The Gothic tomb of Innocent VI., the founder and patron of this monastic town (for the Monastery of the Chartreuse was more than a mere cluster of religious buildings), was only removed from this church as lately as 1835, and placed amidst more secure and fitting surroundings, in the Hospice of the town.
This beautiful tomb of Innocent, not unlike that of his predecessor John, in the Cathedral of Avignon, suffered more shameful treatment at the hands of the demoralised mobs of the first Republic. For years it lay neglected, amidst accumulating mounds of degrading filth that threatened to engulf it; till during the reign of Louis Philippe, when the fires of the Revolution had died down, attention was directed to the ancient monuments of the country, and amongst other things it was discovered that this once beautiful and dignified tomb was being used by some ingenious and impious person as a rabbit hutch. Time’s revenges are indeed bitter, but its healing power is none the less merciful, and to-day the tomb receives the homage of pilgrims actuated by more varied motives than those of former ages.
Some idea of the enormous power of Monachism, and the attraction it had for all classes in the Middle Ages, can be derived from the contemplation of even the ruins of these institutions in the Southern countries where they flourished.
At the close of the thirteenth and all through the following century the Monastery and Convent reached the highest developments. The primitive hermits, who lived in bare seclusion, depriving themselves wilfully of all but the essentials of existence, were not only fifteen centuries removed from the powerful and luxurious monks of the Middle Ages, in point of time; they are for ever unrelated to them in their methods of existence. The gradual stages in the evolution of the monastic idea melt into each other almost imperceptibly. From St. Anthony to the Monastery of Villeneuve is a far cry, and the anchorite of Thebes would have found it difficult to recognise in the monachism of later years the spirit that controlled his life.
Instead of the rough cave of nature’s carving, a succession of chapels richly decorated by the hands of accomplished artists, whose talents were controlled by monastic wealth, cloisters with carvings that only practical
