Chapel of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal

November 27th, 1830, just past midnight... a young nun named Catherine Labouré is awakened by a child of light who leads her down these very stairs to the chapel below, where she'll witness something that will literally change millions of lives. You're standing at 140 Rue du Bac, where the most distributed religious object in history began with a simple vision. This unassuming facade hides an incredible secret - inside that glass coffin to the right of the altar lies Catherine herself, her body perfectly preserved 150 years after death, one of only seven Vatican-endorsed Marian apparitions worldwide happening right here in Paris. But here's what most of the two million annual visitors don't realize - when cholera ravaged Paris in 1832, killing over 20,000 people, the Daughters of Charity distributed just 2,000 of Catherine's medals to the sick... and the epidemic mysteriously ended. Walk through those doors and you're entering the exact spot where Mary instructed Catherine to create what became the Miraculous Medal. By the time Catherine died in 1876, over one billion medals had been distributed globally - making this little chapel on Rue du Bac the birthplace of the world's most widespread devotional object. The building itself dates to King Louis XVIII's 1813 decree, but the current Art Nouveau interior was redesigned in 1930 to accommodate the endless stream of pilgrims seeking their own miracle.