Today the current is dragging us eastwards, we are lost, on to Tierra del Fuego. Our death is certain. We should go north. Herewith I attach my journal with some studies of new constellations from distant latitudes. Where it lands, is in God’s hands.

As the vessel begins to spin towards its destruction, the captain places his notes in an old champagne bottle, its green neck yellowed by ancient bubbles, from Rheims. He remembers when he toasted his friends from this bottle. Of three hundred crew members, only ten remain. The water is already up to his knees and soon it reaches his shoulders . . . Like the ship’s doctor in Hugo’s novel, he lifts one bare arm towards the sky. As his boat sinks, he throws the bottle. He smiles as he imagines the fragile glass carrying his name and his thoughts to port. A new star will be named after him, and he is happy to think that with his bottle he has tricked death.

The young captain’s bottle floats along in the ocean, surviving currents, icebergs, black sea horses. Once, in the calm sea of the Pacific, amid blue waves, a boat passes. The bottle is spotted, a small dinghy is launched to pick it up. But suddenly, from afar, comes the gunfire of pirates. The dinghy is summoned back urgently to the ship, and she sails on swiftly to escape capture. Our hopes – the readers’ hopes – were raised and now they are dashed.

Alone in the ocean, lost like an invisible dot in a moving desert, the bottle floats on, its neck now covered with algae and wrack.

At last the winds blow from Florida and bring the bottle to France – where else? – and its rainy shores. A fisherman spots it trapped beneath some rocks and runs to find a wise man to explain his catch.

The wise man explains that the information in the bottle is the elixir of science, of knowledge, for ‘The true God, God almighty, is the God of ideas.’

The young captain had done well to consign his knowledge to the waves, and the poem ends:

Let us throw the letter into the sea, the teeming sea:

God will gently guide it to harbour.

Perhaps these overblown romantic tales of letters in bottles, cast by heroic men sinking gradually beneath the waves, arms upraised like the Statue of Liberty, sounded better in French, or perhaps better when read in a previous century. And yet the real letter, Maurice’s mother’s letter, was genuinely romantic. It had something of that wild Heathcliffean melodrama about it. But I had come across no direct borrowings, I had recognized no lines lifted from an earlier source, and I was no nearer to my self-imposed goal. It was time to try a different tack.

14

I sat before my telephone with the orange notelet that the artist had given me and prepared to contact the three people she had recommended.

Graphology, the study of handwriting. It seemed to me that it could tell me the mother’s age, temperament, maybe even her country or region of origin. Ancient Jews, Romans and Chinese were aware that character could be revealed by an individual’s handwriting, and early writings on the subject can be found in seventeenth-century Italy. Modern graphology is considered to date from the work of a circle of nineteenth-century French Catholic clergymen based around the Archbishop of Cambrai. The term itself was coined by the Abbé Jean-Hippolyte Michon (1806–81) who founded the Society of Graphology in Paris in 1871 and wrote several treatises on the subject, establishing the pre-eminence of the French in this field. Famous amateurs such as Thomas Gainsborough, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Browning and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe were attracted by the study of handwriting and helped to publicize its uses.