When, a few days ago, I explained this rendezvous to my next-door neighbour, Lilliane, she asked, “Have you checked his credentials?” I replied that I was not worried at all about Monsieur Choinière’s credentials: as far as I’m concerned, if a person wants to devote his life to the analysis of handwriting, then I believe he is sincere and has something of interest to say, though it might appear unusual or even improbable to some. Now I took delight in Monsieur Choinière’s face, which brimmed throughout our interview with an overflow of joie de vivre that made him appear youthful, though he told me that as long ago as the mid-1960s he was employed as a social worker three hundred miles north of Edmonton.

“How did you go from being a social worker,” I asked him, “to becoming a handwriting expert?”

He replied, “If you knew my aunt Iris, you would understand.” His aunt Iris, he said, had possessed a ceinture fléchée—the traditional woven fur-trader’s belt dating from Wolfe’s century—and would wear it every year in the Carnaval de Québec parade. “She was red-cheeked,” he said. “She was one of these people who you look at, and you want to smile. With her you knew you would have fun.”

Iris was a nurse and a schoolteacher but during a time when Monsieur Choinière rented a room from her in his early twenties, she took a correspondence course in handwriting analysis. “She had such magnetism,” he recalled. “She saw that I’m very curious—and I was interested in her mysterious course. With her firm voice, she told me, ‘Hippolyte, you would be good at this!’ And that idea stayed with me.”

I had been wondering if his name was really Hippolyte, as it had appeared on his emails to me; now the answer delighted me.

Through a succession of social work and Children’s Aid jobs in the North and in Muskoka and other places, he continued to study handwriting. “My sister was going to Haiti,” he said. “She’d bought a blue convertible Volkswagen and she said, ‘Come with me to Miami and keep the car and drive it back home.’ On that trip I stopped in every library: Florida, the Library of Congress, University of Toronto….I rented rooms and studied on my own.”

He went to California and to France to learn more, and in 1976 he attended an international congress of handwriting experts in Paris, as an independent participant. “I knew who I wanted to meet,” he told me. At the conference were all the heavy-hitters of handwriting analysis: syndicate vice presidents, forensic graphologists, foreign correspondents for La Graphologie, a handwriting analysis journal published from 1871 to the present day. He had read all their works. These people invited him for cocktails and he eventually became a correspondent for the journal.