title: The Sacred Hill
text: # The Sacred Hill
  
  The Sacred Hill (French: La colline inspirée) is a 1913 novel by the French writer Maurice Barrès. It tells the story of three monks who turn the hill colline de Saxon-Sion in Lorraine into a place of worship, which then develops into a cult inspired by the heretic Eugène Vintras [fr]. It was translated into English with a foreword by Malcolm Cowley in 1929.
  
  In 1950 Le Figaro named the book as one of the winners of the "Grand Prix des meilleurs romans du demi-siècle", a prestigious literary competition to find the twelve best French novels of the first half of the twentieth century.
  
  