00:03In Toul, usually, nothing ever happens. It's a small town in the southwest of France,
00:09famous for its lace, which is still licking its wounds from the First World War,
00:14when, starting in January 1920, she was hit by a storm of anonymous letters.
00:21folded in four, left in mailboxes, on the landings of houses or in front of shops,
00:27on the stairs, always clearly visible, written by the same hand, in large block letters,
00:33that run along the entire sheet and, at the end, always the same signature, the eye of the tiger.
00:40Full of insults, threats, but above all accusations and gossip. He cheats on her,
00:47the one to a lover, the others steal, are corrupt, have unspeakable secrets. They are
00:52addressed to ordinary people, but they also accuse someone else, they call someone else into question
00:57again and so they spread like wildfire. The town is devastated and even people escape
01:03the dead man, Mr. Augusto, who can't stand the gossip about his wife, is locked up
01:08in a mental institution and commits suicide there. But who is the Tiger's Eye? The inhabitants of Tull begin to look at each other.
01:15suspicious. What are the authorities doing? Why can't they find him? Are they covering for someone?
01:21Could it be a plot by the powers that be? Thus, in January 1922, the legendary
01:28Commissioner Edmond Lockard, one of the founding fathers of scientific police, not only in France,
01:35which is developing a series of studies in a field that is particularly useful in these investigations,
01:40Graphometry, which measures and analyzes handwriting. Lockard calls upon a group of people
01:47suspicious and does as in school. He makes them sit at their desks with paper, pen and ink and begins
01:54to dictate the letters. The commissioner is good. And even though the tiger's eye is right-handed,
02:00who writes left-handed to confuse the waters, eventually discovers who overwhelmed the town
02:06with that absurd wave of murderous letters. Angel, a 35-year-old woman who wanted revenge
02:13of the lover who had left her and then she got carried away, turning into a hater
02:20serial. Nothing less than the so-called keyboard warriors who today spread the same attacks
02:26and the same poisonous fake news, even if with the speed, strength and diffusion capacity of the
02:33network. In 1943 the director Henri-Georges Clouseau made a film inspired by this story, which
02:41it is called Le Corbeau, the crow, which since then has given its name to those who defame someone, anonymously,
02:48like Angel, with his handwritten letters, in large, block letters.
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