Philippe de Champaigne felt little sympathy for the universe of Rubens. In 1621 he left Flanders, intending to travel to Italy, and stopped in Paris where, after returning briefly to Brussels in 1628, he was to spend the rest of his life. As painter to Marie de Médicis at the Luxembourg Palace, he kept company with Poussin, and enjoyed the favour of Louis XIII and Richelieu; their sensibility coincided with the aesthetic position of the Flemish artist, perfectly adjusted to the culture of his adopted country. He received commission after commission: official effigies, the Gallery of Illustrious Men at the Palais Cardinal, the Sorbonne chapel... Anne of Austria and Mazarin also called on his services. Little inclined to celebrate the triumphant and worldly conception of religion prevailing under the Regency, but much more in tune with the austere religious sentiment that inspired the Jansenists, he became associated with Port-Royal in the 1640s. This portrait, once said to be of Arnauld d‘Andilly, seems to come from this milieu.
Behind the frame of a window that opens onto a blind wall, squeezed into his narrow abode, the man gazes towards his right. Over the tunic covering his lace-edged shirt, a voluminous dark blue coat, velvety in texture, deploys its ample and supple folds, and lends the subject nobility and dignity. Yet the painter does not flatter him: a face with a broad forehead scrutinised without indulgence, protruding eyes, a squint [?], an unprepossessing nose, a scar, balding temples, drooping hair. Placed on the edge of the frame, his right hand, keystone in the illusionist trompe-l'oeil, points downwards, in counterpoint to the head turned the other way: nature seeks a balance. And nature is indeed the absolute point of reference of Flemish visual culture, preoccupied as it is with rendering outward appearance.
Mingled with a typically French reserve and discretion, realism and colour (reduced, but sumptuous) and the spiritual quality of the light breathe life, beauty, and grace into this objective, and introspective, human presence. The native northern characteristics fit in easily with the painters classical temperament, perfectly in tune with the predominantly ascetic tendency of Parisian art of the 1650s, the melting pot from which the classicism of Louis XIV’s reign was to emerge. An artistic synthesis appropriate to the discreet world of the recluses whose logicians cultivated the clear ordering of thought. Is the man portrayed here one of the ’gentlemen‘ of that retreat amid the fields that was Port-Royal? The overall atmosphere of the painting, which is not without recalling the severe probity of certain portraits associated with Dutch Calvinism, leads one to think so.


François de Bedos de Celles was born in Caux, into a noble family of the diocese of Béziers, on 24 January 1709, and studied at the Oratorian college in Pézenas. He entered the Benedictine order at the monastery of La Daurade at Toulouse on 7 May 1726. We know nothing of his years of apprenticeship as an organ-builder except for the fact that he became friendly with Jean-François l‘Epine l‘aîné, and was to keep in close contact throughout his life with the latter‘s two sons Jean-François and Adrien, both of whom also entered the profession. He was already known for the quality of his work when he was called to the abbey of Sainte-Croix at Bordeaux in the early 1740s by its prior Dom Joseph Goudar. Elected secretary of the abbey chapter in 1745, he began around that time to build a 16' organ with five manuals which was finished in 1748. As a recognised builder, he was often invited to build, repair, or give expert opinion on other organs, or to advise their builders: thus he visited Clermont-Ferrand, Sarlat, Le Mans, Montpellier, Dijon, Pézenas, Toulouse, Tours, Narbonne and Paris, amongst other towns.
As a monk of notable erudition, Dom Bedos was elected to membership of the Académie Royale des Sciences of Paris in 1758 and admitted to the Académie Royale of Bordeaux the next year. In 1760 he wrote and published a treatise entitled La Gnomonique pratique ou l’Art de tracer les cadrans solaires avec la plus grande précision (Practical gnomonics or the art of plotting sundials with the greatest precision).
