I was captivated by this view of waves of text and meaning splashing over me wherever I went, and the vision of myself being gradually driven into an asylum by the attempt to identify the source of each sliver of overheard conversation.

‘But you don’t want this letter to be part of the ebb and flow of meaning in the human world. You want it to have an author,’ the Professor continued. And you want to be able to see this person. Perhaps meet her and ask what really happened – Have you recovered from your bereavement, and so forth. It’s not that I’m suspicious of that wish, because it’s a wish I’ve had myself, finding ancient correspondence. But wanting to have it all buttoned down, and identified, and docketed, and placed in some sort of museum of significant texts, is only one way of approaching communicative acts of this kind. Another way would be to regard this as a valuable human document in its own terms, whether or not the writer is still alive, and leave it at that. Instead, you’re setting off on a kind of quest, a Grail quest, for an author and a concrete personal situation behind the text. And that’s a labour-intensive way of going about things. I don’t envy you the task.’

Perhaps I should take the Professor’s advice and file the letter away in my memory, putting the time I had already spent searching for the writer into a box of experience that had taught me something about myself and improved my French vocabulary. But each time I considered giving up, I thought I would make just one more effort – one more email, one more phone call, one more visit to the library. The answer might be round the next corner.

The teacher in him reasserted itself and the Professor drew my attention to developments in French literature today. ‘Ordinary lives, ordinary factual reports on average people doing average things have come to enjoy a whole new prestige. During the ’60s and ’70s, texts were so obsessed with their own internal workings and their relationships with earlier and contemporary writing that their human content was either drained away or became largely inaccessible through the shadow-play of literary self-consciousness. But in the ’90s the idea grew that literature shouldn’t aim for a grand generality in human affairs, but for closely observed detail. There’s something in this writing that suggests the writer is aware of that.’

We had ground to a halt and I was no nearer discovering the letter-writer’s identity. As the Professor showed me to the door I asked him whether he had found the letter moving.

‘I was moved by it,’ he replied in a slight tone of surprise. ‘I wasn’t particularly expecting to be. I suppose I was rather suspicious of the message-in-a-bottle formula, thinking it very, very improbable that anything of note should emerge on the seashore, washed up on the Channel coast. But I found the inventiveness of the writing, its rhythm and straightforwardness, the sense of a very simple personal tale being unfolded paragraph by paragraph, haunting. And I too wanted to know more about this person and how Maurice came to be lost, how the mourning came to be instigated. And how writing of this kind came to be thought an appropriate response to that personal tragedy. So my curiosity was tickled by the whole thing. But more than that, my human sympathies. And I showed the letter to my wife and she had the same sort of response.’ He paused for a moment. ‘In fact it moved her to tears straight away.’