The Néron () is a mountain in the French department of Isère at 1,299 metres in the Chartreuse massif in the Alps. Sometimes called Casque du Néron in the 19th century because of its shape, its name literally means "the black one" and has no connection with the Roman emperor or with the existence of an ancient station used as a lookout and refuge in its southern part. The mountain is shaped like an inverted ship's hull with a very pronounced north–south oriented main ridge and is mainly composed of Urgonian limestone. Due to its exposure, it has a Mediterranean flora, although this has been weakened by the fire in the summer of 2003, which destroyed the entire upper part of the mountain. The mountain is also part of the Chartreuse regional nature park.

The southern end of the Néron is occupied by a cave called Balme de l'Hermitage. The site, occupied since the Neolithic period, was home to a luxurious villa from the Middle Ages onwards, transformed into a castle, which passed in turn into the hands of rich families and religious orders. At that time, the forests on the mountain slopes were intensively exploited to supply charcoal to the foundries and were largely replaced by vineyards. Thus, in the 19th century, the first scientific and military explorers used some of the steep paths made by the loggers. The Néron appeared in Joanne Guides, but the number of victims increased rapidly and it acquired a bad reputation. The first complete crossing from north to south was carried out in 1884 in order to evaluate the possibility of establishing military batteries on the summit of the mountain. Finally, the construction of a road was started in 1891 to lead to the location of the batteries, which were completed two years later to the north of the mountain, upstream of the Vence gorges. At the same time, exploration of the Néron led to the discovery of the ancient Roman pathway and the remains of the ten-metre long ancient footbridge in the south-eastern escarpments. Subsequently, a series of archaeological excavations led by Hippolyte Müller uncovered the cistern of the former lookout and a number of artefacts. New accidents led to the creation of the Dauphinois mountain rescue committee, the beaconing of trails, the laying of cables, and, in 1911, the inauguration of a new footbridge. The Roman path became the main route of the Néron, replacing the unstable corridors of the eastern face and the steep paths of the western slope. The Boujard inn, in the hamlet of l'Hermitage, flourished in the first half of the 20th century. However, the château de la Balme was burnt down in 1932 and abandoned for good. After the Second World War, with the exception of the opening of a few climbing routes around the 1970s and the chronicles generated by a work representing Lucky Luke on one of the summits overlooking the Grenoble area, the Néron lost much of its appeal; municipal by-laws regularly forbade access to it because of rock falls and the dropping of most of the paths.

Toponymy According to Henri Ferrand (Revue alpine, August 1906), the first mention of Néron goes back to a charter of 1261, preserved in the Departmental Archives of Isère, in the form Neroma de Noyrone. J. Breton also reports the mentions Neyronus and Neuronus. In 1279, the chapter of the collegiate church of Saint-André of Grenoble mentions in one of its publications the "némus situ subtus Neuronem", i.e. "the woods situated at the foot of the Néron". In a text credited by Jean-Pierre Moret de Bourchenu (Histoire du Dauphiné et des princes qui ont porté le nom des Dauphins, 1722) to an agreement held in 1291 between the bishop of Grenoble and the chapter of Saint-André, it is discussed whether the cave of Néron belonged to the parish of Saint-Martin-le-Vinoux: "foramen Rupis Neyronis situm intra farouchiam Sancti Martini" and "foramem dictum Rupis de Neyrone". In the following centuries, various property deeds mention Pascua Neyronis ("the pastures of Néron", 1323), In Neurone (1350) and En Neuron (1687). The name Néron appears for the first time on a map drawn up by Pierre Joseph de Bourcet in the mid-18th century. A few decades later, Jean-Étienne Guettard, in his Mémoires sur la minéralogie du Dauphiné (1782), mentions the Néron range and then the Néron mountain, while maps show the Niéron (1787) or the Néron mountain (1796). Catalogues on the flora of the Dauphiné dwell in turn on the Neyron or again on the Néron. In 1839, Loïs Hermenons mentioned the Sierra du Néron in his "Réminiscences de quelques excursions dans le Dauphiné", published in Le Courrier de l'Isère. Finally, in 1844, the Statistique générale du département de l'Isère mentions the Néron rock and Mount Néron. The name of the mountain is said to come from the local dialect Neiron, derived from neire meaning "the black one", and can be associated with the contemporary French language "Noireau". It would be linked to the dark aspect of its western slope, usually covered with shrubbyHenry Sutter, Noms de lieux de Suisse romande, Savoie et environs. vegetation. However, the ancient forms are incompatible with this explanation, since they attest to a Neurone form, variously Latinised and with different casual inflections Neuronus, Neuronem, Neurone. Since these forms are repetitive, they are not the result of a misconception, but show that it is probably another name.

