QUOTE : Miles away Matisse had had much the same reaction: he was at the frontier with his passport in his pocket and the boat was waiting at Genoa to take him to Rio de Janeiro; but, as he wrote to his son, “When I saw the endless line of people leaving I had not the least desire to go … I should have felt like a deserter. If everything of any worth runs away, what will remain of France?” France meant different things to Matisse and Picasso: but although Picasso remained a Spaniard through and through, France and above all Paris nevertheless for him meant light, freedom, and the living arts, and that intemporal country, beyond all national or geographic boundaries, was where his patriotism lay.