I want to begin with a correction that may seem secondary, but is not. The Abode of Chaos was never a stagecoach relay. That story was repeated often enough to acquire the appearance of fact. It does not correspond to the historical corpus we have assembled. I prefer a complex truth to a convenient legend.

The documented history of Domaine de la Source is far stronger. It takes us back to the seventeenth century, to Protestantism in Lyon, to men and women seeking a place where they could practice their faith in a France whose religious balance remained fragile.

The archives show that in July 1630 a property was acquired at Saint-Romain-de-Couzon. A few months later, a contract was entered into with a mason to build the temple. In 1631, a neighboring vineyard was also acquired for the community.

By the middle of the seventeenth century, this Protestant community from Lyon represented around 248 families, nearly 1,200 people. The temple, known in particular through documents and early representations, was organized around buildings intended to receive worshipers, rooms, a kitchen, a consistory, and an inner courtyard.

I find this history deeply moving because it immediately restores the humanity of those who lived here. They are no longer “the Protestants” from a history textbook. They are men and women who travel.

Who sleep. Who eat. Who pray. Who organize a community. Who also know that they live in an environment where their faith remains fragile.

The gate itself, as it appears in the early documentation, included defensive features. A machicolated projection overlooked a reinforced gate. The architecture already said something about the fear and vigilance of a religious minority in seventeenth-century France.

Then came 1685.

The Edict of Fontainebleau revoked the Edict of Nantes. Protestantism became clandestine and punishable. That same year, a request was made to demolish the Saint-Romain temple. Historical research establishes that the temple was then partially destroyed and that the surviving buildings were put to other uses.

A single legal decision had changed the life of an entire community.

I was born into law. I learned very early that a sentence in legislation is never only a sentence. One article can protect. Another can prohibit. One signature can make an existence possible. Another can force it underground. The power of law has always fascinated me as much as it has troubled me.

Three centuries later, on this same territory, I would find myself immersed in another confrontation between a norm and a freedom. I obviously do not confuse the two situations. Doing so would be historically indefensible. But neither can I ignore their resonance. Protestants here had experienced the legal suppression of their space of religious freedom.

In a radically different era, I would experience years of confrontation over freedom of creation.

The parallel does not establish historical identity. It belongs to my intimate reading of the place. And that distinction matters.

Documented facts are one thing. What those facts produce in me is another. I believe precisely that this book must be able to hold both without ever confusing them. That is also why I reject seductive reconstructions.

When an archive is missing, it must be said. When a hypothesis exists, it remains a hypothesis. Only when a fact is established can we place it in the chain of transmission.

That is exactly what we did at Artprice. We never filled an empty box simply because it bothered us. An artist has several namesakes: we distinguish them. An attribution is uncertain: we preserve the doubt. A price is missing: we do not invent one. One source contradicts another: we investigate the contradiction.

That documentary discipline may be less spectacular than a legend. It is infinitely more durable.

When the historical and archaeological research around Domaine de la Source was deepened, I found myself facing something very particular: I was living in a place whose real history was far stronger than the approximate stories that had been attached to it.

The plans, land records, cadastral maps, aerial views, and successive studies made it possible to reconstruct the site’s different strata. The general historical plan superimposes traces from the seventeenth century, nineteenth-century transformations, contemporary interventions, and finally the Abode of Chaos. History was no longer merely told: it became visible in space.

That superimposition marked me deeply.

It corresponded exactly to my own way of thinking. I almost never build by erasing. I build by stratification.

Old information enters a new database without losing its lineage. A printed work becomes digital but retains its author. A seventeenth-century wall receives a contemporary intervention but continues to carry its history. The new layer does not abolish the old one. Sometimes it makes it even more visible.

That is why the discovery and study of the Protestant memory were never, for me, a peripheral subject within the Abode of Chaos.

They changed my relationship to the place.

I understood that I had not entered a blank page. I had entered a palimpsest.

Before me, there had been beliefs.

Conflicts.

Owners.

Destructions.

Reconstructions.

Parks.

Vineyards.

Transformations.

Forgetting.

My work had no moral right to pretend that history could begin again from zero. It had to become one additional stratum. That idea connects with a much deeper line running through my existence.

Receive without appropriating. Continue without betraying. Transform the medium without erasing the one who came before you.

It is the same ethic that ran through Artprice’s acquisitions. When men such as Enrique Mayer, Peter Hastings Falk, or the families who entrusted us with their catalogs handed us a memory, I never felt the joy of an owner.

I felt the weight of the custodian. The place was now imposing the same thing on me. It was silently saying: you may act, but you are not the first.

I believe this awareness of time gives the Abode of Chaos a depth many visitors perceive without necessarily knowing its origin. They see an old wall beneath a recent intervention. Stone beneath steel. An old scar beneath a contemporary scarification.

They may know nothing about the seventeenth-century history of Domaine de la Source. But something in the material tells them that several times coexist.

That is precisely what interests me.

I did not want to reconstruct the Protestant Temple artificially. I did not want to manufacture a historical set. I wanted its memory to remain present in the truth of the traces.

There is a particular violence in heritage reconstruction when it tries so hard to recover a vanished state that it ends up inventing what it claims to save. I did not want that.

The gap itself belongs to history. Absence can be a document. A missing stone can be truer than a new stone supposedly reproducing one whose exact form is unknown.

This is an idea I would later find again throughout my reflection on the ruin. A ruin is not only what has been destroyed. It is what makes time perceptible.

The Protestant Temple had therefore introduced something essential into my relationship with the Abode of Chaos: the presence of the absent.

From that point on, I could no longer look at a wall in the same way. Behind a surface appeared those who had built it.

Those who had passed through it. Those who had disappeared.

And I understood that the Abode of Chaos would truly be a Total Work of Art only if it accepted this invisible population.

The living.

The dead.

The craftspeople.

The visitors.

The researchers.

Those who had prayed here several centuries earlier.

All belonged, in different ways, to the depth of the place.

This idea already prepares everything that follows. Because once a Total Work of Art recognizes that it is not alone in time, it must give itself the means to preserve, transmit, receive, and protect that memory.

It therefore needed an organ.

That organ would become Musée l’Organe.