THÉRÈSE RETURNED to Lisieux on December 2, 1887. In her absence, her sister Pauline had been writing letters on her behalf and working, successfully, to convince Mother Marie de Gonzague that Thérèse was mature beyond her years and that three Martin sisters in the same convent would not constitute a lobby within the community’s inescapably insular politics. Her uncle Isidore moved from resignation to advocacy and met with the unmovable Delatroëtte, who, sensing conspiracy, accused the prioress of acting “underhandedly.”

With the help of her uncle and the collaboration of Pauline and Mother Marie, Thérèse drafted and redrafted a letter to the bishop, reminding him of her ardor. Whatever fears she had, she did not express: “I believe it is through you that Jesus is going to carry out his promise,” she wrote. Why would God call her so insistently if He were not ultimately to welcome her into Carmel? Stubbornly, she held the hope of celebrating the first anniversary of her conversion with the gift of the bishop’s acquiescence. But in contrast to the previous year’s epiphany, this Christmas came and went without word.

On December 28, the prioress received a letter from Bishop Hugonin: she could decide herself whether to admit Thérèse.

On New Year’s Day, the eve of her fifteenth birthday, Thérèse visited Pauline at the Carmel and was told she had been accepted as a postulant but, in a pragmatic concession to her youth and her frail constitution, her entrance would be postponed until after Lent, a “three months exile,” as Thérèse saw it, not to spare but to deny her the rigors of fasting, of spending winter in an unheated building. Mother Marie de Gonzague was in no hurry. Thérèse was just fifteen; what good could come of breaking her spirit or her health? Besides, a delay would be at least a small concession to Delatroëtte; it would give the angry canon a chance to cool off.

Thérèse was indeed fifteen, impatient as only a teenager can be. Three months was a torturous postponement, a sacrifice of such magnitude that she could take pride in providing this worthy dowry of suffering. Letters she received from Pauline while she waited to hear from the bishop and the prioress introduced the theme of the Child Jesus’ toy: Thérèse was a ball, a humble amusement for the Christ Child, who tossed it this way and that, who played with it and then forgot it. In the memorably suggestive words of her “little mother,” Christ said, “Never has My little ball given me so much pleasure, never; I have already pierced it several times…today I made a bigger hole…. Presently I am going to repair it, and this is how I’m going to do it! I am going to take it into My two little hands and blow very hard into it…place a kiss on the hole I have made…. How I love my little ball! I can pierce it; I can do all I want with it and it always repeats, ‘Jesus, I love you!’”

Much as the image disturbs contemporary readers, who cannot free themselves from post-Freudian suspicion—an interpretation of piercing and blowing and kissing the rent ball as necessarily sexual—the idea of herself as a toy of Christ struck Thérèse as a perfectly innocent symbol, one that would ultimately become an integral part of her theology. To explain mortal trials as proceeding from infantile, if holy, caprice might seem cruel to those who cherish the idea of a reasonable God. Thérèse received the idea as a comfort, and the ball appears in nineteen letters between her and her family, as well as in three from her confessor, Père Pichon. It is mentioned in her autobiography; no doubt she later used it when instructing her novices. Typical of the excessive sentiment for which Thérèse is often faulted, the abused ball was as much a product of the era as of the girl. The Theresian scholar and translator John Clarke traces it to a leaflet given the young pilgrim at the Carmel before she embarked on her journey to Rome. Inspired by the image herself, and knowing its value to her sister, Céline had given Thérèse for Christmas a little boat she had made, inside of which was a figure of the sleeping Christ Child, holding his little ball. The name of the vessel, floating in a bowl of water, was Self-Abandonment.

Girding herself with visions of a love that wounds, that defies mortal understanding if not the urge to allegory, Thérèse used her exile as spiritual test and opportunity; she would make herself an even more worthy fiancée. She began the long process of fashioning what she would come to think of as an ornate wedding dress, each stitch purchased with an act of penance, a gesture of love.

Impatient, she behaved with all the grace she could muster; she practiced the “nothings” of self-censure, of putting others’ desires before her own. Small sacrifices in themselves, these increments of humbling, of subduing, would increasingly constitute her program of spiritual advancement. In the end, when every inclination to self had been squelched, the combined nothings would add up to a monumental and heroic something: martyrdom.

