Matisse was visiting Paris when the Nazis invaded France in June 1940 but managed to make his way back to Nice. His son, Pierre, by then a gallery owner in New York, begged him to flee while he could. Matisse was about to embark for Brazil to escape the Occupation but changed his mind and remained in Nice, in Vichy France. "It seemed to me as if I would be deserting," he wrote Pierre in September 1940. "If everyone who has any value leaves France, what remains of France?" Although he was never a member of the resistance, it became a point of pride to the occupied French that one of their most acclaimed artists chose to stay, though of course, being non-Jewish, he had that option.