"I treated art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction." -- Oscar Wilde i. When Balthazar Klossowski turned six, he had a large birthday party in his family's apartment in Paris. Birthdays were a funny business for "Baltusz" -- as everyone called him. Since he had been born on February 29 in 1908, his family did not know precisely when to celebrate except on leap years. Nonetheless, as the boy anticipated his friends' arrival, he was in high spirits. He had a plan. It was a cozy home full of art and books -- in a building on the Rue Boissonade, near the Boulevard Montparnasse in the fourteenth arrondissement.

Baltusz's parents were both painters, his father an art historian as well, and along with Baladine's winsome watercolors and Erich's vigorous oils hung canvases by Cezanne and Delacroix, as well as a Gericault drawing and Japanese woodcuts. Baltusz's little friends entered dressed in their finery, in his eyes "all very beautiful with their white lace collars." Once the nurses and governesses left the children on their own, the birthday boy took charge. Addressing the other youngsters, Baltusz announced that the time had come for them "to eat badly." There was a chocolate cake, and they all plunged in. Everyone got his collars and cuffs filthy with frosting. Everyone except for Baltusz, who remained spotless. When the nurses and governesses returned, all the other children were chastised or slapped, while Baltusz escaped punishment.

The story was told to me a lifetime later by the eighty-two-year-old Balthus -- the Count de Rola -- in the sitting room of his vast eighteenth-century chalet in a small French-speaking village in the Alps. "It's part of my bad side," he explained, referring to the way he had trapped others into temptation while keeping himself clean. "A very naughty boy, and until now he has never changed," laughed his forty-eight-year-old Japanese-born wife, Setsuko, who had encouraged him to tell me the tale. I had met both of them for the first time that afternoon. Balthus's reputation was that he loathed writers on art and would not grant interviews. In an era when many successful artists preen like movie stars, he has managed to give the impression that he prefers to live in isolation, as if the occasions when he has been quoted or photographed are accidental slips. In 1977, at the time of a rare Balthus show in New York -- the first in a decade -- Robert Hughes wrote of the artist in Time magazine that "at 69 he has no public face" and that there were no anecdotes about him in circulation, thanks to his own careful control. I had scant hope that he would alter his reclusive pose for me.

John Russell had begun his introduction to the catalog of the 1968 Balthus retrospective at the Tate Gallery with the statement, "What is private must remain so: that is Balthus' attitude, and it is at his insistence that this catalog contains no biographical matter. 'The best way to begin,' he said when apprised of our customs, 'is to say: "Balthus is a painter of whom nothing is known. And now let us have a look at the paintings." ' " That statement, often cited since, has become the gospel on the artist. It is especially provocative given the eroticism and deviltry and sinister overtones so many viewers see in his paintings of comatose teenagers and seemingly spent naked women. When his major retrospective opened in Paris at the Centre Pompidou in 1983, critics in search of a lead on the work from Balthus himself could do no better than to fall back on his 1945 pronouncement, "I refuse to confide and don't like it when people write about art." The exhibition catalog, although rendered heavier than the combined volumes of the Paris phone book by its many essays and reproductions, presented no strai.