“What about his love of poetry?”

“He’s a man of principle, socialized as a child soldier. Poetry is a socially accepted way to channel his sensibilities. His regular way of thinking is reason. We see, underneath, intuition and feelings. It’s there. Some people are cold-blooded men of principle. We see in his handwriting that Wolfe is not cold-blooded. But he was socialized as a child soldier. Still, one thing that puzzles me,” said Monsieur Choinière, “is his relationship with money or material things. It would seem money was important for him: he could give, but he had a need for security. I see this in his letter s—he put more emphasis on the letter s, and usually s has to do with money. Psychologically he’s more anal than oral, more concerned with keeping than with giving—keeping things to himself. But then, being a man of principle, if he was to give, it would be through principle.

“He has also got what we call foxtails in his handwriting. When he comes to the end of the page, his writing is cramped in the right margin: he doesn’t want to cut what he’s doing. He wants to do everything in the same, uninterrupted line. He has trouble cutting off or changing a course of action.

“He knows in advance where he’s going, and he doesn’t stop. The letters are connected—they are even hyper-connected, especially in the Quebec journal. Also, we can talk about initiative. His letter t is on the ground, and the t-bar is on a 45-degree slant. We see this in people who can be impulsive, but because of the spatial organization of his writing on the page…he steps on the gas pedal, but then he brakes, using reason.

“In other words, his first response is to be impulsive, but he has enough self-control not to do anything he would regret…unless he is tired, or very ill, or has been drinking wine.”

After we had discussed Wolfe’s psychology, there was the matter of the Quebec journal and its authenticity. “I don’t see any intrinsic signs of forgery,” Monsieur Choinière told me. “If you try to forge, you write more slowly…like following in someone’s footsteps. There are, therefore, tremblings, or breaking-points. I look at general features and small details. There are idiosyncratic gestures that a person doesn’t even know he’s doing.”

He would go, he said, to Ottawa and Kingston, to look at the other documents claiming to be the real thing, but he believed he would, in time, prove that the journal we had read at the McCord Museum in Montreal was the journal Wolfe wrote during the difficult days you and I know about, Jimmy—the days of doubt and mutiny, illness and loss, loneliness and dejection, and the pursuit of a vision seen by turns as heroism or despicable folly.