Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III CARTHUSIA NUNQUAM REFORMATA SED NUNQUAM DEFORMATA About the year 1030 there was born at Cologne, of a noble family, a man who came to be known as Bruno the Frenchman. At the University of Rheims he became a famous scholar, and he there rose to be director of the schools. But secular success did not satisfy him, and in the prime of his life he, with six companions, journeyed to the holy Bishop of Grenoble, St Hugh, and begged from him permission to dwell in some desert place. The bishop welcomed them as the fulfilment of a vision of the previous night, in which seven stars falling to his feet had been seen by him to take their way over the mountains to a lonely spot. Thus, according to the legend, by a miraculous intervention was Bruno led to the mountain height which gave its name to the community of La Grande Chartreuse, the mother house of the Carthusian Order. The manner of the life the Order started here has varied little from that time to this day. A few years after the foundation, Peter the Venerable, writing from his comparatively luxurious and worldly position of Abbot of Cluny, said:
They live in separate little houses like the ancient. monks of Egypt, and occupy themselves continually with reading, prayer, and the labours of their hands, especially the writing of books. They always eat bread of unbolted meal, and take so much water with their wine that it has hardly any flavour of wine left. They never eat meat, whether in health or ill. They never buy fish, but they accept it if it is given to them. The account of Peter the Venerable would hold good for the description of the modern Carthusian, save that some mitigation of the diet has been allowed. No other monastic Order has had so uneventful and consistent a history. There has been, with the…