On the heights of Quebec, an oversized American couple asked me to take their photograph. Their instructions about the background were quite detailed. They wanted the monument to General Wolfe, regularly blown up by Quebec separatists. They wanted the St Lawrence River. They wanted the citadel walls and the copper roof of the Château Frontenac.

I dangled dangerously from a lamppost to accommodate the complexities of their compo- sition. In anoraks the size of Wiltshire, Bob and Mavis filled the foreground so comprehensively that there was little room left for all that background. As I clicked the shutter, their smiles were already fading.

“This city is an anachronism,” Mavis confided, taking her camera back. “The whole country is an anachronism.”

“How do you mean?” I said.

“You know. The British thing. These are French people,” she explained helpfully. So I told them the story of the washerwoman who was responsible for the fate of British North America. They went away shaking their heads, perplexed by the idiosyncrasy of it all.

Canada has always seemed a slightly unconvincing idea. It was never going to be easy to get the English and the French together inside a single nation. “The French hate us,” Arthur Marshall used to say. “And we hate them right back.”

It does not add to the gravitas of the national dream to learn, as we did in grade five in an Anglican town in Ontario, that the conquest of Quebec, and thus the whole bicultural experiment, came down to a question of pink sheets. I had come to Quebec City to check out the position of the laundry line to which Canada owes its being.

QUEBEC CITY is North America’s star turn, its brush with continental glamour. In the great homogenous stew of the New World, Quebec is distinctive, its differences enriched with age. Wrapped within 17th-century walls, it was founded in 1608, 60 years before New York was New York, 200 years before Chicago was anything more than three leaky tents. It has all the accoutrements of a European city — cobbled streets, a history that predates your grandfather, terrace cafes, a sophisticated culture and divisive political issues.

Chief among the last is separatism. For 30 years, it has dominated the provincial agenda. With the last referendum in 1995, Quebec province opted to remain in Canada by a margin of less than 1%. While English Canada likes to trumpet the nation’s biculturalism, French Canada remains troubled about the matter, remembering that it began as a shotgun wedding.

It was General Wolfe who wielded the shotgun. In early September 1759, he was encamped with British forces on the western tip of Ile d’Orléans, a couple of miles downstream of the heights of Quebec. Their mission was to dislodge the French from the city, and thus from North America. Wolfe was keen to be home by Christmas. He missed his mother, his dogs and his fiancée, in that order.

I followed Wolfe to St Petro-nille, where he had pitched his camp. Today, it is a village of whitewashed houses with wicker armchairs on porches and swings beneath the maples in the yard. It inhabits some timeless world of eternal summer.

I dined at La Goeliche, an old inn overlooking the river. Whatever the outcome of the battle for Quebec, the French had clearly won the culinary war. Dinner was divine — raw scallops dressed in lime juice and rolled chicken breast with fresh tagliatelle cooked in squid ink.

Rather less well provisioned, Wolfe spent two months here mulling over his options. General Montcalm, his French opponent, felt he didn’t have any. “We need not suppose,” Montcalm wrote home, confident about the impregnability of Quebec’s vertiginous position, “that the enemy have wings.”