I met Monsieur Choinière beside the glass archive doors as he unlocked them with his security card: he presented a joyful, enthusiastic countenance. We went for lunch at a sushi café around the corner and spent several hours discussing his findings.

I began to divine that his work runs along two threads and that his main work now, which takes him to Poland and Paris and South America and China and other places, is the forensic work of authenticating handwriting in cases of disputed fraud. His other line, that of psychological analysis or personality assessment of a script’s author, was prevalent throughout the seventies: large corporations used to hire him to read over the CVS of job applicants and offer his opinion on the best candidates, and the employers hired or did not hire accordingly. This psychological or graphological aspect, which I wanted him to do for the handwriting of Wolfe, is not so much in demand as it was. This only made me more interested in it. I liked the idea of Monsieur Choinière dusting off and exercising his psychoanalytic skills on James Wolfe’s behalf.

Still, there was a forensic gleam in Monsieur Choinière’s eye: apparently the authenticity of Wolfe’s Quebec journal, the one that resides at the McCord Museum in Montreal, has been disputed.

He showed me an article from Le Soleil of July 12, 2009, headlined Les mystérieux journaux du général Wolfe. It described how there are two other existing documents that claim to be Wolfe’s original: one in the National Archives in Ottawa, and the other at the Royal Military College in Kingston. He would go, Monsieur Choinière told me, to see if these journals would confirm what he already suspected after his perusal this morning. He did not believe the McCord had in its budget the means to pay for such an investigation, but he would do it because he believed it had to be done.

The sushi restaurant had the only quiet nook in the neighbourhood, which is full of noisy eateries with Formica chairs scraping the floors amid a cacophony of McGill students hollering over their falafels. I ordered an avocado roll and Monsieur Choinière requested salmon sushi that arrived bearing a very pretty translucent scattering of roe. We asked for Perrier. We slid the sushi aside and arranged his knapsack and papers, and my notebooks and pencil stubs and my pencil sharpener, across the table from each other.