AT HER BIRTH, on January 2, 1873, Thérèse weighed eight pounds. “Everyone tells me she is beautiful,” Zélie exulted. The infant was baptized on January 4 in the cathedral where her parents were married. Her sister Marie, nearly thirteen, was made her godmother. Greeted with enormous affection and pride by parents old enough to be grandparents (Louis was nearly fifty, Zélie forty-one), at twelve days old Thérèse already smiled at her mother with recognition. “I thought I was mistaken,” Zélie wrote her brother and sister-in-law of the baby’s impossible precociousness, “but I could no longer doubt it yesterday.”

A week later, Thérèse was gravely ill. Unwilling to open her home to the danger of “an unsuitable person as all wet-nurses today are,” Zélie wrote to her sister-in-law that she had been feeding Thérèse “toast with water, with half milk; this is her entire nourishment.” Intestinal inflammation, increasing weakness: Thérèse was failing so quickly that her mother, fearing her imminent death, made the wrenching decision to separate herself from her infant daughter. On March 15, 1873, she sent her to Rose Taillé, who, with a baby of her own, was unable to live in town with the Martins. Barely two and a half months old, Thérèse suffered the first of a series of dramatic separations, exiles that would form her personality, her understanding of mortality and of salvation, of hope and of heaven and hell.

In the country, Thérèse recovered and thrived. Even so, the year she spent in the Taillés’ small brick farmhouse was a hard and humiliating one for Zélie. On Thursdays, Rose Taillé brought the child to market in Alençon, and, not surprisingly, Zélie found that the baby—“very gay, very darling”—clung to Rose while rejecting her mother. She wouldn’t allow Zélie to take her home for an afternoon and cried piteously when she could no longer see the wet nurse. Afraid of a mother wearing the stylish fashions of the town, Thérèse preferred to be held by women dressed like Rose, in country clothes.

As with every passage of her life, the year Thérèse spent in Semallé is well documented. Zélie Martin had a gift for observation and narrative and wrote frequently to her two eldest daughters, Marie and Pauline, boarders at the Visitation convent school in Le Mans, and to her brother’s wife in Lisieux, Céline Guérin, a woman with whom she obviously felt kinship. The 217 letters that have been preserved are filled with anecdotes about Thérèse and her sisters, as well as wry glances at the local gentry. Having suffered much, Zélie understood there was no guarantee of happiness on earth, and even her gossip betrays a sometimes smug suspicion of mortal pleasures. When Monsieur and Madame C. exulted over a fine house they were building and one dark night fell together into a ditch on the construction site, subsequently dying of the injuries they sustained, Zélie ended her report to her brother with a tart “there you have the lamentable story of this so-happy couple.” She could not tell an amusing story without extracting a moral, and the moral was often that only fools looked for comfort in the present.

Without Zélie, without the consciousness that could evoke misery with the swift economy of a phrase like “sad as a shroud,” there would be no narrative tradition in the Martin family. After Zélie died, her expressive and compelling voice remained among the husband and daughters who mourned her. Her letters were treasured and read aloud to the younger girls, who listened and learned to speak their mother’s language, to understand the world and the will of God as their mother herself had understood it. Echoed by all of her daughters, written into their correspondence, quoted everywhere in Story of a Soul, Zélie’s words guided the vocations of all five of the children who survived her. More forcefully than the grip of an angry demon, or the prophecy of a dying nun, they articulated the arrival of a saint.

At the end of April 1874, Thérèse came home to Alençon. Fifteen months old, in sound physical health, still she had suffered a second disorienting loss, both of the breast and of the woman who she necessarily believed was her mother. Zélie wrote to her older daughters that their sister “does not want to leave me, she is continually with me; she loves going into the garden very much, but if I am not there, she does not want to remain and cries until someone brings her back to me.”

All children must negotiate separation, of course, but the little girl Zélie described was particularly vigilant and wary. Standing on the stairs, nearly two years old, Thérèse would not go up or down without “calling at each step Mamma, Mamma! So many steps, so many Mamma’s!” If Zélie failed to answer, Thérèse did not move. In a rare moment of obtuseness—or perhaps denial, both of her pain and of her child’s—Zélie complained of Thérèse’s clinging, as if she did not understand its source.

Already, before the age of three, Thérèse was speaking in complex and surprising sentences. “In her transports of love,” Zélie reported, Thérèse wished her mother and father dead—“since you say we must die to go there,” the little girl explained, referring, as she often did, to heaven. Increasingly, much of Thérèse’s conversation—all that her mother found worth transcribing—concerned religion. Heaven, hell, reward, punishment: she was high-spirited, “full of life” as she later described herself, but she was not carefree. She pushed her sister; she slapped her sister; she tore the wallpaper; she broke a vase. When she misbehaved, she was immediately overcome by a remorse disconcerting in a person so young. “She is a child who becomes easily overexcited,” Zélie wrote Pauline in May of 1876. “As soon as she has done something wrong everybody must know it…. she has in her little mind that we will pardon her more easily if she accuses herself.”

Reading such accounts, stories later retold and amplified by her sisters, one is tempted to conclude that Thérèse’s first sins were inspired by her need to confess and thus to rehearse a dynamic that would always possess her: a cycle of transgression, alienation, confession, and finally—blessedly—reunion. She always betrayed a great deal more pleasure in confession, in the reinstatement and safety granted by confession, than in whatever sin occasioned the need to confess. A stolen sweet, a lie, an act of calculated disobedience: these typical little misdeeds, against which an ordinary child might weigh the prospect of punishment, were not Thérèse’s brand of naughtiness. She was impulsive; she had a violent temper. When frustrated, she “rolls on the floor like one in despair, believing that all is lost,” her mother recounted. Sometimes, she even choked.

