Grande Chartreuse

Listen for a moment. Beyond the wind in the pines and perhaps a distant cowbell, there is very little here. The air is cool, even in summer, and it smells of resin, damp moss and cut grass. Somewhere ahead, behind a screen of forest, a cluster of grey roofs sits in a high mountain valley. You will not go inside. Almost no one does. That is the whole point of this place, and it is why the silence around you feels so deliberate.

This is the Grande Chartreuse, the mother house of the Carthusian order. Monks have lived and prayed in this valley for more than nine hundred years. They live mostly alone, mostly in silence, and almost entirely out of sight. The monastery is closed to visitors. You can walk close, look at its long walls and steep slate roofs, and listen for its bells. But the life inside belongs to the men who chose it, and they ask the world to leave it undisturbed.

The story begins in 1084. A scholar named Bruno, a respected teacher from the cathedral school at Reims, decided to leave his career behind. With six companions, he came to Grenoble looking for a place of solitude. The local bishop, Hugh, later honoured as Saint Hugh, guided them into these mountains. Tradition says Hugh had dreamed of seven stars falling into a wild valley, and saw the travellers as the answer to that dream. That part is legend. The arrival of Bruno and his companions is history.

The word for this kind of wild, empty landscape, in the old monastic language, was "desert". It did not mean sand. It meant a place far from towns, where a person could meet God without distraction. The forested slopes around you are still called the desert of Chartreuse. And the name of the valley gave a name to the whole order. In English, a Carthusian monastery is often called a charterhouse — a word that comes from Chartreuse.

Here is something many visitors miss. The first monastery did not stand exactly here. It was built higher up the valley. In the twelfth century, an avalanche swept down and destroyed it, killing several monks. The community rebuilt lower down, on safer ground. So the buildings in front of you are the heirs of an older settlement that the mountain itself took away. Even the location of this place carries a memory of how hard life was at this altitude.

Bruno himself did not stay long. His former student had become Pope Urban the Second, and he called Bruno to Rome to advise him. Bruno went, reluctantly. He never returned to these mountains. He founded another hermitage in Calabria, in the far south of Italy, and died there at the very start of the twelfth century. Yet the way of life he started here continued without him. One of the early priors, a monk named Guigo, wrote down the customs that shaped Carthusian life for centuries.

So what is that life like? Each monk lives in his own cell — not a small room, but a small house with a workshop and a walled garden. He prays, reads, studies and works there alone. Meals are often passed through a hatch. The monks gather in the church for some prayers, including a long night office that begins around midnight. On certain days they eat together, and once a week they take a long walk and are allowed to talk. White woollen habits, bare cells, quiet corridors. The rhythm has changed very little.

The order has a Latin motto: "Stat crux dum volvitur orbis". It means "The cross stands still while the world turns." Standing here, that idea feels very literal. Outside, the world has gone through wars, revolutions and the invention of almost everything. Inside, the bells still ring for the same prayers. There is also an old saying about the Carthusians, that they were never reformed because they were never deformed. It is a proud phrase, and a fair description of an order that has resisted change.

The world did not always leave them alone, though. Fire damaged the monastery more than once, and much of what you see today comes from a major rebuilding in the late seventeenth century. During the French Revolution, the monks were expelled and their property was taken by the state. They returned in the nineteenth century. Then, in the early twentieth century, new French laws against religious congregations forced them out again. They went into exile in Italy, and only came back to this valley around the time of the Second World War.

Now for the surprise that most people know without realising it. Chartreuse, the bright green herbal liqueur, is made by these monks. The recipe is said to come from an old manuscript given to the Carthusians in the early seventeenth century. It uses more than a hundred plants, and according to the order, only a very small number of monks know the full formula at any time. The distillery is not in the monastery itself, but down in the valley. Every bottle sold helps support this silent community.

If you want to understand what happens behind those walls, the best place is the museum at La Correrie, a short distance below the monastery. These buildings once housed the lay brothers who looked after the monastery's practical needs. Today they hold an exhibition about Carthusian life, including a reconstructed cell. You can see the small rooms, the simple bed, the workbench and the little garden. For many visitors, it is the closest they will ever come to the silence these monks choose every day.

There is one more remarkable exception to the closed doors. In the early 2000s, the German filmmaker Philip Gröning was allowed to live and film inside the monastery. His documentary, called "Into Great Silence" in English, has almost no music and almost no speech. It shows the monks at prayer, at work, in snow, and on their weekly walk. If this place moves you, the film is a quiet way to continue the visit once you are home.

Before you leave, stand still for a minute. Look at the roofs through the trees, and at the forest climbing toward the limestone cliffs above. Notice how small the sounds are — your own footsteps, a bird, a car door far away. Somewhere inside, a monk may be working alone in his garden right now. As you walk back down the path, you carry a little of that silence with you, and the world, as the motto says, keeps on turning.