In 1763 he retired to the abbey of Saint-Denis, where in 1766, in response to a commission from the Académie Royale des Sciences of Paris, he began to write a treatise on the theoretical and practical aspects of organ-building which was to take up the last years of his life. Published from 1766 to 1778, L’Art du Facteur d’Orgues is a monumental survey of the French classical organ of the eighteenth century, which is still accepted as the authoritative work by today's organ-builders. Dom François died on Thursday 25 November 1779, and was buried in the abbey cloisters the next day. In his memoirs, Ferdinand-Albert Gauthier, organist of Saint-Denis from 1763 to 1795, speaks of him in these terms:
He was a man of exceptional merit, who did honour to the abbey of Saint-Denis by his great talents. [...] This artist excelled in several spheres. A man so precious and refined is but rarely encountered, and it is difficult to imagine the full extent of his qualities. He was a learned mathematician, and made all his own tools and instruments. He used to say that he would not have found workmen of sufficient skill to make them for him. In sum, he was one of those men who are useful to Society, and to this he added the qualities of a good monk: gentle, affable, obliging and very hard-working, esteemed by the erudite and enjoying a reputation well earned through the superiority of his talents, on which he never prided himself.

1. The Great organ of an abbey at the peak of its prosperity
The construction of the instrument by Dom Bedos is authenticated by an inscription specifying the date of 1748 and the name of the prior at the time, Dom Joseph Goudar. Until the recent restoration of the instrument, its stop-list was not known with absolute certainty, owing to the fact that the inventories by Bordonneau (1756) and Lavergne (1795) contradict each other on several important points. It was known that the instrument was a large 16‘ one with five manuals and a 32’ Bourdon on the Grand orgue, and that it comprised 44 or 45 stops. Lavergne, whose task was to value the property confiscated from the monastic congregations and the clergy, also specifies that the case was ‘painted green, with all its mouldings and decorations gilded‘. When he finished this instrument, Dom Bedos was aged thirty-nine, and he was perhaps putting his name to the finest achievement of his whole career as an organ-builder, and certainly, in any case, the most important organ by him that has come down to us: it stands comparison with the greatest instruments of the kingdom, thanks in particular to the richness of its grand plein-jeu, unique in France today. Indeed, the instrument that attracts visitors and music-lovers to Sainte-Croix appears somewhat out of proportion to the relatively modest dimensions of the abbey church.
2. The vicissitudes of the nineteenth century: exile and dilapidation
The Dom Bedos organ came through the torments of the revolutionary period without suffering too much damage: despite the lack of maintenance, Lavergne estimated its value at 100,000 livres in 1795! At the cathedral of Saint-André, on the other hand, the monumental organ by Valéran de Héman, built in the seventeenth century, had been totally destroyed. In the early years of the nineteenth century the Archbishop of Bordeaux, Mgr Daviau, in order to avoid costly reconstruction, decided to requisition from his diocese an instrument capable of sustaining the pomp of the archiepiscopal church. His initial choice settled on the Micot organ of Saint-Pierre de La Réole, which boasted some thirty stops. It was dismantled and reassembled in an enlarged case at Saint-André in 1804. Unfortunately the result did not meet expectations, since the sound of the organ was lost in the immense nave of the cathedral. After this disappointment, the prelate then started to demand the Dom Bedos organ from Sainte-Croix from 1811 on. Despite opposition from the parishioners, the soundboards, action and pipework were dismantled and exchanged with those of the Micot organ by the builders Isnard et Labruyère in 1817, whilst Dom Bedos‘ case remained at Sainte-Croix. This exile ushered in a long period of dilapidation of the Benedictine monk‘s masterpiece. A restoration conducted by the Bordeaux organ-builder Henry in 1857 revealed the deterioration of the instrument, and also the poor quality of the work carried out in 1817. The newly modifled organ, inaugurated in 1840 maintained by Henry until 1855, was not long in falling once more into decrepitude. In 1877 it was again restored by another Bordeaux builder, Georges Wenner, whose main contribution was to build a Romantic Récit of fourteen stops to replace Dom Bedos‘ Récit and Écho. At this time both the case and the workings of the organ took on the form in which they would remain until they were dismantled in 1973. The organ now had three manuals and 56 stops, which made use of 2,200 original pipes by Dom Bedos. According to Canon Lacaze, organist from 1947 to 1964, the instrument possessed at this period ‘one of the clearest and most sonorous voices in France‘.
