“I have a complete set of every journal they have published since the beginning,” he told me. Since then, his handwriting analysis work has taken him to Tanzania, Belgium and Chile. He has testified for international penal tribunals and entered the archives of Carl Jung with a concealed spy camera.

Now, over our sushi rolls, he began to tell me his findings on Wolfe.

“I’m a movement translator,” he said. “Handwriting is frozen movement. The page is the stage. My work is to animate that life on the stage. I am meeting the person.

“I’m asking questions of the page. My first question is to ask what is common to Wolfe’s time and what belongs to him personally. For example, in the letter he wrote at age fourteen in 1741, even within the restrictions of that age, I can see what we call the pastosity—a muddiness—that means he was probably, as a teenager, discovering his own sexuality. It’s unexpressed but present. Later it’s the same with some of his emotion. He shows a conflict between being sentimental or emotional and being a man of action. With select people he can be affectionate. The feelings are there.

“His environment, in the army, is not the place to express his feelings. Within him I can see that possible ambivalence between feeling and thinking. It’s like somebody who has a coat of armour. In nature you have the porcupine. Don’t touch it! But then, the meat is so tender. It’s the same with Wolfe.

“Did he idealize his lovers? With this type of personality, if he comes too close to the real person he’s afraid of his own emotions. Psychologically, he is not really in touch with his emotions. We see this with the priest who loves the Virgin Mary—he channels his emotions there, and she won’t challenge them. He expresses his emotions through reason.”

Monsieur Choinière explained that in Wolfe’s handwriting there is equilibrium between form and movement. While his fourteen-year-old handwriting is closer to a “copy-book” rendition of schoolboys’ handwriting of that age—with, for example, flourishes on the letter D—it nevertheless betrays personality and is congruent with his later writing.

“It’s angular, and it has irregularities. I see the strong influence of his environment—he’s not a hippie of his time: he will fit in with society, but with enough individuality to be his own man. He’s a man of action. What strikes me is the overall organization of the page: he can see the global aspect of things, yet at the same time is taking care of details. His punctuation is all there on the page.