IN JUNE of 1877, Zélie Martin, accompanied by her three older daughters, made a pilgrimage to Lourdes. For a woman of apparently unfaltering faith, it was not a desperate act but acknowledgment that her illness was no longer one that so comparatively weak a recourse as medicine could address. The Church was dismissive of science and technological advance; any medicine unaided by God would fail, while God unaided by medicine remained omnipotent. After eleven years of relative dormancy, the tumor had metastasized; Zélie’s entire breast was enlarged and tender; the flesh on her neck and back was discolored; she suffered numbness on one side, an unremitting ache, periods of incapacitating pain. She consulted a physician in Alençon and another in Lisieux, where her brother and sister-in-law lived. Both doctors judged that the time for surgery had long passed; there was nothing they could do to help her. Zélie prayed for more time with her family—she felt her middle child, Léonie, needed her especially—but she was accepting of whatever was God’s will.

“It seems impossible that I can go away,” she wrote her sister-in-law from Lourdes, wondering how her family would manage without her. “Then I think that I must remain and shall remain. I am like all those I have known, not realizing their own state. Only others can see clearly, and one is amazed how the patients promise themselves an indefinite time whereas their days are numbered. It is curious indeed, but I am like all the rest.”

The trip was made for an unhappy reason, and it was marked by inconvenience and discomfort. The train jolted and pitched on the rails, increasing Zélie’s agonies and making her daughters ill; there was confusion over the lodgings; the food was bad; two cherished rosaries were lost; Zélie fell and twisted her neck badly; the waters themselves were punishingly cold. Still, Zélie managed to go into the grotto’s pool four times. Once, she immersed herself for a quarter of an hour, too cold to feel anything while in the water, but when she got out “the sharp twinges returned as usual.”

Zélie wasn’t counting on a miraculous cure for herself; but as long as she was at Lourdes with Léonie, she poured water over the fourteen-year-old’s head and begged the mercies of the Virgin to help her troubled child. Sandwiched between the older and wiser pair, on whom Zélie already counted as surrogates and teachers, and the petted babies, admired and much praised for their precocious virtue, Léonie had always been the odd child out among the five Martin daughters. Described as intellectually inferior, at least in comparison with her four sisters, she’d suffered a succession of ailments that had disrupted her early schooling and perhaps degraded her temperament. In the words of her exasperated mother, she was “a model of insubordination,” antisocial and excitable, a moody, sullen shadow thrown into relief by the obedient, bright beams of those around her.

“You know what your sister was like,” Zélie wrote Pauline a few months before the trip to Lourdes. “She would do the precise contrary of what I wished, even when she would have wished to do the thing asked of her. In short, she obeyed only the maid.”

During the last years of her mother’s illness, Léonie had in fact been turned over to the maid, Louise Marais, who took pride in her ability to control a girl everyone else had failed to discipline. But Louise’s success was that of the secret sadist, who terrorized Léonie with threats of violent punishments. With Zélie overwhelmed by other responsibilities—an attempt to sell the lace business fell through—Léonie and Louise seem to have found a perverse satisfaction in their liaison, not a happy one, to be sure, but a symbiosis that eclipsed the powerful Zélie, further exalted by her martyrdom. The sly and brutal game continued until Marie, having overheard what struck her as a disturbing exchange between the two, eavesdropped until she learned more.

Louise was fired, the prodigal daughter gathered in, kissed and petted and prayed over, anointed with Lourdes water. The treatment worked—at least it effected a reunion between mother and daughter—but it also backfired. Léonie, apparently broken, having failed to thwart Zélie, now despaired at the imminent and unmanageably huge loss of her mother. “Everyone cried,” Zélie wrote her sister-in-law of the scene in which she shared her doctors’ pessimism with her family, “Léonie sobbed.”

“I am very necessary to this child,” she confided to Pauline. “After I am gone she will be too unhappy and no one will be able to make her obey.”

Léonie would suffer tribulations, certainly. But they would not be so simple as a failure of obedience. While her four sisters, first the elder pair and then the younger, entered the Lisieux Carmel, Léonie made one attempt after another at the religious life. In 1886, she briefly entered the Poor Clares at Alençon. In 1887, in 1893, and finally, successfully, in 1895, she was a postulant at the Visitation at Caen. She seems never to have had her sisters’ (and perhaps many nuns’) ability to project the idea of mother onto the ready canvas of the Church. Was this because she lacked the cohesive, uncomplicated vision of maternal love and power that the other four Martin girls shared?

Zélie returned to a summer of dire suffering, physical torment she accepted with a stoicism that Thérèse, perhaps too young to remember consciously, would nevertheless recapitulate in her own agonies, twenty years later.

