Glacis Chapel

On the 8th of December 1624, with the plague in the city, a Jesuit father named Jacques Brocquart carried a small statue of the Virgin in procession out through the gate and set her up here, on the glacis in front of the walls. Officially she was to protect the city; unofficially the Jesuits were doing what the Council of Trent had asked and putting images of the faith where Protestants could not miss them. A chapel was built over her between 1625 and 1627. Then the cures began. In 1639 the fathers published the first "Book of Miracles", and so many pilgrims came for the annual veneration that the statue was carried into the Jesuit church in town for eight days to receive them. They did the same the next year, and the year after, and they are still doing it: that eight-day visit is the Octave, the national pilgrimage of Luxembourg, held every spring in the Jesuit church that became the cathedral. In 1666 the statue was chosen as patron of the city, and in 1678 of the whole Duchy. She is the Consolatrix Afflictorum, the Comforter of the Afflicted — the Tréischterin am Leed — and she is still the patron saint of the country.

The chapel out here did not survive. When the French besieged the city in 1794 the statue was carried inside the walls for safety, and after the fortress fell the Revolution declared the chapel national property and pulled it down, in 1796. For ninety years there was nothing. The chapel you see was built in 1885 to plans by the state architect Charles Arendt, at the wish of Nicolas Adames, the first bishop of Luxembourg, who is buried inside it with his successor. Its six great windows, from 1966, tell the story of the devotion, and were made for the three-hundredth anniversary of the statue's election as patron of the city.

The old chapel came back in April 2016, when the trench for the new tram line ran straight through its foundations, a hundred metres from here. The archaeologists dug it properly for the first time; it is a listed site now, and at the Faïencerie tram stop the outline of the seventeenth-century walls is marked in the paving under your feet.