Below the church and the graveyard, one sees a small, neo-Gothic, rectangular building along the road: it is the Chapel of Our Lady, Protectress of Little Children.
It was built in the middle of the 19th century, at the place where legend has it that a statue of the Virgin Mary with a child was found close to a spring.
The chapel was built just above the spring, which was said to be miraculous. Today, the spring is dry, but at the back, a flight of stone steps still leads under the building to it. Each year, the village organized a procession on the first Sunday in May, and water from the spring was sprinkled on sick children while praying for their recovery.
The chapel has been ransacked, with little left of the original furniture or statuary. All that remains is a polychromatic, sculpted wooden altar in neo-Gothic style, which was restored, and then placed for safe-keeping in the church, opposite the entrance, in the northern aisle.
Translated by deepl.com deepl.com
It was shortly after this cholera epidemic, which was so deadly, that a statuette of the Virgin was discovered in a field by the roadside in Montigny, near a spring.
They saw a sign and marked the spot by building a small neo-Gothic chapel over the spring: Our Lady Protector of Little Children.
From then on, a pilgrimage was organised every year on the 1st of May for the whole village: the procession went from house to house to collect the sick children who were taken to the chapel. To obtain their cure (or protection against illness), the parish priest sprinkled them with water from the spring, which was said to be miraculous, and then blessed them.