3. The restoration (1985-1996)
In the 1960s the decrepit state of the organ led to extensive restoration being considered. But what was to be done with the material from the time of Dom Bedos that could still be reused? The first project was to build a large instrument in the neo-classical style. This provoked a reaction from supporters of a restoration of the masterpiece on historical principles and its return to Sainte-Croix. The ensuing controversy saw the interested parties divided into two camps. The organist Francis Chapelet, who advocated a restoration faithful to the spirit of Dom Bedos, secured public support in 1967 from such personalities as Vladimir Jankélévitch, Emile Leipp, Charles Munch, Gustav Leonhardt, not to mention Claude Lévi-Strauss. After three years of argument, the Commission des orgues et Monuments historiques announced its decision in 1970: a new organ was to be built at Saint-André, and the Dom Bedos material that had been conserved there was to be refurbished and brought back to its original organ loft. In 1973 the Saint-André organ was dismantled and the Dom Bedos material was reunited at Sainte-Croix. The new organ at Saint-André, consisting of seventy-eight stops on four manuals, was finished by the firm of Gonzalez-Danion and inaugurated in 1982.
In 1985 agreement was reached with the Carpentras firm of organ-builders headed by Pascal Quoirin to restore the Dom Bedos instrument in its initial case. There remained of the original instrument four soundboards from the Grand orgue, three from the Positif and two from the pedal, as well as 2,200 pipes, which constituted the essential elements of the material. It was necessary to reconstruct the missing pipes, restore them to the original pitch (A=392 at 18°), rebuild the missing soundboards for the Récit and the Écho, reconstruct the action and the console with its five manuals, rebuild the seven wedge bellows, and restore the case by getting rid of the dark coating that had been applied to it in the nineteenth century in order to uncover the splendour of the initial colours, celadon and gold. Over the eleven years necessary for the work, a process of deduction, observation of the remaining traces of the original condition of the case and soundboards, and utilisation of the information available in L’Art du Factear d’Orgues resulted in the rediscovery of the precise stop-list and original pitch, the compass of the manuals and pedal-board, and the sumptuous decoration of the 48 painted labels naming each stop, which had been concealed by nailed planks at the time of Wenner‘s restoration. The instrument is tuned in adjusted mean-tone temperament.
The end result, inaugurated in 1997, has received unanimous praise from organists from all over the world. The thirty-two-foot Grand plein jeu, whose opulence and majesty are unique in France, is combined with a grand jeu of exceptional vigour. There can be no doubt that this restoration marks the culmination of the movement of rediscovery and restoration of French classical instruments that began in the early twentieth century. In addition to the inherent quality of the restoration work, the very name of the builder responsible for the original organ guarantees it a place as one of the most fascinating instruments in the whole of Baroque Europe.

In 1627, the great François de Sourdis, Archbishop of Bordeaux and one of the leading figures of the Catholic Reformation in France, imposed on Sainte-Croix abbey the reform of the congregation of St Maur. This was the prelude to an upturn in the abbey’s fortunes that was to last 162 years, coinciding with the Baroque period in music and art.
The church of Sainte-Croix, whose organ gallery houses the masterpiece of Dom François Bedos de Celles, was at that time the chapel of the important monastery of the same name, which the  Benedictines bad restored shortly before the year 1000. It had been founded in Merovingian times, and contained the tomb of a venerated holy man named ‘Mommolenus’, but was later devastated by the Vikings. The abbey achieved a new lease of life around 980, with its temporal power assured by particularly rich endowments. The monks showed considerable skill in furthering the prosperity of their vast domain, part of which was devoted to vineyards. The eleventh and twelfth centuries saw the construction of the spacious abbey church in the Romanesque style, with its nave of five bays — its northern aisle was given over to parish functions.
The English protection which led to the expansion of the Gascon vineyards further contributed to the abbey‘s riches. But the power of the abbots, who held their office in commendam from 1439, was not conducive to the maintenance of a strict religious life; discipline became lax, the buildings were allowed to deteriorate. However, the Maurist reform restored the abbey to its former plenitude in the Baroque era.
