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influence exerted by them on the young women of the time. Later, the name Jesuits would be given to all those who devoted themselves to the education of children.
A shadow, however, overshadowed the picture, which the frequent pilgrimages to Our Lady of Montaigu, Foy, and Hassel failed to dispel: the union of the archdukes remained sterile, and the dream would therefore have no future. So when Albert of Austria died in Brussels on July 13, 1621, the shadow of Philip II in his austere mausoleum at the Escorial would have reason to rejoice. Having bet on the hereditary defect of the last Valois, the paternal love of the old king of Spain had given way one last time to rigid reasons of state. The heartless game was now paying off handsomely The Netherlands, once pacified by the archdukes' enterprise, definitively returned to the bosom of the Spanish "mother country." Apart from certain personal considerations, honors, and privileges, and despite many protests from the archduchess, her role was henceforth reduced to that of a simple governor, entirely at the orders of the Court of Madrid. This fact must have been so deeply felt that even today, one searches in vain in most history textbooks for the date of Infanta Isabelle Eugénie's death, December 1, 1633. She was 67 years old.
But in June 1626, a very nasty plague epidemic had terrorized the city of Luxembourg for many weeks. The authorities had fled in haste, and the inhabitants, cut off from all contact with the outside world following a quarantine imposed on the city, hoped for help only from above It was in these dramatic circumstances and at the instigation of the Jesuit Father Jacques Brocquart, himself miraculously cured of the disease, that the cult of the Blessed Virgin was born under the name of Comforter of the Afflicted. This devotion, propagated by the Jesuits with great success during their missions throughout the country, would find its apogee in the election of the Comforter of the Afflicted as patron saint of the city in 1666 and of the entire country in 1678. The numerous deaths of plague victims had, however, created many voids among the population, so a more pronounced influx of new bourgeois, 62 over the next three years, would come to somewhat correct the losses suffered by the "contagion".
However, already in 1618, a disturbing glimmer had zigzagged across the horizon. A certain defenestration of some imperial advisors in Prague, the golden city, seems to have retained to this day (see J. Masaryk in 1948) a particular taste for such demonstrations of force - had lit the fuse in Bohemia. There was a good laugh on August 9 of that year at the passage through Luxembourg of the commander-in-chief of the new theater of military operations, Count Bernard Longval de Bucquoy, but no one doubted-
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It was still at this time that a terrible avalanche had just been triggered. Life was going on as usual, and everyone felt safe at home. Thus, the register of citizens of the city of Luxembourg, which begins in 1621, records only 57 new citizens for the first six years, an average of 9 to 10 per year. Had it not been for the repeated visits on major fair days of the "scribes of monsters," seeking with great stratagems to attract young recruits in love with glory and adventure, the war would have remained a storybook affair. However, much more than the noisy din of the recruiting agents, the extraordinary military career of two children from the suburbs of the city of Luxembourg must have encouraged more than one boy in those years to try his luck by enlisting These two were Jean Aldringen, who rose in no time through the military ranks to field marshal and, created count, fell in 1634 at the Battle of Landshut, and Jean Beck, who, after a no less spectacular rise, became Colonel of Wallenstein, made a baron and, in 1642, as governor of the Duchy of Luxembourg and County of Chiny, attained the highest office in the country. If their peerless destiny would remain for their emulators an inaccessible fata morgana, the rank of captain nevertheless already allowed a Jean Michelbouch, Beck's nephew, a Barthel Muller, a Neunheuser, Boneface and Binsfelt to have access to a social level that a profession would not have provided them. For many others, however, their dream ended far away with the death of the unknown soldier.
The bad wound of the Prague incident had continued to fester little by little, and what resulted from it would later be known as the Thirty Years' War. Unfortunately, it was from the city of Luxembourg that the spark would ignite, which would spread the blaze throughout the region for two and a half decades. For what political or personal reasons had Conrad von Soetern, Archbishop of Trier and Imperial Elector, wanted to play it cool by admitting a French garrison into his archiepiscopal city? The fact remains that this gesture was not at all to the liking of the Spaniards, who took a dislike to von Soetern. The governor of Luxembourg, Count Christopher of Oberemden, received orders to seize Trier On April 25, 1635, he took the city by surprise at dawn and plundered it with his 700 infantrymen and cavalry. The captured archbishop, taken under heavy escort to Luxembourg, then to Brussels, and finally to Austria, was to remain there as a captive of the emperor for ten years. Since France had no appreciation for the Treviri flounder, Richelieu bluntly announced in Madrid on June 12 that his country now considered itself in a state of war with Spain. Misfortune was in the air. With its innate flair for danger, the country's population began to seek refuge in the city. If from 1630 to 1633 an average of 17 new burghers were registered per year, their number in 1634 had already risen to 26. It climbed
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1635 to 32. At the end of the year, presuming a French attack, Spain asked Germany for military aid in compensation for the coup de main at Trier. And disaster struck. The devil was driven out by Beelzebub. With 8,000 Croats and Poles, Coloredo came to establish his winter quarters in the Duchy of Luxembourg. These Landsknechts, stupefied by 17 years of often merciless war, in no way expert in geography—friend or foe country?—and even less expert in morality, mine or yours?, caricatures of humans, seem to have known only one supreme law: to destroy and to hurt.
Thanks to its walls, though not yet famous, and its garrison, though not numerous, the city of Luxembourg appeared to those who had the opportunity and the means to flee as the last lifeline In January 1636, it was noted that the city was bursting at the seams with refugees living in incredible conditions, to the point that about twenty were dying every day from cold or hunger. Overcrowding, a chronic lack of basic hygiene, a summer that came early and scorching hot, and the plague, which the previous year had ravaged Alsace, insolently set in, sparing no one. One of its first victims was the governor himself, Count Oberembden. But it was the populous suburbs that were most often affected. Were we going to see a general outcry like during the 1626 epidemic? Not at all! In this city oozing the miasma of "contagion," where a new cemetery had to be hastily blessed, where additional undertakers had to be hired, no one thought of fleeing. And where else to go? In these ghost villages where houses have been looted and burned, animals stolen, inhabitants driven out or killed, where no one has sown the land and where merciless soldiers can reappear from one day to the next? In the city, the chances of survival, however miserable, are even greater despite the danger of disease. The most privileged who still have a nest egg or some influential relative or friend will buy the right of citizenship. There will be 67 of them for the year 1636. Some, it is true, were not to enjoy this privilege for long. For some of them, the protocols of admission to the book of burgesses indicate that the taking of the burgesses' oath had to be postponed, as the person concerned could not be present "corpora-liter wegen leibsbloedigkeyt". These blood losses, the "flux of the belly," are only exceptionally forgiving; such patients probably remained forever only bourgeois on paper. Finally, they left it to heaven, in September, with a solemn vow and a procession in honor of the patron saints against the plague: Adrian, Sebastian, and Roch. The cooler days of autumn helped, the disease regressed, then disappeared.
Many families domiciled for generations in the city and whose names are still found on the 1615 list (for the suburbs) will have disappeared in the turmoil. There is no longer any trace of them.