Chapelle Saint-Lazare

The order of Saint Lazarus, established in the Holy Land in 1099, had an establishment one league from Pontarlier near the old Roman road (the place was called the city of the sick, villa dei), in the hollow of a hill along the Drugeon, near its confluence with the Doubs. In 2005, we can still see a barn called Saint-Lazare, a chapel and a spring called Fontaine des malades (fountain of the sick where children are bathed to cure them of scabies. It is probably its virtue in skin diseases that had previously established a hospital for lepers).
In the main building of the old farmhouse, you could see firebacks bearing the dates 1716 and 1737.

The chapel announces the pious destination to which this place was dedicated. This chapel dedicated to Saint Lazarus was perhaps built in the 17th century. In 1653 Hugues BOISSEAU owned the barn of Saint Lazare: there would no longer be a hospital at that time.

This chapel contains a polychrome wooden altarpiece.
The statue of Saint Lazarus is of a touching rusticity. Carved out of wood, he is shown seated with fine clothes (bourgeois style) and with a removable hat.
He is represented as a young man, seated, with half-length hair and often beardless.
The objects that were placed in his hands have disappeared; no doubt he was holding the leper's clipper.
In the niches of the altarpiece, the statues are absent for safety reasons.

Near the chapel, there is a small pond or pool of slightly sulphurous but excessively cold water where the sick who came to the hospices of Saint Lazarus to beg for a cure for their sufferings bathed.
Traditions agree that this place was a hospital, a leper colony, a sickhouse.
And then on Tuesday 11 September 2007, in the early afternoon, a fire destroyed the farm: only the new house and the chapel remained, perhaps protected by Saint Lazarus as the legend goes.