On the night of September 4th the general was well enough to dine with Monckton's officers at Point Lévis, but the next day he was again prostrate with illness, to the great anxiety of his army. He implored the doctor to "patch him up sufficiently for the work in hand; after that nothing mattered." Chronic gravel and rheumatism, with a sharp low fever, aggravated by a mental strain of the severest kind, all preying on a sickly frame, were what the indomitable spirit there imprisoned had to wrestle with. On the 6th, however, Wolfe struggled up, and during that day and the next superintended the march of his picked column, numbering some four thousand men, up the south bank of the river. Fording, near waist-deep, the Etchemain River, they were received beyond its mouth by the boats of the fleet, and, as each detachment arrived, conveyed on board. The Forty-eighth, however, seven hundred strong, were left, under Colonel Burton, near Point Lévis to await orders. The fleet, with Wolfe and some thirty-six hundred men on board, now moved up to Cap Rouge, behind which, at the first dip in the high barrier of cliffs, was Bougainville with fifteen hundred men (soon afterward increased), exclusive of three hundred serviceable light cavalry. The cove here was intrenched, and the French commander was so harried with feigned attacks that he and his people had no rest. At the same time, so well was the universal activity maintained that Montcalm, eight miles below, was led to expect a general attack at the mouth of the Charles River, under the city. Throughout the 8th and 9th the weather was dark and rainy and the wind from the east, an unfavorable combination for a movement requiring the utmost precision. On the 10th the troops from the crowded ships were landed to dry their clothes and accoutrements. Wolfe and his brigadiers now finally surveyed that line of cliffs which Montcalm had declared a hundred men could hold against the whole British army. It was defended here and there by small posts. Below one of these, a mile and a half above the city, the traces of a zigzag path up the bush-covered precipice could be made out, though Wolfe could not see that even this was barricaded. Here, at the now famous Anse du Foulon, he decided to make his attempt.