve guns down from Montreal, and his biographer puts it flatly: he "was obliged to lay siege, with a totally inadequate siege train." He wanted around forty guns in position before he opened a real bombardment, and he did not have them. His troops were exhausted, some of his militia uncertain, his ammunition so short that he had to order his guns to fire only about twenty rounds each per day.

Everything now depended on the river, and on which navy reached Quebec first. If French ships came up the St. Lawrence with the siege guns and powder Lévis lacked, he could pound his way into the city and the conquest of 1759 might be reversed. If British ships came first, they would bring Murray everything he needed and sweep away the French supply boats, and the siege would be over. Both sides watched the water.

A small French supply fleet was, in fact, already in the river. A naval officer named Jean Vauquelin (French) had brought a little division of ships, the frigate Atalante and a few others, down from upriver to follow and supply Lévis’s army, and they had reached the approaches to Quebec on the very day of the victory at Sainte-Foy. For a moment it might have looked as if the French had won the race on the water too.

They had not. On May 9, 1760, a ship came up the river, and each side strained to see whose flag it flew. It was British: HMS Lowestoffe, a frigate, the first ship up after the ice. One ship was not a fleet, but it was a sentence. It told Lévis, plainly, that the Royal Navy had reached the thawed river ahead of the French, and that more were coming behind it. Within a week the rest came. A British squadron under Commodore Lord Colville, with his ships of the line, arrived first, about May 15; Commodore Robert Swanton (British) came up the next morning, May 16, with two frigates that joined the squadron. Together the British warships turned on the French supply vessels and destroyed them. The boats carrying the army’s powder and provisions, the very things Lévis needed to break into Quebec, were burned and scattered in a running fight up the river.

Once Murray was resupplied, the firepower contrast told the whole story. The British, with their fleet now feeding them shot and powder, threw thousands of rounds a day at the French batteries; Lévis’s starved guns could answer with their twenty rounds each. A win on the open field had been turned into a thing of no value by the cargo holds of a few ships.

Vauquelin made the kind of stand men remember. Pursued by two British warships, he deliberately drew them off to protect the army’s supply depots, then ran the Atalante aground rather than strike his battle flags. He fired off the last of his ammunition, nailed his flag to the mast so it could not be hauled down, threw his sword into the St. Lawrence so no Englishman would take it, and only then ordered his crew off the ship. He was wounded and captured, and the British burned his frigate the next day. By the account of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, "Vauquelin, it seems, had greatly impressed his enemies with his bravery." It was a magnificent gesture, and it was the gesture of a lost cause.

Vauquelin, it seems, had greatly impressed his enemies with his bravery.

With the British fleet in the river and his own supply ships destroyed, Lévis had nothing left to take the city with. On the night of May 16 into May 17, eighteen days after his victory, he lifted the siege of Quebec and withdrew toward Montreal. He had beaten Murray in the open field, in the bloodiest battle of the war, and it had bought him nothing. The win was real; the season and the Royal Navy made it meaningless. He had needed a fleet to turn a victory on land into the recapture of New France, and the fleet that came was the wrong one.

The end came that summer with the grim logic the river had already written. Lévis pulled his army back to Montreal for a last stand, and three British armies closed in on the city from three directions, Murray’s among them, coming up the same St. Lawrence the British now controlled. There was no fleet to save New France and no field victory that could matter once the river belonged to the enemy. On September 8, 1760, Montreal surrendered, and French rule in Canada was over. Lévis, who wanted to keep fighting to preserve the honor of French arms, was overruled; he had his regiments burn their battle flags rather than surrender them, and that was the last defiance New France had to offer.