Recollections by David Christie Murray — Read

One of my hobbies for the last forty years has been the study of character in handwriting. It is pretty much with the various forms of caligraphy as it is with the human face or with the human voice. The vast majority of faces that one sees are essentially commonplace, but each has somehow an individuality of its own. Handwriting has its physiognomy, and everybody who has been accustomed to a large correspondence knows how instinctively and unfailingly he recognises a caligraphy which has been presented to him only twice or thrice. It was as a result of my pursuit of this hobby that I first began to take a real interest in the Dreyfus case.

When the first rough and ready facsimiles of the famous _Bordereau_ and of the authentic letters of Captain Dreyfus were published side by side, it struck me with an immediate amazement to conceive that any person who had given even the most casual attention to this study of handwriting could possibly have supposed that the various documents had emanated from the same hand. The forgery of a signature is one of the simplest businesses in the world, but the truly deceptive forgery of a document of any length is an absolute impossibility -- an impossibility as complete as would attend the continued personification of a dual character by the most skilful mimic under the observation of one who was able to maintain a sustained and microscopic examination of the two.