OUR LADY DE LA BRECHE, CHARTRES, FRANCE (1568)

Abbot Orsini inscribed: “Our Lady de la Breche, at Chartres, where a procession takes place every year, in thanksgiving for Our Lady’s having delivered the city, when besieged by heretics, in the year 1568. It was during this siege that the image of Our Lady, placed upon the Drouaise gate, could not be injured by the cannon and musket balls, which the besiegers fired at it, and the marks of which are still seen at two or three inches from the image.” 

The procession mentioned by the abbot always takes place annually in memory of the miracle, until the time of the French Revolution, when the Chapel was destroyed. The mayor, or on occasion some other important personage who happened to be the guest of the town at the time, solemnly lit the first candle before the shrine of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Our Lady de la Breche. Thereafter the procession began,

winding its way from the Cathedral down the steep curves of the Rue Muret towards the Porte Drouaise. There is an inscription engraved on the ramparts which recorded the events of the siege in Latin for the instruction and example of posterity.

From their way up the Rue de la Breche, the procession ends at the Chapel of Notre-Dame-de-la-Breche. Inside there was a statue of the Blessed Virgin which stood on the keystone of the old chapel that was erected in 1599 in memory of this event, and near the site of the famous breach.

Around the altar there were numerous cannon-balls of stone which were relics of the siege. Entering the large annex on the right, visitors would see a still more curious relic of the siege – the fourteenth or fifteenth-century statue of Notre-Dame-de-la-Breche, whose name was graven on the keystone above mentioned. If we ask questions on how she earned that name, wqe would be told that this was the very statue which had been set over the Porte Drouaise and, by a miraculous intervention, had saved the town. 

The Huguenot army were known as the greatest soldiers in Europe, yet they were miraculously blindfolded by a manifest miracle. The defenders of Chartres placed above the gate of Drouaise the statue of Our Lady de la Breche against which the enemy fired many shots from cannon and arquebus, but without being able to ever hit it. And to demonstrate how many shots were fired at the gate on which was the said image, the bridge of that gate was broken and cut in two by the cannon-balls, and all round the image up to a few inches of it the marks of many bullets may still be seen. Amidst all this, the statue remained whole and intact; in spite of the efforts of the enemy to destroy that image, for it was never struck by a single shot.