Offered one last trip by her father, a pilgrimage with him to the Holy Land, Thérèse declined. She went each day for lessons from Madame Papinau, where another pupil would remember clearly his last sight of Thérèse before she entered the convent: “I can still see her on the pavement, mechanically turning the point of her umbrella in the groove of one of the curb stones. She was wearing a green dress edged with astrakhan and frogged trimmings, and her hair was tied with a sky-blue ribbon.” Described as tall and robust, with a round face that belied her ascetic impulses, Thérèse looked every bit a cosseted daughter of the bourgeoisie.

Surely one of the attractions of Carmel was aesthetic. Well clothed, well fed, Thérèse spent her days in rooms stuffed with furniture and furbelows. The austerity of the convent, its bare cells and simple, whitewashed refectory, its stone hallways traveled by identically dressed women, silent except for the sweep of the habit, the hiss of rope sandals—all this presented a physical grace and order that materialism had buried. At fifteen, an age that seeks a new language, a separate identity, Thérèse must have longed for bare stone floors underfoot as much as she did doctrine overhead.

On April 8, the Little Queen had a farewell dinner at home, at the heavy mahogany dining table of Les Buissonnets, surrounded by her father, her sisters Céline and Léonie (home from her second failed novitiate, this time as a Visitation nun), and the Guérins. The next morning, all attended mass together at the convent. Thérèse remembered that during the silence of communion she could hear “nothing around me but sobs.” Thérèse didn’t cry, but when she was summoned to the enclosure her “heart was beating so violently it seemed impossible to walk” through the door separating the world from the cloister, freedom from service.

She knelt for her father’s blessing, and he wept. The usually locked doors swung open and showed her the entire community assembled, black veils lowered over their faces. The outmaneuvered Canon Delatroëtte presented her to the prioress, absolving himself of any responsibility if “this fifteen-year-old child” were to “disappoint [her] hopes.” The cloister doors closed, and Thérèse followed her newest mother, Marie de Gonzague, into her new life.

The Carmel of Lisieux was a small and humble convent, even by the order’s ascetic standards, and the physical privation of life within was compounded by a spirit of fear and penance. Their order having been founded in 1155, during the Latin occupation of Palestine, the Carmelites took their name from Mount Carmel, where the most extreme Crusaders eschewed the established and insufficiently severe religious societies to live as hermits in an enclave of tiny cells. For their spiritual father, they chose the prophet Elijah, who had hidden himself in the same mountain and “whose word burned like a torch.” Guided by this soul for whom “nothing was too hard,” the Carmelites gathered only for mass, devoting themselves to charity, to preaching, and above all to contemplation. The rule of the order can be summed up in one of its sentences: “Let them remain alone in their own cells, or near them, meditating day and night on the law of the Lord, and watching in prayer, unless they are engaged in some other just occupations.” The Virgin was revered as the “perfect Christian expression of the prophetic vocation,” and Marian devotion would remain a cornerstone of Carmelite life.

As with most programs that deny human frailty and desire, the Carmelites, transplanted to Europe, deviated from their lofty aims. By the time Saint Teresa of Ávila joined the order in 1535, the mystic found it ripe for the rigorous reforms she brought to bear, all of which sought to return the community to its original purpose of holding souls in uninterrupted communion with God. But Saint Teresa, for whom Thérèse Martin had been named, was the rare creature in whom sacrifice was greeted by joy and humor, an élan that her spiritual descendants were unable to preserve or replicate. The Lisieux Carmel was not high-spirited, nor, in contrast to a socially active congréganiste order, was it youthful, especially not in the eyes of a teenager: the average age was forty-seven. Among the twenty-six nuns remained one of the foundresses of the convent, Mother Geneviève, now eighty-three. Ill and silent, considered holy, she was waiting in the darkened choir for Thérèse; she “fixed” her eyes on the newest member of the community, thrilling Thérèse, who embraced every moment of her entrance with joy.

