When I left Vevey, I was not bringing back only the rights to the Mayer Guide. I was leaving with a responsibility. Enrique Mayer had not transmitted a book to me. He had transmitted a mission. During our final conversations, he had stopped talking about himself. His gaze was already elsewhere. He now spoke to me about those who had come before him, as if, having reached the end of his own life, he felt the need to place his work within a history far larger than his own. One name kept returning.

Le Mireur.

Every time he pronounced it, his voice changed almost imperceptibly. He was no longer speaking about a book. He was speaking about a monument.

— Le Mireur is the true beginning, he told me. Without it, you will never be able to claim that you are reconstructing the global memory of the Art Market.

Then, after a long silence, he would add:

— It is the missing link.

I already knew the work of Dr. Hippolyte Mireur. Like everyone who had grown up in a family of collectors, I knew the name as part of a kind of intellectual heritage. You did not discover Le Mireur the way you discover a book. You grew up with it.

But Enrique forced me to look at it differently.

He was not talking about the seven volumes that can still be found today in major libraries. He was talking about everything no one saw.

The index cards.

The annotations.

The correspondence.

The notebooks.

The doubts.

The corrections.

The hesitations.

The living thought that had made the work possible. He often repeated:

— The book is only the visible part. What remains behind it is even more important.

I then understood why he insisted so strongly. Hippolyte Mireur was not merely a historian of the Art Market. He was a surgeon. A doctor of medicine. A recognized researcher. A Marseillais. A Freemason. A humanist. He belonged to that generation of men who believed knowledge should never be separated into isolated domains.

Medicine. Law. History. Economics. Philosophy.

Everything entered naturally into dialogue.

That vision moved me deeply. I recognized in it what my father had transmitted to me since childhood. Marcel Ehrmann too belonged to that tradition in which a doctor of law could speak with a scientist, an industrialist, a theologian, or a historian without ever feeling that he had changed disciplines.

I found that same breadth in Mireur. And I suddenly understood why Enrique Mayer had immediately recognized something familiar in us. The three of us, each in our own era, belonged to the same intellectual family. A family that believed knowledge acquires its true meaning only when different forms of knowledge meet.

Enrique continued. He described Dr. Mireur’s work as one tells the story of an expedition. For nearly half a century, surrounded by around ten collaborators, he had reconstructed, sale by sale, the birth of the modern Art Market. He did not work only on works of art.

He worked on people. Buyers. Sellers. Collectors. Dealers. The first industrialists. Great families. The first fortunes.

Reading his cards, one could see the birth of Europe’s great museums take shape.

The Louvre.

The Hermitage.

Public collections.

Private collections.

One could see works circulate the way ideas circulate. At the time, catalogs still gave the name of the buyer and the seller. Today, that information is largely protected. At the time, it was raw material for history. Through it, Mireur followed the life of works, the formation of collections, the emergence of major museums, and the migration of patrimonies after wars or inheritances.

I understood that what he had built went infinitely beyond a simple history of auction results. He had reconstructed the sociology of the Art Market before that discipline even existed.

But Enrique immediately added: — The most extraordinary thing is not in the book. It is in what remained behind.

I did not truly understand that sentence until several weeks later. When Nadège and I decided to search for the Mireur archives, we thought we were going to recover a library. We had no idea what we were about to discover. Without yet knowing it, we were entering one of the largest documentary rescue operations of our existence. And that day, I finally understood that some memories are not simply transmitted. They must first be saved.

I thought I was going to retrieve a library. I discovered an archaeological worksite. Enrique Mayer had warned me. He had not exaggerated.

When Nadège and I arrived in the south of France, we expected to find Professor Hippolyte Mireur’s archives carefully preserved in a library, perhaps an attic, a few fitted-out rooms where time had simply suspended his work. The reality was entirely different.

The heirs had done what they could. I never blamed them. Quite the opposite. For decades, they had preserved the original Mireur editions with the respect owed to a family work. Without them, those volumes might have disappeared.

