fACTS AND FICTIONS I N ALL THREE GENRES
141
of response taught me a great deal. People whose feelings were still so
bitter a century after Matisse had left the region gave me my first inkling
of the depths of humiliation and persecution he had endured there.
His history, as it slowly emerged, reminded me again and again of the
fate that had overtaken Vincent Van Gogh, born sixteen years before
Matisse, roughly a hundred miles away on the far side of the great cen–
tral European plain. This was french flanders, the source of the Rivers
Somme and Sambre, a difficult place
to
come to terms with at first for
anyone from England . Matisse's birthplace, Le Cateau-Cambresis, is
ringed with British cemeteries holding young soldiers who died in
19] 4-1918.
If
it took me some time
to
get used to signposts pointing to
places of sombre memory like "Le Cateau" and "Ypres," it took just as
long for even more ancient mcmories
to
begin to surface in the old peo–
ple of Matisse's hometown.
These were people who had grown up hearing their parents talk in
whispers about
Ie sot Matisse,
the village idiot or madman who had
been despised, jeered at, hounded, and finally run out of town. Their
initial secretiveness had deep historical roots. Their region had been the
cockpit of European battles from the time of Julius Caesar onwards. All
the local towns and villages had been occupied by German armies three
times in Matisse's lifetime. He himself had grown up in a countryside
full of fresh graves, being takcn to visit the fie ld on which France was
defeated when he was a baby of twelve months in 1871, listening as a
small boy to tales of looting, pillage, and destruction, of civilian
hostages lined up to be shot, of whole populations helpless to protect
themselves or their dependents.
People had learned to bury or burn possessions and papers rather
than have them forcibly removed by Prussian invaders. Old habits of
mistrust and reticence governed their ways of thinking and behaving. I
was often reminded of a saying that had become almost a refrain in
those parts. Matisse's mother repeated it at mealtimes in his childhood,
like a grace: "Well, there's another one the Germans won't get their
hands on
IEncore un que les Allemands n'auront pasl."
Wrongs that
couldn't be righted could at least be obliterated. Denial and repres–
sion-the destruction of records, the refusal to keep mementos or look
back at the past-remain widespread to this day throughout the region.
I had come across cultura l amnesia on this sca le once before, in India,
when I made a journey across the subcontinent in the footsteps of the
novelist Paul Scott-who was my second biographical subject.
The Jewel
in the Crown-a
hugely popular TV series based on Scott's novels after
his death-coincided with a wave of imperial nostalgia in Britain in the
