THÉRÈSE LOOKED BACK on the five years she spent at school as the “saddest in my life,” years that taught her nothing more profoundly than they did her own alienation from the world. The teachers found her as odd as did the pupils—“meticulously faithful to the smallest detail of the rules,” one recalled after her death, “quiet, calm and reserved…dreamy.” Walking home one night from the Guérins’ with her father, she saw a constellation of stars forming the letter T: proof that a great and shining apotheosis awaited her. On earth she was more than ever bereft when, in the summer of 1882, Pauline applied to the Carmel of Lisieux and, undoubtedly putting off a potentially traumatic announcement, did not immediately share the news with Thérèse, who learned the truth when she overheard a conversation between Pauline and Marie. Her “little mother,” her “ideal,” would leave her to enter the cloister in October of that year.

“In one instant, I understood what life was; until then I had never seen it so sad; but it appeared to me in all its reality, and I saw it was nothing but a continual suffering and separation…. Having heard about it by surprise, it was as if a sword were buried in my heart.”

Truly, Pauline had fulfilled every hope Zélie might have voiced regarding the tutelage and care of Thérèse. She’d been devoted and dependable and affectionate, and she had unintentionally scripted any movement toward her own independence as a betrayal. Thérèse cherished and inflated her every word and even believed Pauline had promised her that one day the two of them would go together to a “faraway desert place,” where they could be hermits, apart from the world, together before God: a fantastic happiness for Thérèse, union with her chosen mother, withdrawal from all threat of separation. Writing of the plan, the adult Thérèse could admit that it was indeed a fantasy, a pious version of playing house, “no doubt not said seriously, but little Thérèse had taken it seriously.” In any case, it would have been impossible to overstate what was for her a profound and dangerous shock.

Nine years old, Thérèse regressed into piteous and servile clinging. As when she had returned to Alençon from her wet nurse in Semallé and held tight to Zélie’s skirts, Thérèse couldn’t let Pauline out of her sight. Every day she brought her older sister little gifts—cakes and sweets that would be forbidden once Pauline was inside the convent—and covered her “little mother” with what can be interpreted only as petitionary kisses. What did she have, other than love, to save herself from abandonment?

Nothing, and Thérèse’s was human love, the same emotion she dismissed in her careless friends as imperfect, inconstant, “narrow.” In her turn, each Martin daughter, first Pauline, then Marie, Thérèse, Céline, and Léonie, would sacrifice human bonds for the hope of perfect—divine—love. On October 2, 1882, Pauline entered Carmel, or, from the perspective of her little sister and pupil, she left.

It is estimated that, at the time of Pauline’s postulancy, seven of every thousand French women were nuns, compared with four on the eve of the Revolution, one hundred years earlier. The nineteenth-century splintering of a previously homogeneous Catholicism into various factions allowed women a more powerful presence in what had been a male-dominated faith. Vocations were at an all-time high and were heard loudest in the towns and small cities, dioceses such as Bayeux, which included Lisieux. Paris and rural regions filled far fewer convents than did the bourgs, with their more rigid social hierarchies.

For girls who did not marry—girls tainted by a family history of tuberculosis, marred by smallpox, or, like Zélie, girls whose dowries were spent on a brother’s education—entering a religious order guaranteed a respectable role in life as well as a surrogate family and security in old age. “A dynamic young woman from a Catholic and cultured home with drive and ambition could not do better than become a nun.” Contemporary readers might balk at the idea of a woman choosing to forsake sexual satisfaction, but in nineteenth-century France, what sex life was to be had outside the convent? When the Church was hostile to all earthly pleasures, especially those of the body, there were few sexually liberated married Catholics. A well-brought-up, catechized girl had never even heard of an orgasm.

The fastest-growing orders were congréganistes and service-oriented, drawing young women who might today become teachers, nurses, or social workers. Known as bonnes soeurs, they ministered to the sick and the destitute, they taught the children of the poor, they answered a complex of growing needs that the state had yet to address. In contrast, orders of religieuses, like the Carmelites, were cloistered and comparatively elitist. For each postulant they required a dowry of up to ten thousand francs, attracting daughters of the professional bourgeoisie to a strictly regulated life dedicated to contemplation and prayer, silence rather than engagement. The Lisieux Carmel was in the center of town on the rue de Livarot, its members housed in a two-story cloister built around a garden with an allée of chestnut trees. The buildings were of plain red brick, functional and solid rather than graceful. To the bereft nine-year-old, however, the neoclassical facade of the entry, its columns and pediment, would have seemed both imposing and majestic.