But no one could reasonably preserve, for nearly a century, thousands of working cards, notebooks, correspondence, annotated catalogs, and preparatory archives under scientific conservation conditions.

Two world wars had passed. Generations had succeeded one another. Houses had changed. Life had continued. The archives had simply been put somewhere safe. Wherever there was room. In a cellar. An outbuilding. An old wine cellar. A garden shed.

In small storage spaces where no one would have imagined finding one of the most important documentary patrimonies in the history of the Art Market. We opened one door. Then another. Then a third. Each time, new boxes appeared. Then more. Then still more. Very quickly, I understood that no one had truly measured the extent of what was still sleeping there.

I still remember the smell.

Old paper.

Damp cardboard.

Wood.

Dust.

An almost organic smell. As though all that memory were still breathing. In places, moisture had begun its silent work. Mold was spreading. Spores were slowly colonizing certain boxes. Sepia inks were losing their intensity. Some sheets were beginning to stick together. Every hour mattered. We could no longer simply inventory. We had to save.

I then understood that we were changing professions completely. We were no longer documentalists. We were becoming rescuers.

The first days were almost unreal.

We brought in teams. Staff. Temporary workers. Vehicles. The boxes seemed endless.

Several times, the heirs told us:

— Wait… there are more over there.

We set off again. Another cellar. Another shed.

Then more crates, more cards, with nothing ever seeming to end.

I remember thinking:

“If we truly want to save this memory, we will have to accept going all the way, whatever the human cost.”

Then came a scene that still makes me smile today because it seems so improbable. We needed to move hundreds of thousands of extremely fragile Bristol index cards. No ordinary shovel would work. It would bend the cardboard. Tear the cards. We found a solution of disarming simplicity.

A snow shovel.

Its width allowed us to lift a very large volume of documents without exerting excessive pressure. We gently filled that enormous shovel, then emptied its contents into transport crates. When I tell the story today, many people think it is a metaphor. It is not. We really did save part of the Mireur archives with snow shovels.

By evening, our backs were broken. Our arms no longer responded. But no one thought of stopping. We knew each box might contain a unique item.

An annotation.

A correction.

A hesitation by Dr. Mireur.

A piece of information that existed nowhere else.

That was the moment when Nadège truly took charge of the operation. She immediately understood that the problem was not merely documentary. It was becoming biological. Spores from certain molds could be dangerous. The papers were continuing to deteriorate. We could not improvise.

She then organized a genuine scientific protocol. The boxes were isolated. Contaminated areas separated. Teams protected. Flows organized.

We used appropriate respiratory protection whenever necessary. Not because we were seeking a dramatic effect. Because prudence required it.

We also discovered a problem no one had considered. Transporting the archives itself represented a risk. A plastic tarp would have created condensation. Condensation would have accelerated the destruction. So we had several vehicles specially fitted out.

Humidity had to remain as stable as possible. The archives traveled almost like museum works. At that precise moment, I understood that we were no longer transporting paper. We were transporting nearly a century of memory. And I also understood that this memory would demand only one thing of us: that we be worthy of receiving it.

When the first trucks finally arrived at Saint-Romain-au-Mont-d’Or, I understood that the rescue was not over. We had only begun its most difficult part. The boxes now occupied several spaces. Crates were stacked. The Bristol cards seemed endless. Handwritten notebooks sat beside correspondence, annotated catalogs, press clippings, personal notes, and thousands of documents whose precise origin no one could any longer explain.

I looked at Nadège. We immediately understood each other. If we began opening these boxes without a method, within a few weeks we would destroy what Professor Hippolyte Mireur had built over nearly half a century. We had to forget the urgency. And build a protocol.

From that moment on, Nadège naturally took scientific charge of the worksite. I have often affectionately called her “the queen of processes.” It is not merely a phrase. I have never met anyone with such an ability to organize chaos without ever stripping it of its soul. She did not see boxes. She already saw the entire chain.

Isolation.

Quarantine.

Neutralization.

Photography.

Classification.

Digitization.

Control.

Archiving.

