I wanted to know what made a successful teacher walk away from Reims, so I went looking, and the sources disagree about Bruno — politely, the way sources do. Some say a quarrel with his archbishop had soured the place for him; some say he and a few friends had simply promised one another they would go, and then went. The later tale about a corpse sitting up at a funeral and speaking is almost certainly attached afterwards: memorable, but not contemporary.
What he built in 1084, up in that valley, was a house of separate cells — each man alone for most of the week, together for a few offices, silence holding the rest of it. Then Urban II, who had been his pupil, called him to Rome, and he ended up in Calabria instead, dying there in 1101. There's an old etching of the Grande Chartreuse sitting at the foot of enormous cliffs, small figures crossing the open ground in front, and it does rather show you what the distance was for.
Those Carthusians still make Chartreuse off a manuscript recipe handed to them in 1605, and only a couple of monks know the whole herb list at any one time. Something like a hundred and thirty plants, steeped and distilled and left in oak for years. Silence keeps a recipe better than any safe.
Miriam, the plan is the rule in stone: every cell is really a little two-storey house with its own walled garden and a hatch beside the door, so bread arrives without a face. A village, roofed by one cloister, and the great cloister walk only long because it has to pass all those front doors.