“Unfathomable,” was the first, and least helpful, from Arthur Weasley, who knew him a little.

“Reliable,” sniffed Minerva McGonagall, concise and uneffusive as a Calvinist prayer book.

“Strangely etiolated. Dungeon-dweller, you know.” That’s Pomona Sprout.

“Bastard. Turn-coat. Made up for it, though,” was Aberforth Dumbledore’s grudging valedictory.

“The man was tortured,” Poppy Pomfrey told me with tears in her eyes, and she should know. In retrospect, though, it’s unclear if she meant in body or in spirit.

How to write an epitaph for a man known to all and by none? There is no lexicon for mourning a deliberate cipher.