Each stage called for the next. None could be reversed. The slightest error would contaminate everything that followed. We had entered a logic belonging as much to heritage conservation as to microbiology. The spores continued to spread. Some were harmless. Others could become dangerous to the teams.

So we established zones. Circuits. Protocols.

The most severely affected documents were immediately isolated. They never went directly to the historians. They first passed through what was effectively a medicine of archives.

For a long time, I wondered why my path had led me so early toward computer-generated imagery, digital processing, physical sciences, optics, and matrix calculations. The answer was in front of me. Everything I had learned over the years was finally finding its use.

The Lumière Stations, which we had originally developed for computer-generated imagery, suddenly changed function. They stopped producing images. They began saving writing. Their size still impressed visitors. Each station occupied nearly thirty square meters.

At the time, they represented a considerable investment. But for the first time, they were being used for exactly what I had always imagined them for without yet knowing it: making visible what the human eye could no longer see.

We worked in successive layers.

Visible light. Ultraviolet. Then infrared, colorimetric filters, spectral processing, digital reconstruction.

Some inks, almost completely erased, gradually reappeared. Words returned. Numbers. Names.

Annotations we believed lost became legible again. I recognized the gestures of my earliest work on computer-generated imagery. But this time, we were no longer creating an image. We were resurrecting a memory.

Torn index cards posed another problem. At first glance, they seemed unrecoverable. For a human being, manually finding the fragments belonging to the same card would have taken years. Our digital processes then began automatically comparing the contours of tears, paper fibers, inks, dimensions, and handwriting. Little by little, fragments that seemed condemned found their place again.

I then understood that artificial intelligence had not been born with large language models. It already existed, in another form, in this ability to automatically connect information that no human brain could bring together alone.

But the hardest part was still ahead. We now had to understand. Restoring a document is never enough. You also have to know what it says. This is where our work as historians truly began.

We discovered hundreds of namesakes. Artists with exactly the same name. Pseudonyms. Aliases. Different signatures for the same painter. Sculptors deliberately changing identity over the course of their careers.

Wars had shifted borders. An artist born German became French. Another, born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, changed nationality several times without ever leaving his city. Currencies had changed as well. The franc was no longer the same franc. Exchange rates varied over time. Units of measurement shifted from the imperial system to the metric system. At times each catalog used its own vocabulary.

We quickly understood that no historian could solve such complexity alone. Fortunately, for several years already, our teams in Lyon had been building what would become one of Artprice’s great strengths: an immense normalization architecture. We had already established authority tables.

Pseudonyms.

Spelling variants.

Aliases.

Geographic equivalences.

Currency correspondences.

Changes in units of measurement.

All these tables, patiently built long before the Mireur arrived, suddenly became indispensable.

Dr. Mireur had built his work with the tools of his time. We were now going to make it dialogue with the tools of ours. But what moved me most was found neither in the catalogs nor in the cards.

It was in the notebooks. Hundreds of notebooks. Perhaps more than a thousand.

Hippolyte Mireur recorded everything in them. His questions. His hesitations. His doubts. His hypotheses. His letters. His exchanges with Auction Houses. His corrections.

Sometimes a single sentence was enough to illuminate a difficulty that had occupied us for several days.

“I believe I am right… but I am still missing one element.”

Or:

“Probable attribution… to be verified.”

I would remain in front of those lines for a long time. I was no longer merely reading a historian. I was watching a man think. A man doubt. A man willing to leave those who came after him the very trace of his uncertainties.

At that moment, I understood that we were not restoring a book. We were restoring fifty years of thought. And that thought, a century later, was continuing to dialogue with ours.

When Frank Van Wilder, his secretary, saw the first crates arrive from Lyon, he immediately understood that something had changed. He did not find the Chaos he himself had known for years. He discovered a memory that had already begun to be reconstructed.

The cards arrived classified. The annotations identified. Variants flagged.

Then came the first namesakes already identified, catalogs cross-referenced, correspondence grouped, and documents biologically stabilized.

I could see his astonishment. At first, he said almost nothing. He opened the files. Closed them. Then opened another. Very quickly, he understood that we had not merely transported the archives. We had begun to reconstruct the intelligence that had produced them.

