140
PARTISA REVIEW
drug-dealers. To be more precise, I feel like a ferret, which is not a pleas–
ant sensation. At the outset, admittedly, I haven't the faintest inkling as
to what sort of secrets I am likely to ferret out. But, though the family
at this stage always know far more than I do, they don't know what sort
of ferret they have just put down their trousers.
It
is at moments like this that I come closest to sharing french misgiv–
ings about Anglo-Saxon methods and, still more distasteful, Anglo-Saxon
morals. I see the logic behind their ability to make even the most routine
biographical research feel like ignoble ferreting, or muckraking. The
French have perfected a protective and defensive system of legal and
bureaucratic regulation that militates against any attempt to take a second
look at a life that has been reduced over the years, like Matisse's, to a
handful of legends, endlessly recycled and passed down like Bible stories.
Checking up on these legends often proved next to impossible. Looking
back, I see my years of research in France as a long series of shocks.
My first shock was the discovery that biography's name was mud.
My second was to find that the name of Matisse was mud, too. Most
people in the small northern town where he grew up-as well as in the
neighboring towns where he was born and went to school-had never
heard of him. The few who knew his name generally belonged to an
older generation that remained too embarrassed to talk about him. Sev–
eral elderly people described his work
to
me as pictures a child could
have painted ("Have you
seen
his paintings, Madame?"), explaining
that nobody in those parts would have been fool enough to shell out the
ludicrous prices apparently paid for such things in Paris.
But the next generation of people in their forties and fifties more
often than not knew nothing at all about him. I visited the law firm that
had once handled Matisse's father's business affairs. The office still
exists a little further along the street from the seed store where the
painter grew up, and the head of the firm, who couldn't have been more
accommodating, saw no problem about my consulting his records
(which were kept in sacks in an attic at the top of a winding stair across
the courtyard). "What name did you say, Madame?" he asked helpfully.
"Mathis? Mathys? How are you spelling that? with an
i
or with a
y?"
This was in
1992,
and I found similar reactions all over the painter's
native North. The director of the local art school, where Matisse had
enrolled in secret as a boy, kept the relevant register at home, not in the
school itself, precisely so as to avoid prying eyes like mine. When we
finally met, after eighteen months of broken appointments and missed
rendezvous, he told me that the very name of Matisse had brought
shame and ignominy to his school's otherwise proud record. This sort
