I have never loved war for its own sake. I know its history too well, its bodies, its ruins, its lies, and the way it destroys in a few hours what several generations took a century to build. Yet I have to use the word warrior to speak about part of my existence. Avoiding it would be false. Nadège and I fought.

We fought for a long time. Sometimes for years over a single case. We knew trial courts, courts of appeal, the Cour de cassation, European courts, international proceedings, expert assessments, summonses, nights spent going back through thousands of pages because one sentence, one date, or one exhibit could change the outcome of a case.

We faced adversaries with considerable resources. We knew economic, institutional, banking, and media pressure. At times we faced a violence far beyond what one imagines when looking from the outside at an Art Market information company or a contemporary work.

But the word warrior interests me only if it is immediately followed by a question: what are we fighting for?

Without that question, the warrior is merely a man who loves violence.

That is not my subject.

I never wanted to win simply in order to defeat someone. What mattered to me was not yielding when yielding would have meant betraying something that had been entrusted to us. That is where the boundary lies. It is moral before it is legal.

With Artprice, that boundary appeared very early. We were building a global memory of the Art Market from hundreds of documentary collections, millions of data points, catalogs, biographies, auction results, signatures, monograms, and archives accumulated by men and women who had sometimes devoted their entire existence to their work. Enrique Mayer had warned me.

He knew the environment. He knew the Art Market was not the polished world displayed at openings. Behind the beauty of the works lie enormous interests, fortunes, reputations, estate strategies, inheritances, questions of attribution and provenance. A single piece of information can alter the value of an object by millions. From that moment on, anyone who holds an independent memory inevitably becomes the target of pressure.

Enrique wanted to know whether I would hold. He was testing me.

He was not interested only in my technical or financial capabilities. He wanted to know what I would do on the day someone far more powerful than I asked for a piece of information to disappear.

That was the real question.

A database is easy to defend when it bothers no one. Ethics begins when documentary truth has a cost.

I had told him I would not yield.

That sentence might sound theatrical today if thirty years of legal proceedings had not given it reality.

We held.

Not because we thought we were always right. That would have been madness. We could make mistakes. And when a mistake was demonstrated, our duty was to correct it.

But correcting an error and erasing a truth under pressure are two radically different acts. That distinction is at the heart of everything.

A memory worthy of the name must be correctable. It must never become purchasable. That is where the fight begins.

I saw the methods. They are not always brutal. The most effective are sometimes extremely courteous. Someone explains that your work is admirable. That they deeply respect what you do. Then they offer you a solution.

An agreement. A settlement. A major order. An acquisition. An elegant way of resolving a problem that in reality consists of making embarrassing information disappear. Everything is presented as reasonable.

All you have to do is yield a millimeter. The problem is that the first millimeter already contains all the ones that follow. Someone who knows that memory has a price will return with more money. Someone who knows pressure works will increase the pressure.

Ethics is therefore not a moral decoration added to a prosperous company. It is an architecture. Remove one foundational stone, and the whole may gradually collapse.

I believe that is what Enrique had understood.

He was not merely transmitting data to me. He was transmitting a responsibility. And after him, everyone else would do the same.

The families. The historians. The researchers. The booksellers. Peter Hastings Falk. The thousands of guardians of memory.

Every time someone handed us the work of a lifetime, an additional moral debt was added. We could no longer say: this information belongs to us; we can do whatever we want with it.

Exactly the opposite.

The more memory we legally owned, the less we could morally behave as if it belonged to us. We were becoming custodians.

That is probably what made our positions difficult for some counterparts to understand. They thought in terms of assets. We thought in terms of transmission.

An asset can be negotiated.

Transmission imposes fidelity.

That difference necessarily produces conflict when it meets powerful interests.

So I learned war through law.

Law is a strange weapon. It should never be used to destroy the other person arbitrarily. Its noblest function is exactly the opposite: to prevent raw power alone from deciding.

Two adversaries may possess radically different financial means. Before the judge, they are supposed to encounter the same norm.

I said: supposed to.

Reality is obviously more complex.

