Monarch and Monk.

Auckland Star, Volume XVIII, Issue 148, 25 June 1887, Page 3 (Supplement)

Monarch and Monk.

The Queen's visit to the Monastery of La Grande Chartreuse will be remembered for a long time, we doubt not, by the members pf fche order. Any distinguished visitor is .welcomed, if only for the reason that on such occasions the rigour of discipline is likely to be a little relaxed. The Carthusians, indeed, among other hardships, are obliged to preserve unbroken silence, except on extraordinary occasions, under penalty of scourging. Perhaps the Father Superior is not subject to this rule, or more probably the visit to Queen Victoria was considered an occasion of extra freedom. At any rate we read that Her Majesty conversed freely with him at the various places of interest visited, and we may be pretty sure that the worthy Father is not paying for his moment of conversational freedom by endirriug the customary flagellations. But the monks must have been grievously disappointed that their Royal visitor, only the second woman (the first is variously reported as either the exEmpress Eugenic or the Queen of Italy) who has ever been permitted to enter their walls, did not accept their hospitality. We can hardly believe that the Queen, who, as she tells us in her "Leaves," sometimes take's a sip of whisky in Highland cottages, did not taste the wonderful cordial by which the monastery is best known to the outside world, and which is supposed by the unregenerate outsider almost to make up to the monks for their enforced silence. The Queen is now doubly connected with the order which St. Bruna founded. She has visited his monks in their old homo, while she has at least one grandson in the ranks of modern-day Carthusians — the Carthusians of the school at Godalming.