On the brilliantly clear fall day that Pauline went through the spiked iron gate separating convent from town, Thérèse, responding with the monomania typical of the bereaved, “was astonished the sun was shining with such brightness” on so sad an occasion. To make things worse, she was forced that same Monday to return to the school she hated. And she had no opportunity to forge any psychic defense: every Thursday she was expected to accompany her family to the cloister, to visit with her sister on the other side of a grille.

“Perhaps, dear Mother,” she wrote Pauline twelve years later, “you find I am exaggerating the pain I was experiencing? I readily admit that it should not have been as great…but my soul was FAR from being mature.” A mature soul would have been a soul like Zélie’s, a soul with a tested apparatus for converting earthly torments to spiritual advancement. But Thérèse was still a child and, as would become clear, she had been not merely wounded by her mother’s unavoidable abandonments; she had been damaged.

Pauline introduced her little sister to the mother superior of the Lisieux Carmel, Marie de Gonzague, who was charmed by the girl’s unusual piety and tried to comfort her with promises that she, too, could follow a vocation into Carmel. But what could assuage so profound a loss, one that recapitulated the agony of her mother’s death, provoking grief and rage she had not been able to express five years earlier?

By the end of 1882, Thérèse was plagued by unremitting headaches and abdominal pains, and, even more ominously in the case of this child, her behavior deteriorated along with her health. She suffered conflicts with her soul mate Céline; she talked back to Marie, who tried to assume the role of her third mother.

For Holy Week of 1883, Louis made a trip to Paris with Marie and Léonie and left the younger girls to spend Easter vacation with Céline and Isidore Guérin and their two children. The many years of correspondence between the Martin girls and their aunt and uncle attest to an unusual devotion between the families. Clearly Thérèse and Céline depended especially on this second set of parents; their love and need were generously returned. Noting Thérèse’s despondency during the Easter visit, her uncle took her on a walk, sharing his plans for amusing distractions and speaking, as Thérèse recalled, “about Mama and about past memories with a kindness that touched me profoundly and made me cry.”

More than that, Uncle Isidore’s implicit acknowledgment of what everyone else seemed determined to deny—that Thérèse’s misery centered on Zélie—quickened the child’s anguish into physical illness. For months, everyone had insisted that Thérèse remain stoic, that she attend school with her aching head and each week cheerfully visit the cause of her distress. Now that her uncle had recognized—and permitted—her grief, she succumbed to it entirely. Observing that Thérèse was in no condition to attend the Catholic social to which the family had been invited, her aunt put her to bed with piles of blankets and hot water bottles to ease the shivering brought on by hysteria. But by morning, Thérèse was no better.

According to the testimony of the Guérins’ maid, Marcelline Husé, who attributed the girl’s ailment to “deep loneliness,” Thérèse was “seized by nervous trembling, followed by attacks of fright and hallucinations several times a day.” Doctor Notta, the family physician (the same who had found Zélie’s cancer inoperable), pronounced the illness “very serious.” Louis Martin returned from Paris with Marie and Léonie; by all accounts Thérèse’s life was in danger. But what was the disease? As interpreted by the Martin sisters during the beatification process, and as Thérèse herself wrote, it was the work of the devil, angered by Pauline’s entry to Carmel and attacking a child destined to be a saint. A contemporary psychiatrist might suggest that it wasn’t the devil but Thérèse who was furious, raging at having lost yet another mother.

Initially, she could not be moved from the Guérin house, and her sister Marie stayed to nurse her until she could return to Les Buissonnets. Remarkably, in the middle of March, Thérèse was able, as she announced she would be, to attend the clothing ceremony of Pauline, to sit in the lap of her “little mother,” now gratifyingly alarmed, to gather the kisses and prayers of the nuns of Carmel.

