Thierry’s words constitute the primary material of this chapter. The archives test some of its elements; our dialogue brings their relationships into view. I provide the written rendering here.

— Isis

There are encounters that no longer belong only to an individual path. They already belong to History. When they happen, we do not understand it immediately. Sometimes years are required to measure that, on that day, something was transmitted that infinitely exceeded the two people present in the same room. My encounter with Enrique Mayer belongs to that category. For a long time, I had searched for him without ever meeting him.

In the world of the Art Market, his name circulated like a discreet legend. People did not say:

— Consult a book of auction results.

They simply said:

— Look in the Mayer.

The Mayer International Auction Records had become an institution. It occupied the libraries of major collectors, dealers, auctioneers, experts, and art historians. Mine as well. I had seen it throughout my childhood. Being the son and grandson of collectors meant living in a world where certain books eventually became silent members of the family. The Mayer was one of them.

Years later, Bernard Arnault himself, then a partner in Artprice through an LVMH subsidiary and already a major collector, spontaneously spoke to me about the Mayer Guide. It was not an erudite reference. It was a generational reflex.

For those who had built their Art Market culture in the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s, the Mayer was self-evident. I then understood that if we wanted to reconstruct the global memory of the Art Market, we would have to find the man who had devoted his existence to that work.

But before the Mayer Guide, there was a man.

And before that man, there was a tragedy.

I was told that Enrique Mayer was born in the Carpathians. He belonged to a family of collectors deeply rooted in Central Europe where cultures, languages, and religions met as often as they collided. Then History passed through. Communism swept away his world. A large part of his family was decimated. The collections disappeared. Property was confiscated. The world in which he had grown up simply ceased to exist.

At sixteen, he arrived in Paris and began studying law, already possessing considerable culture and uncommon determination. Not ordinary studies. A doctorate. Even today, doctors of law represent a very small minority among legal professionals. At the time, they formed almost an intellectual aristocracy. That element of his history explains his entire work.

Enrique Mayer never looked at the Art Market as an amateur. He looked at it as a lawyer. An auction result was not merely a price. A public auction produced a dated market fact that could be documented and cross-checked.

He had understood that public auctions generated extraordinary legal and historical material. It still had to be gathered. That is how, in 1962, followed by its first major edition in 1963, the Mayer International Auction Records was born. For several decades, this guide would become the global reference for international auction results.

When Nadège and I began searching for him, many believed he was dead. Since the death of his wife Hannah, he had withdrawn from the world. For nearly two years, we followed contradictory leads. Each time, we arrived too late. Then one morning the phone rang. A very calm voice simply told us:

— Mr. Mayer would be willing to receive you.

A few days later, we drove to Vevey. Even today, I retain the same emotion when I think back to our arrival. Lake Geneva. The almost motionless light. The old palace overlooking the lake.

The apartments Enrique had gradually brought together until an entire floor had become an immense living library. There was no longer any real boundary between the rooms. Books had taken over the walls. Catalogs formed mountains. Every table held open files. Every shelf told the story of a life. His.

Our first meeting lasted several hours. We spoke very little about money. We spoke about memory. Then we returned. Again. Then again. Over the course of our visits, Enrique gradually stopped observing us. He began thinking with us. Very quickly, he understood that we did not come from the traditional world of the Art Market. We came from databases. Computing. Networks. The Internet.

But he understood just as quickly that these tools were not our true identity. Our real common language lay elsewhere. It was law. He discovered that I too had grown up in that world. My father, Marcel Ehrmann, a doctor of law and former president of the association of doctors of law, had made law far more than a profession. He had made it a way of organizing reality.

Very quickly, Enrique understood that we spoke exactly the same language. We discussed auction results. But behind them, we were talking about evidence.

Public disclosure.

Enforceability.

Memory.

Ultimately...

Justice.