Given a postulant’s habit, a long blue dress with a black cape and bonnet, Thérèse was shown to her cell in order to change forever out of the clothes of a daughter of the French middle class. Pretty things that had once given cause for scruples, even a hat so piously pretty as the one she’d worn to Christmas mass with her father, navy blue trimmed with a decorative symbol of the Holy Spirit, a white dove, would trouble her no more. Her room on the second floor measured a little over six by twelve feet, a room to herself but one she was henceforth to refer to as “our,” never “my,” as she no longer had any property of her own. In her cell was a bed—a board laid on two trestles with a straw mattress, wool sheets, and pillow; a jug of water and basin set on the swept plank floor; a bench (not a chair); a writing desk and workbasket; and a few devotional books. While the nuns of Carmel kept silence, the walls around them spoke. “My daughter, what are you doing here?” Thérèse’s cell asked, lest she forget her calling.

True to the intentions of its original founder, life in the Lisieux Carmel sought to sanctify every minute and every action, to consecrate the entire being to God. The community rose at five, awakened by the snap of castanets in the hall, a reminder of the Spanish mystic’s stringent reforms. Upon rising, the sisters dressed in their tunics, habits, toques, and veils; winter and summer they slipped their feet into the hemp sandals of Spanish peasants, alpargatas. Work and prayer came before food, hours before. A ten o’clock breakfast was preceded by a bell summoning the sisters to examine their consciences. In pairs they processed to the refectory, singing the De Profundis, taking their assigned places at the long tables, speaking only to confess a fault. They ate in silence and in unison, napkins stretched between their plates and their chests so as to catch, and consume, every crumb. A human skull hung on the wall above them, between lines of scripture, lest they forget, while they ate, the future of their bodies. Convent food was simple, two meals a day, with no meat, no eggs, milk, or butter during Lent or on Fridays. As the youngest—and the one most obviously willing if not anxious for mortification—Thérèse was given scraps that the others didn’t want, “food that had been left over or rejected at a previous meal” (reheated fish heads were an example furnished by Céline), “food that even a healthy stomach would have had difficulty putting up with.”

The largest portion of the day was given to prayer in the choir, including mass, two hours of silent prayer, and three and a half hours of reciting the Divine Office. Also known as the Liturgy of the Hours—Matins, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, and Vespers—the Divine Office means literally “a duty accomplished for God,” a daily cycle of devotions established in the sixth century with even more ancient, Judaic roots. (The Psalms and, later, the Acts of the Apostles include references to the recitation of prayers at particular hours.) For the Carmelites, there were also five hours of manual labor; two hours of recreation, during which edifying conversation was permitted; and one hour of free time before bed, which Thérèse used for writing. A naturally talkative person who had grown up depending on language to bridge all divides, even that between the dead and the living, she had chosen a life of separation and imposed silences, one that produced an outpouring of documents invaluable to her biographers: letters, poems, plays, memoirs, and notes, even scribbles, through which we can trace her spiritual evolution.

“I found the religious life to be exactly as I imagined it,” Thérèse recalled, which was not to say that there weren’t trials. She knew nothing of sewing or sweeping or weeding. Every task she was given she completed slowly, only to be criticized for her clumsiness, her lack of accomplishment. And, most painful, she fell victim to an affection for Mother Marie de Gonzague that she herself understood as inappropriate, suffering an attraction so strong that she described it as if it were literal magnetism. Each day she invented “a thousand reasons” to see the prioress; she had to “walk rapidly by [her] door and to cling firmly to the banister of the staircase in order not to turn back.”

Later, as novice mistress in 1892, Thérèse would be able to see a familiar fault in the novice Martha of Jesus, an orphan whose neediness must have reminded her of herself during her postulancy. “Your fondness for Mother Prioress is too natural,” she told the novice. “She is doing your soul a great deal of harm, because you love her passionately, and those kinds of feelings displease God; in nuns they are poison. You did not become a Carmelite to satisfy your natural longings; you did so to mortify them and die to yourself.” It’s interesting that Thérèse said that Mother Marie was doing Martha’s soul a great deal of harm. It was a judgment she would never be able to apply to the prioress with regard to herself.

Of course, it is not possible to overstate Thérèse’s vulnerability to any mother figure, to an available female outline onto which she could project her desire for a mother, and Marie de Gonzague was not anyone, but a woman of great charm. A daughter of the nobility, more brightly polished and better educated than most in her position, she intended to direct the affections of her twenty-five “daughters.” Moreover, Thérèse’s crush was not new, but had begun—was deliberately cultivated—when she had suffered the diabolic illness that had culminated in a vision of the Virgin. In the years following this manifestation of divine favor, Mother Marie broke the Rule to allow Pauline to communicate with Thérèse during Lent, she granted the sisters the indulgence of long visits in the parlor, and she herself kissed and embraced Thérèse in person and in messages appended to Pauline’s letters.