The church was newly furnished and decorated according to the recommendations of the Council of Trent. Retables were erected, a certain Bourgneuff painted an Exaltation of the Cross in 1636, and Guillaume Cureau a St Maur curing one lame with the palsy and a St Mommolenus curing one possessed in 1641 and 1647 respectively. In March 1643, the organ which the Congregation of the Exempt had already had repaired around 1584 was once again overhauled, and then in 1661, to mark the passage of the Court on its way back from the royal wedding at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, the builder Jean Haon produced a larger instrument which used the existing case and bellows.
Once royal authority was fully re-established under Louis XIV after the Fronde, Dom Robert Ploutier undertook a campaign of renovation and extension between 1664 and 1672; the Romanesque cloister and the annexes were demolished and rebuilt, as were the abbot’s lodgings. To the south-west side of the church a superb three-storey building in classical style, surmounted by a roof after the manner of Mansart, was erected; this imposing edifice, basically unaltered, was an old people’s home after 1795, and has accommodated the Bordeaux college of art since 1890. The ground floor housed the kitchen, the refectory, the cellary and the classroom for students; the first floor held forty cells for the monks and bedrooms for the sick, whilst the second floor was given over to the library. A second large building was used for the monastery's guests and for outhouses. Finally, the abbey was surrounded by artfully arranged gardens and by orchards. In 1735, the garden was adorned with an exquisite monumental fountain, conceived as a nymphaeum, with aquatic decorations.
The Age of Enlightenment was a second golden age for Bordeaux, recalling the expansion of the period of English domination. Looking out over the river, animated as never before by the comings and goings of merchant ships, freed of its obsolete ramparts, the city offered a harmonious façade of monuments in the classical style, and was adorned by a rich urban landscape, magnificently crowned by the Gabriels’ Place Royale and Victor Louis’ Grand Théâtre. Back on its feet thanks to the Maurist rule and its claustral priors, Sainte-Croix abbey benefited from this prosperity.
From 1730, the chapter began entertaining the idea of replacing Haon’s organ with an instrument better suited to the generous proportions of the abbey church. Dom Bedos, ‘a highly skilled person and entirely competent to direct such matters as were appropriate for the organ’, was received into the community of Sainte-Croix around 1740 and took up residence in the monastery. When he was appointed secretary to the chapter, on 30 September 1745, he had already been working on the plans for a new instrument for some time. But he had to wait until the funds needed to build it could be assembled.
Dom Bedos had an exceptionally wide knowledge of both the theory and the practice of the organ, as well as infinite curiosity in this sphere - in 1751, for example, he travelled to the abbey of Weingarten in Swabia to examine the organ there, on the advice of his fellowbuilder Riepp. The instrument he produced for Sainte-Croix was his masterpiece. A commemorative plaque affixed to the case bears the date 1748, but the receipt for the organ's final installation dates from 1756, and an inscription found inside the instrument during its recent restoration confirms that work on it was still in progress in 1754.
In fact, it was the exceptional wine harvest of 1748 at Château Carbonnieux, the Graves estate that the monks of Sainte-Croix had purchased in 1740, which removed the financial obstacles to the building of the new organ. And since the revenue from subsequent vintages had an equally positive effect on the abbey’s books, the completion of this monumental instrument proceeded in the most favourable conditions.
