“YOU WANT TO CLIMB a mountain, and God wills to have you descend.”

During Thérèse’s retreat in October of 1892, she tried to come to terms with the unavoidable paradox of Christianity. What way existed toward the sublime except through total loss and poverty? If asked where she lived, mustn’t she be able to answer with Christ: “The foxes have their lairs, the birds of heaven their nests, but I have no place to rest my head”?

“A question here of the interior,” she qualified in a letter she wrote to Céline just after the retreat, lest her sister think she meant anything as simple—as superficial—as renouncing food or shelter. Others might find her good, even exemplary, but mortal measures were worthless to Thérèse. She knew her virtues, even her love, to be flawed: flawed by self, a mirror too clouded to reflect the divine. Having begun to see her “little way” toward union with Christ, she was eager to apply her intelligence, her will, and above all her faith to the discovery of any means to further her progress.

In order to more efficiently strip herself of self, she returned to the teachings in The Imitation of Christ, a work she knew well enough to recite. Desire to be unknown and counted as nothing, Thomas à Kempis advised. By now her application of the monk’s formulae was almost reflexive. Mystical experience defied articulation, but Saint John of the Cross provided witness to the anguish of the soul’s “dark night,” the abyss into which she would have to fall before landing in the arms of God. She read and reread the Gospels, she turned to Christ in wordless prayer, attempting to open her heart to the possibility of grace. In her quest for union with God, she raked through her consciousness to find and expunge whatever might interfere with its absorption by the divine.

In February of 1893, Thérèse wrote the first of her fifty-four poems, most of them unremarkable as art, but useful for what insight they provide into her spiritual development. “The Divine Dew, or The Virginal Milk of Mary,” was not a spontaneous outpouring—few of her works were—but a response to a request by Sister Teresa of Saint Augustine for a canticle (verses to be sung aloud) on the infancy of Jesus. The poem relies on a passage taken from Saint Augustine, who explains Mary as a conduit for the Word of God, a spiritual wet nurse whose breast transforms the adult nourishment of scripture into the milk of love. This somewhat patronizing exegesis, taken up by Saint Francis de Sales in his “Treatise on the Love of God,” is made more distasteful by Thérèse’s conflating milk with dew’s “abundant sap,” Jesus with a “new bud, gracious and scarlet red,” a phallic flower who, crucified, bleeds milk. Such equations, or perhaps the eagerness to make such equations, result in a curiously uncomfortable aesthetic; still, they provide access to Thérèse’s particular vision. Even as she discarded more and more of what might interfere with her spiritual ambition, those ideas and images she kept were subject to a process of rendering. She boiled them down until what she found in the eye of God was not infinite diversity but simplicity, identification, oneness.

On February 20, 1893, Pauline was elected prioress of Carmel and became Mother Agnes. As a novice rather than a chapter nun, Thérèse was spared the obligation of participating in the close and emotionally fraught election between the sister she revered and Marie de Gonzague. Pauline, young and intimidated by an older opponent who frankly intended to intimidate, had landed in a position that would test her diplomacy as well as her ingenuity. In a concession to Mother Marie de Gonzague’s need to continue in her role as a spiritual director, and manipulator, Pauline appointed the former prioress novice mistress and made Thérèse her assistant. The work of guiding the novices would fall mostly to Thérèse, younger than the women she instructed and counseled, shy and awkward in her own estimation, without any talent for friendship.

The task was beyond her, and so, as she said, “I threw myself into the arms of the Lord,” a vantage she compared to a castle turret, from which nothing could escape her divinely aided scrutiny, which she applied to each young woman in her individuality, seeing both strengths and weaknesses. Observant and uncompromising, Thérèse allied herself with her novices against their flaws, characterizing her methods as those of a little gundog, “the one chasing game all day long. You realize the hunters (mistresses of novices and Prioresses) are too big to slip into the bushes, but a little dog…it has a sensitive nose and it slips in everywhere!” she wrote to Céline.

She was dogged, but not unimaginative. Over the next few years she would discover a talent for clarifying doctrine to those who had not received as much education as she. A kaleidoscope, whose three mirrors transform scraps of colored paper into beautiful designs, provided an inspired illustration for the Holy Trinity. When God considers His creation, He looks through His triune Self, ennobling it with His exalted vision. To retreat from God’s eye would be to find ourselves reduced to scraps: worthless. Another cherished image was that of the newly invented elevator, a vehicle Thérèse used many times over to describe God’s grace, a force that lifts us to heights we can’t reach on our own.

