the altar, which was enriched with a crucifix donated by the Abbot of Altorf in 1648. In 1688, Prior Conrad Odendal, who did not think the previous decoration was up to scratch, had the walls of the hall covered with painted panelling and a fresco depicting the Last Judgement, which was itself framed with paintings. Near the altar, two other paintings were placed, one depicting the Grande Chartreuse, the other the first site of the latter. The courtyard also housed the monks' graveyard, which extended from the northern corner. Carthusian tombs are reduced to their simplest expression, i.e. a simple wooden cross bearing no name whatsoever; the deceased monk has no coffin, but is simply wrapped in his habit, with his hands crossed over his chest. The tombs are placed in no particular order on either side of the central aisle. The priors of the second half of the 17th century are all grouped together in the first three rows from the large cross; the next rows contain the tombs of fathers and donors; the last rows, on the western side, were those of brothers and servants. The cross that adorned the graveyard on the eastern side was erected on September 26, 1626; it came from Koenigshoffen. For a long time it was thought to be the work of a lay brother, but the hypothesis now generally accepted is that of a talented Strasbourg sculptor. The cross, carved from a block of pink Vosges sandstone weighing almost twenty tonnes, four and a half metres high and two and a half metres wide, is dated to around 1480, according to Walter Hotz, who likens it to the Baden-Baden crucifix carved by Nicolas Gerhaert of Leiden. The upper arm of the cross bears the inscription INRI in Latin, Greek and Hebrew in a classical manner. The fathers' cloister The cloister itself was built from 1614, and completed before 1626; the northern wing is the oldest. Unlike an abbey cloister, although it also forms an elongated rectangle, the north and south wings extend beyond the east and west galleries to serve all the fathers' cells. This arrangement is not common to Carthusian monasteries, but is specific to Molsheim. Thus, the north wing of the cloister was thirty-four bays long, i.e. one hundred and nine metres; the south wing, which was shorter on the western side and was limited by the prior's dwelling, was