The Carbonnieux estate was a magnificent property of 122 hectares, situated south of Bordeaux on the communes of Villenave d’Ornon, Cadaujac and Léognan, amid rolling coun tryside whose ample contours are further emphasised by the vine plantations. On 28 March 1740 the monks bought it for 119,000 livres from Charles de Ferron, a debt-ridden young man of good family. They did not hesitate, in order to ‘repair the degraded and dishonoured vines’, to make an immediate additional investment of 80,000 livres, which had to be borrowed. In 1745, still owing 27,000 livres to Monsieur de Ferron, the community borrowed 15,000 livres more, ‘to honour those notes in circulation and to avoid bankruptcy‘. It is understandable, then, that Dom Bedos had to be a little patient. But the operation soon showed a profit: in 1748 the wines of Carbonnieux brought in 20,100 livres - and the average income rose from 11,000 livres for the first five years of exploitation to 15,000 for the subsequent ten. The monks provided Carbonnieux with extensive outhouses to store the barrels, and closed off the courtyard off with a solid wrought-iron gate, one of the finest in the region: it was not only their reliquaries that needed to be protected from covetousness. Of the 320 barrels yielded by an average harvest, a third was white wine (a proportion of which was botted), and the monks kept a third for their own consumption. Their clientele included members of the local aristocracy, but the bulk of the production was bought by merchants from Les Chartrons, the wine-trading district of Bordeaux. The monks also made direct sales without middlemen to Paris, and even as far afield as Turkey, renaming their beverage ‘eau minérale de Sainte-Croix’ for the occasion! The conjunction of Carbonnieux and of Dom Bedos' masterpiece - wine in the service of the organ - is a characteristic example of the refined tastes of the Benedictines of Sainte-Croix.
Dom Bedos took enormous pains over the construction of the Sainte-Croix organ, with the help of assistants including Jean Beyssac, also known as Labruguière. It was also Dom Bedos who designed the case, in typical grand siécle style, with its balance between the vertical thrust of the great silvery pipes of the organ and the refined rhythm of the gilded rocaille decorations and volutes. The woodwork is painted a sober celadon, from which stands out, in addition to the gold of the decorations, the ultramarine blue of two cartouches, which display respectively, embossed in gold, the Maurist motto Pax above the three nails of the Crucifixion, and the monogram of the abbey itself, S and Croix intertwined above a moon, the symbol of the city’s setting as a port on the bend of a river.
Dom Bedos also designed the stone gallery, whose graceful undulations mould the Positif's towers as they project into space. The undulating pattern of the stone is doubly underlined: first of all, the fine fiuting which runs all along the edge of the relieving arch rises and swells, below the Positif, right up to the horizontal ledge of the gallery, as if the pipes were continued or reflected in a stone organ; in addition, the section of the gallery’s ledge between this fluting and the Positif is gilt-coated. The undulating motif is taken up and multiplied by the painted bands on the top and bottom of the various towers. The undulation of the gilded lines deployed across the breadth of the Grand orgue, at the foot of the pipes, further amplifies the gilded motif, and provides a well-balanced base for the thrust of the great silvery pipes towards the vault.
Below the gallery, the quoins of the massive surbased arch present a sculpted décor consisting of trophies of musical instruments garlanded with ribbons and branches. On the balconies that surmount them, the black wrought-iron railings, in High Louis XV style and featuring on the central medallions, in gilt, a crossed pair of crosiers and the abbey’s cross, frame the Positif: they are probably the work of the most remarkable ironsmith of the Bordeaux area, Blaise Charlut of La Réole, and it is thought that they date from around the same time as the organ’s installation in the abbey in 1756 - highly decorated rocaille art gave way around 1754 to a style of greater sobriety which retained only the flexible contours of the preceding fashion.
In a final round of major renovations of the church in 1753, evidently related to the building of the monumental organ (and to the prosperity of Carbonnieux), the rib vaults in the nave were rebuilt and large windows were opened in its walls.
Subsequent nineteenth-century modifications have left little trace of the changes that were made to the interior decoration of the church at this time, with the obvious exception of the organ and its gallery. Although the redecoration of the choir carried out after 1750 has been removed, a few of its elements still remain: the fine wrought-iron communion rails in the apse chapels; the gilded wood statue of the Virgin of Seafarers, a Virgin in majesty, holding the Infant Jesus in her arms and trampling a serpent underfoot; two large angels bearing torches, brilliant ornaments associated with great ceremonies; a tall holder for the Paschal Candle; two tables in rocaille style, in gilded wood topped with pink marble; and a polychrome high altar in pink and green marble, the work of Italian sculptors. Nor should one omit mention of the impressive polychrome Christ in lime wood, nearly four metres high, shaven-headed and poignant in expression, which is thought to date from the fifteenth century. This splendid work, which combines emotional power with elegance, must certainly also have been part of the devotional material in the Baroque period.