ABSTRACT
I have already mentioned that I was trying to discover the secret of the monastic life in places where its traces were so recent. By this I don't mean that I was hoping to find some mysterious facts related to the Cartuja in particular, but I was asking its deserted walls to reveal to me the intimate thoughts of the silent recluses whom they had shut away from the outside world for so many centuries. I would have liked to follow the slender or broken thread of Christian faith in the souls committed there by each generation as a sacrifice to a jealous God, who demanded human victims the same as did the pagan gods. I would have liked, finally, to bring back to life a Carthusian monk of the 15th century, and another of the 19th, and to compare these two Catholics with each other, whose faith would be separated, without their knowing it, by unfathomable depths, and to ask each one what he thought of the other.