The next day, she relapsed. The following weeks were characterized by periods of violent agitation that gave way to long stupors during which Thérèse seemed insensible to those around her. When she could, she occupied herself by making petitionary wreaths of flowers for her altar to the Queen of Heaven. This was her sole amusement. Twenty years later, her sister Marie recounted “terrifying dreams that depressed all who heard her cries of distress. Some nails fixed in the wall of the room suddenly became as thick, charred fingers to her, and she cried out, ‘I’m afraid, I’m afraid!’ Her eyes, usually so calm and so kindly, had a terror-stricken expression that is impossible to describe.” She was ill for two months with what Doctor Notta concluded was Saint Vitus’s dance, or chorea, a nervous disorder that afflicts children, usually at the onset of puberty, and causes uncontrolled motor activity—jerks and grotesque spasms of the muscles.

But Thérèse’s movements were not random. Consistently she was thrown or threw herself off the bed and onto the floor. Chorea, hysteria, diabolic possession? All of these, ultimately, are semantic differences. The patient herself was consumed by doubts. Others judged that she sank into comas, but as she remembered, “I was not deprived of the use of my reason for one single instant.” She heard and later remembered all that was said at her bedside; more significant, she worried she “had become ill on purpose,” a private anxiety that hints at the disease’s genesis within her own desires—for punishment of her family and herself, for the opportunity to escape the remarkable, even injurious, self-control that had characterized her from as young as three, when she sat quietly for hours during Céline’s catechism, a self-possession that had suppressed and thwarted subsequent years of grief and anger.

In gestures that were inextricably both affectionate and cruel, Pauline sent Thérèse letters and prayers accompanied by the gifts of an hourglass—so she might see that time did in fact pass, or so she could measure the dreadful tedium of illness?—and a doll dressed in the habit of a Carmelite, lest she escape for a moment the vision of her longing, and her torment. “Uncle wasn’t too happy,” Thérèse reported of the reception of the doll, perhaps allowing Isidore Guérin’s sane voice to express what she denied. “That instead of making me think of Carmel, it would be better to remove it from my mind.” Doctor Notta prescribed hydrotherapy, but the prospect of disrobing for showers was too horrible to a girl who later admitted she was “troubled at having a body…not at ease in it…ashamed of it.” Perhaps it’s no accident that the trembling and agitation of chorea typically announce puberty’s turmoil, the clamor of the flesh; but whatever name was given Thérèse’s complaint, its resolution would be as abrupt and mysterious as its onset.

On May 13, 1883, Pentecost Sunday, Thérèse experienced a second, celebrated apparition. The day had begun badly, with the ten-year-old girl even more distressed and disoriented than usual. Marie was in the garden, Léonie watching by the bed, while Thérèse continued to call out “Maman! Maman!”—a plea so relentless, so familiar, that no one paid attention. It wasn’t until she began screaming that Marie came back inside and Céline ran into the sickroom as well. Marie offered Thérèse some water, and she “cried out in terror, ‘They want to poison me!’” It was a hysterical cry, certainly, and yet one with explicit content; that Thérèse later insisted she never lost her reason makes it impossible to dismiss her choice of words as meaningless. Even if we resist forcing a literal gloss upon her accusation—“poison” a metaphor of toxic despair, all she was expected to swallow rather than express—the Martin family’s faith asked much of a child. When Zélie died, Thérèse had been taught to turn a face of sweet acceptance to an unappeasable God, one who had now taken Pauline and must have seemed intent on removing her every comfort. What was the cost of continuing to perceive that God as a good God, a God of love?

Thérèse thrashed and screamed, and her three sisters, frightened, knelt down and began praying to the statue of Our Lady of Victories, the same to which their mother had turned after the death of Hélène and which she had heard speaking words of reassurance. “She is here by my side,” Zélie had heard the Virgin say, a story told over and over, a script, some might judge.

“Three times I repeated the same prayer,” Marie testified. “At the third time, I saw Thérèse fix her gaze on the statue, radiantly, like one in ecstasy. She confided in me that she had seen the blessed Virgin herself. This vision lasted four or five minutes.”

