LDV113-4

57 MICHEL BOUVARD I have often enjoyed imagining this great, ageing boss of a large company, at the height of his glory, who had still retained the soul of a craftsman from south-west France, no doubt feeling a special pride at rebuilding the organ of Saint-Sernin in ‘his’ city of Toulouse, where he had started off in his father’s workshop in 1827, not far from the famous basilica. An earlier project of his had been refused in 1845, when Daublaine-Callinet-Barker were preferred. Forty years later he found himself in direct competition with the Toulouse dynasty of Puget, the creators of the impressive instruments of Notre-Dame du Taur, Notre-Dame de la Dalbade and others. To be sure, he had already worked for Toulouse (the cathedral in 1850, the église du Gesù in 1864), but the loftiest artistic and spiritual symbol of the ‘Pink City’, where the twenty-year-old’s lucky star had brought him the first of the meetings that were vital to his international destiny, remained the prestigious Romanesque basilica, world-famous in its own right.