Spiritually, Zélie was resigned to death. She believed in God and in resurrection, she had long placed her hope in the joys of heaven; she was able to understand physical torture as useful, productive: a means toward sanctification, a shortcut through purgatory. But the burdens of each day reminded her how dependent a family she had created. Louis was unable to conceal his grief and was “inconsolable…as though completely crushed.” It was obvious to Zélie’s brother, Isidore, and to his wife, Céline, that the father would be unable to hold the family together, and they encouraged a move to Lisieux after Zélie’s death. There the girls would find a “second mother in their aunt.”

Zélie’s final weeks were marked by a suffering that left an indelible trauma. In too much pain to lie down, too much pain to sleep, she “went from bed to the armchair and from the armchair to bed.” In order to spare her the added irritant of noise, people whispered around the dying woman and took off their shoes. Over and over, Zélie repeated the words of Saint Francis de Sales: “One ounce of virtue practiced in tribulation is worth more than a thousand in times of peace and joy.” Marie and Pauline remained at home to attend to their mother. Léonie came up with the only solution that would end her own and her family’s grief—she offered God her life in exchange for her mother’s, sincerely enough that she immediately felt ill and believed in her approaching death. Each morning Céline and Thérèse were sent off with Madame Leriche, a cousin by marriage who impressed the children primarily in the many ways she was different from their mother. Aware that a crisis was occurring and that they were shuffled aside, Thérèse later called herself and her sister “two poor little exiles,” a word and an idea that recur throughout her writings. Exile from mother was immediately translated into exile from safety, succor, comfort, God. As it would be for any four-year-old.

But Thérèse Martin’s conception of heaven would remain unashamedly anthropomorphic and personal: the restoration of family—mother, father, and all nine children reunited before God, God as indistinguishable from father as the Virgin from mother. Before this reunion was to happen, however, Thérèse would endure and then learn to embrace twenty years of suffering.

Up to the point of her mother’s death, Thérèse described her early years in the words of Zélie, stories corroborated and enhanced by her sisters. When she faulted her three-year-old self for vanity, the judgment came from an often-told account of her taking exaggerated pleasure in a pretty blue dress. As it is for most of us, her autobiography was informed—formed—by family reminiscences, handled and rehandled, scenes tumbling like stones through a stream of collective narrative. Received by us, they have a smooth and even slippery quality, no purchase left, no snag of immediacy or individual authenticity. But Zélie’s death changed that, just as it changed everything: it provided the saint her first autonomous memory, even as it was an event that almost defied articulation. It was so large, and Thérèse’s talent was in evoking the minute.

“I don’t recall having cried very much, neither did I speak to anyone about the feelings I experienced. I looked and listened in silence,” she would later write.

By August 26, having suffered a hemorrhage, Zélie was confined to bed, her limbs too weak and too swollen to support her. Thérèse watched as her mother was given the last rites, all five of the Martin daughters lined up by age: Marie, seventeen; Pauline, sixteen; Léonie, fourteen; Céline, seven; and, last of all, Thérèse, four and a half. Standing at the elbow of the priest, Louis sobbed aloud. Zélie died the next day, just after midnight. On the morning of August 28, carried in her father’s arms, Thérèse kissed her mother’s corpse. With the family preoccupied by the crisis at hand, she had the opportunity to measure herself against the waiting coffin lid. “I had to raise my head to take in its full height. It appeared large and dismal.”

The funeral took place on August 29 at Our Lady’s Cemetery in Alençon. Afterward, as family lore presented the scene, Louise Marais, the maid who had been fired for persecuting Léonie, looked at Céline and Thérèse and remarked, “Poor little ones, you no longer have a mother!” at which point Céline threw herself into Marie’s arms and said, “Well you shall be my mama!” and Thérèse ran to the second sister saying, “For me, Pauline will be Mama!” It’s interesting that Louise was made a catalyst for the one dying wish Zélie had reiterated. Did this redeem the amoral maid, did it defeat her more thoroughly, did it accomplish both ends? In any case, the elder girls had already promised their mother to guide and catechize their little sisters, but not even as devoted a surrogate as Pauline could assuage so devastating a loss.

By her own account, proved in every detail of her subsequent life, the death of Zélie had a radical and destructive effect on Thérèse. “My happy disposition” (a happiness the observant reader has cause to question, a disposition already complicated by fear and even rage) was “completely changed,” Thérèse recalled. Having been joyful and extroverted, she became “timid and retiring, sensitive to an excessive degree.” It would require what she regarded as a miracle to restore her original nature.