“Doesn’t my angel want to come and be with her older sisters, who are so happy in God’s service?” she asked when Thérèse was ill in 1887.

“Tell dear mother that her Theresita loves her with all her heart,” Thérèse answered.

By the time she entered, for six years Marie de Gonzague had beckoned powerfully to Thérèse, one of the promises of the cloister: a mother who found her adorable, compelling, virtuous.

Whether or not it was wise to welcome a large faction of blood sisters into the Carmel, the Martin daughters made attractive postulants. Poised and well educated, they came from material stability, which indicated a truer vocation than those of nuns whose worldly position was low enough to make the convent an agreeable alternative to a secular life of drudgery and compromise. And they provided worthy adversaries for the proud Marie de Gonzague; they were more satisfying to order around.

“God permitted that she was very severe without her even being aware of it,” Thérèse wrote of the prioress, a generous interpretation of a woman every other nun remembered as mercurial, even irresponsible. During testimony, Marie of the Sacred Heart, Thérèse’s oldest sister, was “bound to say” that the community had a troubled atmosphere—“deplorable disturbances: factions and personality clashes arising chiefly from the vexatious temperament of Mother Marie de Gonzague.” According to Céline, who would enter Carmel six years after Thérèse and whose remarks about the prioress were generally more compassionate than censorious, Mother Marie’s many directives were “based on the whim of the moment,” “a legion of petty regulations,” in the words of another nun, “which she repealed or changed according to her fancy,” made and forgotten so quickly that the other nuns ignored them.

But not Thérèse. She carried out every minute directive, blessed by the ability to see grace in every one of her superior’s actions. If Mother Marie seemed to be cruel, it was with the purpose of advancing Thérèse’s spiritual growth. Thérèse could not conclude what others saw plainly—that the prioress, whom one novice privately named “the wolf,” required an environment of emotional turmoil in which “precautions were necessary to avoid offending her susceptibilities.” In this female world, gestures were weapons: an averted face, a closed door, a smile withheld—any of these could wound.

Of course, Thérèse was not the humble downtrodden field flower she chose to portray, but a hothouse hybrid. She’d been orphaned, ill, coddled. Pauline and Marie lobbied constantly—humiliatingly, from Thérèse’s perspective—for their little sister’s being excused from one or another rigor of convent life. It was too cold, they insisted, for her to wear straw sandals, she must have fur-lined slippers, quickly provided by her aunt Guérin. And her bereft father came almost every day with fish, fruit, champagne, cakes, even a surprise so indulgent as “an artificial melon which burst to scatter a rain of sweets.”

“Your little queen is crushed under the weight and the magnificence of your gifts,” Thérèse wrote in thanks and, it would seem, censure for the Point d’Alençon lace Louis delivered months too early for her clothing ceremony. A few years hence, farther along her path toward selflessness, she might have avoided so potentially hurtful a verb as crushed when thanking a frail father who would have no other wedding dresses to trim. But for now his doting compromised her before the community, who shared the treats heaped upon their newest member even as they faulted her for being a spoiled elitist.

As many have had the chance to observe, the cloister doesn’t encourage charity as well as it does pettiness and jealousy. Thérèse would find that the most effective mortification came at the hands of her convent sisters. In Carmel, she would learn, as one of her novices testified, “to transform all of her actions, even the least of them, into acts of love.” This meant responding with genuine sweet simplicity to a taunt; it meant sitting next to the most cross and disapproving sister at recreation; it meant looking everywhere for an opportunity to put another’s happiness before her own.

There was an obvious formula, a simple Gospel directive she could apply to the impossible demands she made of herself. On one occasion when she was acting as assistant portress, she was asked to get up in the night and bring a lantern for Mother Marie’s family, guests at the Carmel (in defiance of the Rule). To conquer herself and what she described as her violent thoughts against authority, Thérèse imagined that she was performing the chore for the Virgin and the Baby Jesus. “And then I did it with incredible care, not leaving on it the least speck of dust.” She transformed the irritating demand into a joyful—thrilling—occasion to play a game that was over the heads of her sisters, a strategy she would have occasion to use again and again. After all, she intended to be not just a good religious but a saint.