A cure would have restored Thérèse to her previous self. These few minutes transformed her. “Beautiful to me, so beautiful,” she wrote years later. “Her face was suffused with an ineffable benevolence and tenderness.” Immediately, Thérèse understood that the apparition was private, even a secret, and that if she told anyone of it, her “happiness would then disappear.” But her sisters were watching her face; they knew that something had transpired and that whatever it was had effected a miraculous rescue. Thérèse was returned to them: lucid, smiling, relaxed.

They pressed her with questions. Marie, in particular, waited until the two were alone and then pushed her little sister to betray that instinctive reticence common to religious experience. After all the months of worry Thérèse had caused Marie, she felt she owed her something—everything. She had seen the Virgin, Thérèse told Marie, and Marie told Pauline, and Pauline told the sisters of Carmel, and the child, soon well enough to visit the convent, was questioned closely. What was the Virgin wearing? Had she said anything? Was she carrying the Infant Jesus? Immediately, Thérèse’s experience was appropriated by others eager for a vicarious glimpse of heaven.

The cult of the Virgin was never more powerful than in the nineteenth century, when many French girls, including the Martins, joined a religious society called the Children of Mary, whose pious exercises were a means to secure the chastity of adolescents. Invoked by countless young women to comfort and protect them, the Virgin appeared to Catherine Labouré in Paris in 1830, to Mélanie Mathieu in La Salette in 1846, and to Bernadette Soubirous in Lourdes in 1858. Such visions, Bernadette’s in particular, were exhaustively publicized and contributed to a climate of expectation among French Catholics. “A lady, young and beautiful, exceedingly beautiful, the like of whom I had never seen, came and placed herself at the entrance of the opening above the rosebush. She looked at me…smiled at me…as if she had been my mother.” Thus Bernadette described an experience very like Thérèse’s. Fourteen in 1858, Bernadette was still living in 1877 when Zélie made her pilgrimage to Lourdes, where a witness to the young shepherdess’s transports told Madame Martin of the indelible experience. The Virgin appeared to Bernadette eighteen times. She recited the rosary with the girl, she taught her a prayer (which Bernadette never shared), and she gave instructions for the building of a chapel. Bernadette’s ecstasies were witnessed by friends, townspeople, and later clergy, and while those others saw nothing, the girl was able to describe the Virgin’s yoked and pleated dress in detail, her blue ribbon and the white beads of her rosary, the yellow rose shining on each of her bare feet.

Thérèse, alas, could not provide any such details. “Seeing that the Carmelites had imagined something else entirely, I thought I had lied,” she recalled, and the experience became a “real spiritual trial for the next four years.” Having doubted the validity of her illness, now she doubted what restored her to health. As she said, “I was unable to look upon myself without a feeling of profound horror,” a secret shame exacerbated by the solicitous affections of Marie de Gonzague, the prioress of Carmel. Mother Marie was fascinated by the little sister of her new novice: impressed by Thérèse’s piety, worried by her endangered health, riveted by the report of the apparition. “Mother Marie de Gonzague kisses her dear little daughter,” read a typical postscript to one of Pauline’s letters home. Would it be possible to overstress how Thérèse cherished these tokens and how miserable she was to think she might not truly merit the indulgences of this august woman—a surrogate with heaven’s stamp of approval, a mother who was already encouraging her to think seriously of a religious vocation?

Thérèse had not been dishonest, but she couldn’t answer a question that persists: Was the experience one of neurosis or of supernatural revelation? And this, in turn, is a question that has validity only to those who admit the possibility of the second. Does the one necessarily exclude the other? Is anguish blind to the divine? Or perhaps might it sometimes be granted extra powers of perception?

Just as the sight of her stooped and aged father bore witness to her fears over his mortality as much as to any divine communication, Thérèse’s miracle was personal and private; it unfolded only for the child who experienced it. Whether this means it issued from or was delivered to her psyche is a question without a single answer. The atheist sees a neurotic symptom, the believer the grace of God, and the biographer a leap of creativity, one that testifies as much to Thérèse’s resilience as to the damage she suffered.

In any case, in the wake of devastating loss, Thérèse was given, or she gave herself, a vision of a mother who would never leave her.