Martha of Jesus, a novice who had spent her childhood in a series of orphanages and who was described by all as emotionally unbalanced, with a violent temper, gave witness to the unusual dedication and presence of her young teacher. Probably no one had shown her the patience and the love she received from Thérèse. “Everything about her commanded respect,” Martha testified during the beatification process, noting that Thérèse deliberately “sought out the company of those nuns whose temperaments she found hardest to bear”—part of the apprentice saint’s self-imposed program of perfecting her sisterly love. What merit was there in acting charitably toward people whom one loved naturally? Thérèse went out of her way to spend time with, and therefore to love, the people she found repellent. It was an effective means of achieving interior poverty, a way to remove a place to rest her head.

In 1895, when Céline became one of Thérèse’s novices, she observed her little sister’s spiritual evolution. “Oh when I think how much I have to acquire!” she said, despairing.

“Rather, how much you have to lose,” Thérèse answered.

For now, Céline was still in the world. In June of 1893, she moved their father to La Musse, the Guérins’ summer home. He would be away from his daughters in Lisieux, but the countryside suited his temperament. Even if he couldn’t fish, he would be calmed by trees, fields, water. Unaccompanied by Léonie, who had departed for the Visitation at Caen (this time for a two-year stay), Céline admitted a spasm of self-pity, “considering [her]self with heartbreaking dizziness as the last stray of the family.” At La Musse, she devoted herself utterly to her father, to providing psychic insulation between the old man and his fears. A good-night kiss and a sign of the cross seemed to protect him from nightmares. “It is as though I had become his mother,” she wrote with no small satisfaction to her three sisters in Carmel. But Céline was drained by her sacrifice and by the yet unresolved conflict over her vocation. Behind her words was an implicit grief: her role as nurse to a father infantilized by illness—and later to Thérèse, similarly diminished—would be as close as she would come to motherhood. Where was fulfillment?

“Within me there is always nothing, always the dark night,” she wrote.

In September of 1893, Thérèse, having been a professed novice for the standard three years, asked not to be promoted but to continue as a novice indefinitely. On the face of it, the request seems odd for a nun so impatient for spiritual advancement, and yet it represented her ambition. She who would be first guarded her position at last, permanently subservient within the community. As a novice she would always have to ask permission of the other, full sisters: she would never be elected to any position of importance. Within a closed hierarchy, fraught with lobbying and shifting alliances, she found an obvious way to follow Thomas a Kempis’s advice to be submissive to everyone, to protect herself from the dangers of pride. Remaining closely associated with the other novices, she could continue to care for her spiritual charges, especially Martha of Jesus, who had yet another year as a novice and who was troubled—needy—in ways Thérèse felt she could address.

Having chosen to stay a perpetual child within the religious community, still, twenty-one years old in 1894, Thérèse could assume one privilege of her majority: she was now allowed to fast during Lent. And, in a shift that impresses itself upon biographers combing through the most tangible and personal of her effects—her writing—she abandoned the “proper” slanting penmanship Pauline had insisted she use as a student and began to write the faster, vertical script that came naturally to her. Clean and consistent and highly legible, without decorative or indulgent elements, it has only one distinctive flourish: the backward loop of the lowercase d.

The year 1894 brought a national celebration of Joan of Arc, whose beatification was at last authorized on January 27. Thérèse wrote two plays in honor of her childhood heroine, the first about Joan’s response to the heavenly voices calling her to battle, the second about her resulting martyrdom. The plays were to be performed during the community’s recreations, and Thérèse invested a great deal of time and attention, a great deal of herself, in their creation. Joan’s acceptance of her mission echoes Thérèse’s Christmas conversion—a transformative grace—and the Maid of Orléans voices a Carmelite’s preference for a life of hidden poverty rather than glory. At the time of her writing, Thérèse was considering requesting a transfer to a place where she’d be truly hidden, the Carmel of Saigon, a separation from her family that would offer both spiritual rewards and terrors. Aside from the romance she had always seen in foreign missions, a geographic remove might grant her emotional independence from the sisters whom she loved and who persisted in babying her.

Afraid of what was to come, Thérèse’s Joan of Arc girds herself for battles she never imagined fighting. Thérèse, whose chronic sore throats and hoarseness were now accompanied by pains in her chest, would also have to prepare herself for a martyrdom different from those of her fantasies. Her blood would be spilled, but as she would reflect on her deathbed, an infirmary was not the arena she’d once pictured: it wasn’t the Colosseum with its soldiers and its lions but an internal and seemingly interminable struggle, hidden from all: minute. Still, as she wrote to Léonie in Caen, “Everything is so big in religion…to pick up a pin out of love can convert a soul.”

On Sunday, May 27, 1894, Louis Martin had a stroke and was administered the last sacraments at the Guérins’ house in La Musse. On June 5, he had a heart attack, serious enough, Céline reported, that he “turned blue and his heart was no longer beating.” Isidore Guérin revived him with ether, and the family settled in to a deathwatch, marked by the hysteria familiar to such situations. Céline, Marie Guérin, Doctor and Jeanne la Neele, together with a seminarian friend, Abbé Cornière, distracted themselves with a photographic project, “a story of travelers in living pictures,” posed at various sites around the country house where Louis lay dying. “We spend our days in uncontrollable laughter, enough to split our sides, and I am thirsting for solitude. I can no longer breathe. Then I am unhappy,” Céline wrote Thérèse.

