Champmol

[4] Purchase of the land and quarrying of materials began in 1377, but construction did not begin until 1383,[5] under the architect Druet de Dammartin from Paris, who had previously designed the Duke's chateau at Sluis, and been an assistant in work at the Louvre.

The monastery was built for twenty-four choir monks, instead of the usual twelve in a Carthusian house,[2] and two more were endowed to celebrate the birth in 1433 of Charles the Bold.

The Valois dynasty of Burgundy had less than a century to run when the monastery was founded, and the number of tombs never approached that of their Capetian predecessors at Cîteaux – indeed there would hardly have been room in the choir of the church, where the monuments were.

Underneath the slab the effigies rested on, unpainted small (about 40 cm high) "pleurants" or mourners ("weepers" is the traditional English term) were set among Gothic tracery.

She had decided to rest her remains with those of her parents in Lille, and Philip had been planning a single monument for himself for over twenty years, having commissioned Jean de Marville in 1381.

[17] John expressed a wish for his own tomb, this time a double one with his Duchess Margaret of Bavaria, to resemble that of his father, but nothing was done, even after his death in 1419, until 1435, and in 1439 de Werve died without having managed to find suitable alabaster.

[19] Champmol was designed as a showpiece, and the artistic contents, now dispersed, represent much of the finest monumental work, as opposed to illuminated manuscripts, of French and Burgundian art of the period.

[20] The lower parts of the Well of Moses (Puits de Moise) survive, including six life-size figures of the Old Testament prophets who foretold the Messiah, most of the rest having been destroyed, apparently more by weathering than the Revolution.

The following are only the main works in Dijon: After the death in 1477 of Charles the Bold, Burgundy proper was recovered by force by France; the Kings, still descended from the Dukes via the Habsburgs and other routes, continued to support and occasionally visit the monastery.

The monastery was suppressed in 1791, and on May 4, five days after the monks departed, the buildings and land were bought by Emmanuel Crétet (1747–1808), later to be Minister of the Interior under Napoleon with the title Comte de Champmol.

[39] Today the buildings house a psychiatric hospital, and "aller à la chartreuse" is a local phrase for developing a mental disorder.