The question as to who had the right to use the word "Chartreuse" has been decided in the United States Courts. Judge Coxe, called attention in an interesting way to the essential points of "contention:

The courts of France by a decision on March 31, 1903, dissolved the order of the Carthusian Monks at Grenoble and sequestered the entire property and appointed a receiver therefor. The court also held that all the business of the monks, including their good-will, clientage, trade marks, commercial names, models of bottles, flagons, cases, furniture, machinery, raw material, manufactured goods and the exclusive right to the industrial name L. Gaenier, was the property of the monks and as such passed to the receiver to be liquidated. Thus it appears that every right and title which belonged to the monks, whether corporeal, or incorporeal, tangible or intangible, was, so far as the laws and courts of France are concerned, vested in the receiver appointed by the French Government.

The federal court also summarized the situation as to the monks and found that had they chosen to do so they could, with some necessary changes, have used the old label and trade marks in Spain; but they have seen fit not to do so probably because the labels would have been prohibited in France and they would thus have lost the French market, which, of course, is the most important. They could not have used the trade mark in the form registered in France, for it would have been a falsehood and a fraud on the public to assert that liqueur made at Tarragona, Spain, was manufactured at the convent of the Grand Chartreuse in France. This especially would have been a false statement, since the monks even had claimed that the peculiar excellence of their product came from the plants and herbs grown in the Alps in the vicinity of their Monastery.

It appears, therefore, that on their establishment in Spain, the monks of their own accord abandoned the use of their former labels and trade marks and put on their bottles an entirely different label, calling their product Liqueur Peres Chartreux.

The U. S. court also held that the use of the old labels by the French liquidator, or the parties to whom he sold the right, would prove deceptive to the customer, who would not only think that the liqueur was made as before at the Grand Chartreuse at Grenoble, but unless he was familiar with the processes of the courts in France, would think also it was made by the monks themselves. Hence, any label used by the liquidator, or any one authorized by him, which would convey such an idea; that is, any label which was exactly similar to the old label used by the monks, must, of necessity, be deceptive. Thus any liqueur made subsequent to 1903, cannot be legally called Chartreuse in the United States.