The party with greater means can multiply counsel, expert reports, proceedings, appeals. It can try to exhaust the other side. But law possesses something I have always deeply loved: the possibility of taking up the reasoning again.

A judgment can be challenged.

A court of appeal can review.

The Cour de cassation can review the law.

A European court can shift the scale again.

Legal combat therefore has its own temporal depth. We experienced it to the extreme. Some cases ran for years. Sometimes decades. We had to begin again. Return to the exhibits. Reread. Wait. Lose one stage without deciding the war was lost. Win one stage without deciding it was over.

That temporality requires a particular form of resistance. Above all, it requires memory. This is where Nadège once again becomes absolutely essential.

I could be the sword. She protected the armory.

The metaphor makes me smile, but it is accurate. A long legal battle is never won only by the person who argues or designs the strategy. You have to retrieve an exhibit ten years later. Reconstruct a chronology. Know exactly which version of a document was transmitted. Preserve the formal reports. The expert assessments. The letters. The decisions. The evidence.

A legal war is also a war against amnesia.

Nadège built that memory. That is why the She-Wolf and the warrior belong to the same story. We did not fight in the same way. But we knew what we were protecting.

I also have to speak about the Abode of Chaos. Because there the struggle took yet another form. The issue was no longer only documentary memory. It directly concerned freedom of creation.

For years, part of the conflict rested on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of what was being built at Saint-Romain-au-Mont-d’Or. Some saw alterations to buildings.

I saw a work.

That difference in legal and conceptual classification changes everything. But it was not enough for me to say so. An artist declaring that his work is a work does not by itself constitute a scientific, heritage, or legal demonstration.

We had to work. Document. Bring in architects, historians, surveyors, academics, and heritage specialists. We had to accept their independent view. And sometimes their limits.

I care deeply about this point. I never wanted science to become a decoration used after the fact to legitimize what I had decided. That would have had no value.

Researchers had to be able to look. Measure. Compare. Contradict. Establish.

That is how the work led in particular by Nicolas Detry with Raphaëlle Rivière, TT Géomètres Experts, and university researchers gradually produced another reading.

The plans. The overhead views. The surveys. The major recurring artistic gestures. The spatial composition.

The relationship between the old architecture and the contemporary interventions. What could look like an accumulation at ground level became, when viewed from above and measured, a structure. I find that moment magnificent. Because the nature of the struggle changes.

I no longer need to say: look more carefully.

The measurement speaks.

The architect speaks.

The land surveyor speaks. The geomatics specialist speaks.

The historian speaks.

The conservator speaks.

Different disciplines gradually arrive at a convergent conclusion: there is an overall coherence here that makes it impossible to treat each intervention as an isolated object. The Total Work of Art becomes demonstrable through something other than the author’s own discourse. That is a far more important victory than a personal victory.

Because a person can be challenged.

A demonstration constructed by several disciplines has a different kind of resilience. That is exactly why I have always loved knowledge. It allows us to move outside the balance of power.

The warrior of law, if I retain the expression, is therefore not the person who hits harder. It is the person who tries to move the conflict into a space where brute force loses some of its power.

Law. Evidence. Knowledge. Transparency. They are strange weapons because they do not necessarily destroy the adversary. They may simply make the adversary’s lie impossible.

I prefer that victory. It lasts longer.

The light, in this expression, is not mystical in the easy sense of the word. It is what allows us to see. Data makes a price visible. An archive makes a provenance visible. A plan makes a structure visible. Case law makes a limit visible. A photograph makes an earlier state visible.

Knowledge gradually takes away arbitrariness’s territory of shadow. That is probably the thread connecting my most different battles.

I never wanted to possess a secret in order to dominate. I often wanted to produce enough information for secrecy to stop being a weapon of domination. That is exactly what Artprice did in a market historically marked by opacity.

Make visible.

Compare.

Publish.

Preserve.

Power changes when information once reserved for a handful of insiders becomes accessible to hundreds of thousands of people. That also explains the violence of some reactions.

Information asymmetry is sometimes a rent. The person who removes it does not merely provide a service. He redistributes power.

