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.