This establishment near Alexandria was, as it were, the Grande Chartreuse of their order.
After passing through four tunnels the road bends north (leaving the Guiers Mort which flows past St Pierre de Chartreuse), and the valley soon opens to form the upland hollow in which are the buildings of the convent.
It flows past Yenne (left) and beneath the picturesque fortress (formerly a Carthusian monastery) of Pierre Chatel (right) before it attains the foot of the extreme southern spur of the Jura, at a height of 696 ft., not far from the village of Cordon, and just where the Guiers flows in (left) from the mountains of the Grande Chartreuse.
The original settlement here was founded by St Bruno about 1084, and derived its name from the small village to the S.E., formerly known as Cartusia, and now as St Pierre de Chartreuse.
He left Rouen, went up to Paris, where he found refuge in the same garret which had sheltered him when a boy at the College Louis le Grand, and there wrote his second poem, La Chartreuse.