Clairefontaine (Belgium)

See also: Clairefontaine

Clairefontaine is a Hameau of the Ville of Arlon, in the Province of Luxembourg, in Walloon region of Belgium. Some steps of the Border with the Luxembourg, he played a great part in the history of the Duché of Luxembourg.

Clairefontaine is known today for the ruins of its Cistercian abbey, built between 1247 and 1250. The place was occupied however well before this foundation. The heights of Clairefontaine would have probably accommodated fortifications at the time Roman. In any case, there existed already a castle before the construction of the abbey, because it is the countess Ermesinde of Luxembourg which lived the castle close to Bardenbourg, which was the founder of the abbey of Clairefontaine. The legend tells that the countess, one day that she walked in the surroundings of her castle, calms down under a oak and had a dream. She saw a Lady which went down from the close hills. This Lady held in its arms a child and was surrounded by a herd of white sheep marked of a black cross. A hermit of the area explained to him that it was the Virgin that she had seen in dream, and that she asked him to build a monastery about Cîteaux on the site of Clairefontaine. In accordance with its last wills expressed in its will, Ermesinde still currently rests on the site of Clairefontaine, where a monument with its memory was high.

The monastery was thus built at the place even where, approximately 100 years earlier, in 1147, holy Bernard blesses a source, whereas it made a halt on the way which carried out it from Rheims in Trier. He traversed this way whereas he accompanied the pope Eugene III and eighteen cardinals. The lord of the castle of Bardenbourg invited the pope and Saint Bernard to come to rest and be restored in his residence. However, a family member of the lord was seriously sick. Saint Bernard made a prayer blesses it with spring water which ran at this place, and the person cures at once! The source which still currently runs at this place bears the name of source Saint Bernard, and passes to have miraculous virtues…

After centuries of activity, the monastery was destroyed at the end of the XVIIIe century, at the moment when the French revolutionary troops invaded Luxembourg (episode whose romantic writer Marcellin the Guard will remember in his historical novel the last days Clairefontaine (1850).

With the abandonment during many years, the site of known Clairefontaine a new religious dash at the end of the XIXe century thanks to construction, in the center of the principal nave of the church of the old monastery, of a new vault. The vault " Notre-Dame of Beautiful Amour" was built by Jésuites fathers between 1875 and 1877. This vault was the subject of a restoration supplements between 1997 and 2000.

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