I then recognized exactly the look Enrique Mayer had worn a few months earlier. The same mixture of surprise and relief. For a long time, Frank had believed Le Mireur had become an impossible work. A documentary mountain so gigantic that no team could ever take it up again.

Seeing it arrive in this way, gradually organized, made him understand that its rebirth had finally become conceivable. I also understood why Enrique Mayer had told me:

— You have to convince Frank.

He was not merely a historian. Frank carried within him the entire living memory of Le Mireur.

He knew the methods.

The habits.

The reasoning.

The intuitions.

He knew where Dr. Mireur had been wrong. He also knew why he had been wrong. He knew the thousands of details no book could transmit. It was precisely that living memory we wanted to preserve.

Very quickly, our dialogue changed in nature. We were no longer talking about publishing. We were talking about method.

How do you take up the work on an artist again when several hundred others carried exactly the same name?

How do you distinguish pseudonyms?

How do you correctly connect works published under different signatures?

How do you follow an artist whose borders changed three or four times during his lifetime?

With every difficulty, a new layer of complexity appeared.

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

Changes of sovereignty.

European upheavals.

Preparations for the First World War.

Movements of collectors.

Shifts in industrial fortunes.

Le Mireur told all of this. We simply had to learn how to read it.

Currency problems were another universe. Francs. Swiss francs. The different reforms. Equivalences. Foreign currencies. Old units. Imperial measures. Metric systems.

We gradually built immense correspondence tables. Databases capable of placing every piece of information back into its exact context. Computing never erased history. It made history readable.

Then came the annotations. By themselves, they justified the entire undertaking. I quickly understood that the real treasures of Le Mireur were not in the seven published volumes. They were in the margins.

In the cards.

In the notebooks.

In the doubts.

Professor Hippolyte Mireur had immense intellectual courage. When he doubted, he wrote that he doubted. When an attribution seemed fragile to him, he noted it. When he thought an error might exist, he flagged it. He never tried to hide his hesitations. Quite the opposite. He transmitted them.

That scientific honesty moved me deeply. I found exactly what my father had taught me. The true researcher is not the one who asserts. It is the one who indicates how far he knows, and where his doubt begins. Those annotations completely changed the way we worked. We were no longer simply correcting Le Mireur. We were continuing his thought. A century later, we were answering the questions he himself had asked.

Little by little, Frank understood that we had not come to finish his work. We had come to give him the means to continue it. That is when the idea emerged that would permanently transform our collaboration: create in Paris a genuine scientific unit devoted entirely to Le Mireur.

At the time, the decision seemed almost insane. We installed a dedicated data center. Specialized digital links were set up between Paris and Lyon. It took France Télécom several months to build the architecture. Every connection had to be secured. Every database perfectly synchronized. Every modification made in Paris had to communicate immediately with the documentary databases in Lyon.

Today, that seems almost ordinary. In the late 1990s, it was a pioneering undertaking. Yet the hardest part was not the technology. The hardest part was human.

In Paris, passionate historians were at work. In Lyon, computer scientists and documentalists. They spoke two different languages. The first thought in centuries. The second thought in data structures. The first saw artists. The second saw identifiers.

For months, Nadège performed what was probably the most discreet and most structurally important work of the entire undertaking. She translated. She connected. She transformed a historical intuition into a documentary procedure. Then a computing procedure became understandable again to the historians. Without ever trying to put herself forward, she built the common language that finally allowed these two worlds to work together.

I then understood that we were no longer simply restoring Le Mireur. We were inventing a new way of producing history. When I think back on that period today, I no longer see only an immense documentary undertaking. I see the moment when several generations of researchers finally began working together despite the century separating them.

Hippolyte Mireur.

Frank Van Wilder.

Enrique Mayer.

Nadège.

Our Lyon teams.

Our historians.

Our computer scientists.

All were now continuing the same work. Memory no longer belonged to one man. It was becoming a common heritage. And that day I understood that Le Mireur was not simply being reborn. It was becoming alive.