Each having been denied life as a religious, at home Louis and Zélie Martin created an atmosphere of faith and piety that few convents could rival. But they were not dour, nor ascetic in their faith. Sunday was greeted as a holiday, with hot chocolate in bed, curled hair and pretty dresses, the intoxication of music and incense at mass, followed by an extravagant meal and the pleasure of a long walk in one another’s company. Every feast day was welcomed as an opportunity to renew one’s ardor and commitment to God, and Zélie outspokenly preferred that her daughters die young and virtuous than that they thrive outside the faith. The four children who did die were petitioned in heaven as saints, receiving the supplication of family they left behind. In such a context, it isn’t surprising that Thérèse, already once abandoned and reclaimed, would learn to translate every act and its consequence into the arena of sin and redemption, but Zélie’s reports of what she saw as a precocious religious sensibility might equally reveal a fearful, even desperate personality.

Closest to Céline, who was only three years older, Thérèse attached herself to her sister with characteristic resolve. She sat, not moving, for two or more hours in the schoolroom at home, sometimes weeping with fatigue and frustration but determined not to be denied the privilege of listening as Céline did her lessons with Marie, home from boarding school. Rather than stay at the dinner table alone, she left her dessert to be with Céline, and the two little girls amused themselves in the small back garden where Louis had put up a swing. Thérèse was shy, afraid to cross the street to play with the prefect’s daughter in her big house and park, but she had physical courage. Tied into the swing with a rope, she screamed when it didn’t go high enough to suit her. Céline was older, but she made an impression altogether fainter than did Thérèse, who was obstinate, imaginative, passionate, and determined to get her way.

The two youngest looked forward to the elder girls’ holidays from convent school, from which Marie brought home a little string of beads, a chaplet on which she taught Céline to count up her “acts of virtue.” Each time Céline conquered self-love, each time she sacrificed her desires to those of another, she could slip her hand in her pocket and move one bead forward. As it was impossible to leave Thérèse out of so irresistible and significant a game—the tallying up of worthiness—she also was given a set of beads and soon outstripped Céline in the practice of virtue. “She records even a little too much,” Zélie thought, a noteworthy judgment from such a mother. “Her chaplet of practices never leaves her for one minute.” Perhaps more portentous, as Marie would reflect after Thérèse’s death, her pride was such that, even at three, the sacrifice of her own will required that she do violence to herself.

To test the mettle of her daughter, Zélie offered Thérèse a sou to kiss the floor. Thérèse refused. “When she says no, nothing can make her give in,” Zélie wrote Pauline. “I could put her all day in the cellar and she would rather sleep there than say ‘yes.’” Offered to choose what she wanted from among a basket of ribbons and doll clothes, Thérèse didn’t follow the example of Céline’s polite restraint; she didn’t select one or even two but grabbed the whole thing. Her temperament was not formed for compromise or moderation, and writing the story of her soul, she chose this incident as “a summary of my whole life,” a life spent not taming but directing her appetite and her will, a life perhaps shortened by the force of her desire and ambition.

Zélie continued to assess her daughter’s moral progress, and she was equally vigilant about her frail health. Thérèse had one respiratory complaint after another, some so severe they caused her difficulty in breathing that lasted for months and a “strange whistling in her chest” when she walked quickly. No remedy could repair such a constitution, and each cold, each fever frightened Zélie, whose thoughts turned quickly to death, perhaps influencing the games of Céline and Thérèse. Pretend funerals were a favorite. “Truly the burial of a doll is very amusing,” her sister Marie wrote a friend. “Thérèse has experienced this more than once.”

Mothers and daughters wrote one another leisurely detailed accounts of ordinary days, but as few long, personal letters from Louis Martin exist, our vision of Thérèse’s father is one reflected by the women who surrounded him. By all accounts, he was completely in love with his youngest daughter. He was her “King of France and Navarre”—a name she would always use for him—and she was his Little Queen or, in another mood, his Benjamin (the youngest son of Jacob, whose “portion was five times as much”). When Zélie worried about a threat to her daughter’s life, she could not consider her own grief before she thought of how bereft would be Thérèse’s father, who “adores her!…It is incredible all the sacrifices he makes for her day and night.”

Dignified, white-haired Louis Martin rode Thérèse through town on his shoulders and took her for walks and to his special sanctuary, the Pavilion on the rue des Lavoirs. A whimsical six-sided tower surrounded by fields and a stream, the Pavilion was where Louis kept his angling gear, where he relaxed and mused, and where Thérèse enjoyed picking strawberries. A gifted mimic, Louis filled the house with games and play alien to Zélie’s more sober nature. And he put his faith into practice: he encouraged the giving of alms, provided food and shelter to those in need, helped carry the sacraments to the ill, the dying. He welcomed as a holy privilege his part in the spiritual guidance of so beautiful and prepossessing a daughter.

What was to become of Thérèse? Zélie wondered in a letter to Pauline. “I do not know too well how she will turn out,” she wrote, trying to predict the impact of “superior intelligence” on “invincible stubbornness.” At three and a half, the child was beginning to read, and she understood ideas as complex and as abstract as omnipotence, which she explained to Céline, who couldn’t see how God could be present in the communion wafers, when He was so big and the host so small. “This is not surprising since God is all-powerful,” Thérèse said.

“What does all-powerful mean?” Céline asked.

“It means to do whatever He wills!”

“Thérèse asked me the other day if she would go to heaven,” Zélie wrote to Pauline on October 29, 1876, less than a year before her own death. “I told her yes, if she were very good. She answered, ‘Yes, but if I were not good, I would go to hell…but I know what I would do. I would fly to you who would be in heaven. What would God do to take me? You would hold me tightly in your arms.’ I saw in her eyes that she positively believed that God could do nothing to her if she were in the arms of her mother.”