I knew this would cause wars.

Enrique Mayer had told me so.

But he had also transmitted something else to me: once you begin to yield, you will no longer know where to stop. I kept that sentence as a discipline.

That does not mean every battle should be pursued. That is one of the warrior’s mistakes. Believing every conflict deserves to be fought.

With age, I learned exactly the opposite. You have to choose.

Human energy is limited. Time even more so.

A useless fight steals time from what you could be building. True strength is therefore not answering every attack. It is knowing which one actually threatens what you have a responsibility to protect.

Nadège contributed enormously to that learning. She could tell me: that one does not deserve your energy. Or, on the contrary: there, we cannot yield. That ability to rank battles may be one of the highest forms of strategy.

Sun Tzu understood this long ago: the most intelligent victory is not the one that requires the most battles.

Strength is not agitation. It is precision.

I also learned that an adversary is not necessarily an enemy. That distinction is fundamental to my humanism.

Someone can oppose me legally and be entirely respectable.

He defends his interest.

I defend mine.

The judge decides.

Conflict does not require hatred.

I deeply distrust the moment when an adversary stops being a human being and becomes an evil abstraction. That is how the most dangerous forms of violence begin.

Dehumanizing the person you are fighting then makes it possible to justify anything. I reject that.

Even in the hardest battles, somewhere you have to preserve the awareness that the other person has a history, reasons, and sometimes fears of his own.

That does not require yielding.

It requires only that you not become what you claim to be fighting. That is a difficult boundary.

Anger can be useful. It provides energy.

Hatred destroys the person who carries it.

I do not want to transmit hatred to Sydney. I want to transmit the capacity to resist. They are not the same thing.

I want him to know how to say no. How to defend a memory. A team. A work. A freedom. But I also want him to know how to recognize the moment when fighting becomes an end in itself.

That is when you have to put down the sword.

Family transmission therefore also concerns war.

What did we learn from our battles that Sydney does not need to learn again in his own flesh?

That is one of the hardest questions for parents.

We want to transmit experience. But some experiences are truly understood only after they have been lived.

You can tell someone that a predator exists. He will never know exactly what it means to face one until he has. But you can still transmit markers.

Do not sign under fear.

Do not decide solely under anger.

Keep the evidence.

Listen to the person who contradicts you.

Never underestimate the adversary.

Never dehumanize him.

And above all, before entering a war, ask yourself what you want to protect. If the answer is only your ego, go home.

I believe that last rule would sometimes have saved me a great deal of time when I was younger. But part of a life is learning what you wish you had known earlier.

Today, when I look behind me, I see hundreds of conflicts, proceedings, intellectual, economic, artistic, or legal confrontations.

I feel no nostalgia for battle. I feel gratitude for what endured.

Artprice is still here. The memory is here. The Abode of Chaos is here. The works are here. The archives are here. The family is here.

And above all, the meaning of what we wanted to protect was not dissolved by the battles required to protect it. That is probably what I regard as our most important victory.

Not allowing war to turn us entirely into warriors.

Remaining capable of loving.

Of transmitting.

Of looking at a work.

Of welcoming a visitor.

Of marveling at a scientific discovery.

Of laughing.

Of sitting together.

Of speaking to Sydney as something other than the person who will have to take up a battle.

The warrior of law is not the person who lives with a sword in hand. He is the person who can lay it down without having lost what it was meant to protect.

Seeing is not enough. Fighting is not enough either.

At some point, one has to transmit. And transmission imposes a form of renunciation. Accepting that the other person will not fight exactly your wars.

That he will not choose your weapons.

That he may abandon certain territories to which you were attached.

That he will open others you may not immediately understand.

If I refuse that, I transmit nothing. I am merely trying to extend my own will beyond myself. That is not what I want.

True transmission begins when the person receiving becomes free enough to transform what he is given without betraying its spirit.

That is where Thierry, Nadège, and Sydney cease to be merely a family. We become three mental architectures confronted with the same question:

How do you transmit without manufacturing a copy?

That is the question that must now close this part and open the next.