For Céline, the grief of their father’s imminent death was complicated by the increasing pressure of invitations from Pére Pichon to join him in Canada, where, as early as 1891, he had urged her to become the foundress of his Bethany Institute, which sought to provide a moral education for neglected children. Probably it seemed to him a perfect solution to Céline’s predicament of a religious impulse coupled with a desire to remain in the world. And it must also have seemed something her family would oppose. At his request, she kept the plan secret, acknowledging her vocational conflict in veiled terms of sacrifice, journeys, separations required by God, vague allusions that flummoxed and disturbed her Carmelite sisters. Privately, miserably, Céline struggled with the idea of leaving versus that of joining an order in which she would be reunited with three of her siblings, a prospect that might present itself falsely as a vocation.

On July 29, Louis Martin at last died, with Céline beside him. All the daughters welcomed their father’s release from illness; they celebrated his having accomplished what they believed was a living purgatory. Directly, he would be on his way to God, to Zélie, to the four children he’d lost so many years before. “In a sleep filled with anguish, I suddenly awakened,” Céline wrote of the night following his death. “I saw in the firmament a kind of luminous globe…. And this globe went deeply into the immensity of heaven.”

Freed at last from the care of her father, Céline turned to the question of Canada; she revealed Père Pichon’s invitation to her sisters. Thérèse immediately launched a campaign to win a fourth Martin sister’s entry to the Carmel. She might flirt with the idea of hiding herself in Indochina, but it was impossible that her soul mate, the other of the “two drops of dew” that would soon “be united for eternity in the bosom of the divine Sun” should pursue her mortal destiny on the other side of the Atlantic. Thérèse succumbed to an emotional storm that echoed her panic over her abandonment by Pauline and Marie and that was perhaps exacerbated by her already failing health. She cried herself into severe headaches and sought a cure in a typically economical program of two-for-one petitionary prayer: she wanted a sign from God that her father was with Him, a sign other than a luminous orb. If the obdurate Sister Aimée of Jesus (the mouthpiece of the community’s misgivings) relented in her reasonable opposition to another Martin’s joining the order—an artist, no less, rather than a person of more useful talents—then Thérèse would know that “Papa went straight to heaven.”

Improbably, Sister Aimée changed her mind, Mother Gonzague acquiesced, Mother Agnes approved, Père Pichon withdrew, Canon Delatroëtte made no objection. Often, it must have seemed that the sole way to explain the collapse of so many potential obstacles to the agenda of Sister Thérèse was that her will was aligned with God’s. The only person who seemed unhappy with the turn of events was Céline. “Once I made the resolution to enter Carmel as early as possible, disgust invaded my soul, repugnance for the religious life.” But Thérèse read her sister’s resistance as an auspicious sign, evidence that Jesus was demanding Céline’s future as a sacrifice. Her career as a nun would be a gift she made to God, rather than vice versa.

On September 14, 1894, Céline entered Carmel as a postulant and, the conflict at last resolved, felt immediately at peace. Mother Agnes, convinced that her sister’s artistic training would be of use to the community, allowed her to bring her photographic equipment with her, both camera and developing materials. The indulgence was not by any means usual, but then it wasn’t usual to have four siblings within one convent, or to have one of those blood sisters as mother superior while another subjected herself to the extraordinary rigors of sanctification.

Also outside of the normal and expected progress of events would be the destiny of those photographs Céline would make in the Carmel, images that would be scrutinized and reproduced too many times to count, copied onto postcards and calendars and coffee mugs, purchased even now, this very day, on street corners in Lisieux. Thérèse’s face, its calm regard, is one we might imagine for a milkmaid—easy to picture her cheek resting against the warm flank of a cow as she worked to fill a bucket—but, even when the images are poorly reproduced, her eyes arrest us. Described as blue, described as gray, they look darker in photographs. They search and, in some shots, penetrate. Along with written testimony, journals, and letters, Céline’s pictures of her sister contributed to the extraordinary cult of personality that formed in the years after Thérèse’s death; they had their impact on her canonization.

Her naked, poised, and youthful countenance framed dramatically by her black veil; her calm, her self-possession, the manner in which she returns our stares without wavering from the shining path she sees before her, bright as sunlight on water—all these announce Thérèse as one of the elect. Unlike the posthumous portrait Céline would paint of her sister, the one that hides a face behind an emblem and that has contributed to the un-knowing of Thérèse, the photographs provide a means for those who doubt Thérèse to touch her wounds.