The historians suggested the idea of the mascarade ball. We were preparing and we had to respect the logical sequence of events. We wanted to invoke life in Quebec City in 1759. We were told that it was an aristocratic era. Then the military authorities arrived, in this instance Montcalm, and the people were neglected, left in poverty. It was despicable. The symbol of this opulence was that, during the winter, the intendant gave two or three balls per week. Montcalm wrote to Vaudreuil several times—I read this text the other day, and I have it here and could read it for you—to ask him to stop having balls that no one wanted. This slowly set Vaudreuil and Montcalm against one another, which had significant consequences during the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. Vaudreuil meddled in Montcalm's military strategy to prevent him from sending a battalion onto the plains.
This is what we wanted to demonstrate.