In 1835, Cassien and Debelle, in L'Album du Dauphiné, wrote: "On the left, the Chartreuse summits, the Aiguille de Saint-Égrève [the Aiguille de Quaix], and the Néron helmet descend in varied contours to the town...". This description was quickly taken up again in 1839 by Loïs Hermenons: "The next morning, as the sun began to shine with a pale reflection on the Helmet of the Néron, the villagers, called to the chapel of Narbonne by the sound of the country bell, found two corpses on whose features rage still breathed." According to Henri Ferrand, "this figure, to which its author certainly did not give any importance, had a great success in the world of the fine spirits and the precious of the time...". Thus, in the same year, in Stendhal's Mémoires d'un touriste, the narrator says, referring to the mountain, "Oh! this helmet, my dear! The successive repetitions of this simple metaphor are the source of the main misunderstanding of the origin of the mountain's name. In fact, in 1853, in his Description pittoresque de la Grande Chartreuse, Auguste Bourne wrongly associated this name with the Roman emperor and wrote "Nero's helmet". Four years later, the Breton Antonin Macé, who had become a professor of history at the University of Grenoble, published a series of articles, notably in the Bulletin officiel des chemins de fer, using this wrong name. It then appeared from 1862 to 1905 in the famous Joanne Guides. It was introduced in 1864 in Charles Lory's Description géologique du Dauphiné. However, in July 1868, Louise Drevet simply pointed out in Le Petit Dauphinois that "seen from Grenoble, it looks like a helmet, always ready to crush the pretty village of La Buisseratte, which is scattered at its feet, with a little good will. In spite of everything, the General Staff map, which until then had been marked Neyron, was corrupted in turn in 1884, as were those of the Geological Research Bureau until 1952, and the regional map of Éléogard Marchand in 1886. The element helmet would be an alteration of break, that is to say a "place of ruins, scree, heaps of large stones" (like the Grande Casse or the Casse Déserte at the Izoard pass). In the magazine La Nature, the saying appears: "The mountain is often crowned with clouds; it is then said in the country that the Néron has its helmet". It was not until the July 17, 1898, issue of the Petit Dauphinois that General Cosseron de Villenoisy finally questioned the accuracy of this name: "Le Casque de Néron is a name imagined, I believe at least, by Joanne, who was the first to use it in her guides to the Dauphiné. This awareness led the Alpine Congress to consider the case of the Néron when it was looking into the "origin of mountain names". The work of Morel-Couprie in 1906 and Ferrand in 1907 finally rendered the term "helmet" inappropriate, even if it would take several years to make it archaic.

The spellings Nez-Rond, in the Joanne Guides of 1877 and 1890, and even Nez-Long were used, but appear to be fanciful, even from the simple point of view of appearance. The images of a reclining woman and a panama hat, during the Belle Époque, or of an overturned ship's hull have also been attached to it.

Geography

Location

The Néron is located in south-eastern France, in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region and the Isère department. Its main ridge, including its summit, delimits the territory of the communes of Saint-Égrève to the west and Saint-Martin-le-Vinoux to the east and south; the northern slope, from a secondary peak, occupies the territory of Quaix-en-Chartreuse. The mountain dominates part of the Grenoble area and is almost 100 km south-east of Lyon. It belongs to the pre-Alpine range of the Chartreuse and forms the southern end of its median axis.Parcourir la Chartreuse , geol-alp.com

The mountain is surrounded by the Rachais (1,050m) to the east, the aiguille de Quaix (1,143m) to the north-north-east and the rocher de l'Église (1,300m) to the north-northwest. To the west and south, it overlooks part of the Isère cluse, sometimes called the Sud-Grésivaudan region.

Topography The Néron is a strongly individualised mountain. It is separated from the other summits of the Chartreuse by the Col de Clémencières (621 m) to the east and by the gorges of the Vence, a tributary of the Isère, to the north.

Seen from the east or west, the mountain has the silhouette of a rounded ridge three to four kilometres long rising towards the north; seen from the south or north, it has a pronounced ridge profile. The western slope has large sloping sides which end in rocky walls dominating the slopes. It is crossed, from north to south (from left to right seen from the valley), by the Ullrich ravine, the Avalanche corridor (named in 1886 after a landslide) and another unnamed scree slope on the IGN maps which has developed strongly since the 2003 fire. The eastern slope is made up of cliffs of 150 to 200 metres in height overhanging scree. These are intersected by four main openings called, from north to south, the Quaix corridor, the Clémencières corridor, the Godefroy corridor and the Z corridor. The main summit, which rises to 1,299 metres, is located between the Ullrich ravine and the Avalanche corridor, approximately at the level of the Godefroy corridor; it is however not very pronounced. The secondary summit, or northern summit formerly known as Croix-Chabert, rises to an altitude of 1,294 metres and forms the northern edge of the gap separating the Ullrich ravine from the Clémencières couloir. The southern end of the mountain, above the hamlet of La Buisseratte, is occupied by a balme visible from certain points in the valley.

Geology