“I FOUND HER VOICE very much changed,” Marie Guérin wrote to Marie and Céline at the end of 1894, commenting on Thérèse’s hoarseness. “I spoke to Francis [her brother-in-law, Doctor la Neele] about her. For the moment there is nothing serious, but it can become so from one day to the next, and then there will be no longer any remedy.”

Thérèse had long assumed she would die young—she wished it for herself, reunion with mother and father as much as union with God—-but it is hard to know when she began to perceive her own physical deterioration. Contemporary medical technique was unable to diagnose tuberculosis definitively in any but its advanced stages, and even then doctors often confused it with lung cancer or pneumonia. Mediated by a third party, Doctor la Neele’s assessment was guarded. It betrayed the helplessness of his profession to effectively treat a disease that had only twelve years earlier been attributed to a germ, rather than to heredity or temperament, to poverty or vice, to “almost any form of unconventional behavior,” all of which would still be blamed by the masses for decades to come.

Focused as she was on the significance of the minute—everything is so big in religion—Thérèse would have found no contradiction, only confluence and sublime alignment, between the purposes of the tubercle bacilli and their Creator. “Don’t worry about me,” she wrote Céline after la Neele visited the convent, “I am not sick; on the contrary, I have iron health.” But she added a qualification her biographers have interpreted as prescient: “God can break iron just like clay.”

Whatever Thérèse might not acknowledge, behind her older sisters’ request at the end of December 1894 that she write about her childhood was their fear that she was dying, and that the stories she told of their youth together—“all these detailed accounts that we find so interesting,” as Marie put it—would be lost. Like their mother, Thérèse was observant; she’d noticed and remembered what the others had not. In the past year she’d become the convent’s unofficial poet, making gifts of verse to the other nuns for their feast days, to inspire or to cheer, to communicate without breaking the rule of silence. She was careful never to favor her own sisters, never to express her own preferences. But why, as the eldest Martin sister asked possessively, “should she compose little poems to please everybody,” why should she spend herself on plays for recreation rather than functioning as the family historian?

At the end of January, Thérèse played Joan of Arc being martyred—the role she’d written with herself in mind—and was nearly burned when the scenery caught fire from spirit lamps used to illuminate the stage. We have Céline’s pictures of her sister in makeshift armor and a dark wig, a chain wrapped around her wrists. She looks appropriately wan and pensive, a girl unjustly condemned to death, and she looks exhausted. At the end of each day, during the one hour allowed for individual recreation, Thérèse was writing in her cell, at first concerned that the task would “distract [her] heart by too much concentration on [her]self” and thus impede her spiritual progress. But she’d learned to obey simply and without question. If an order came from a superior—in this case her sister, the prioress—then it must necessarily express the will of God. By the end of 1895, she’d filled six of the cheapest exercise books available (ten centimes apiece, thirty pages long); she’d completed the first and longest of the three manuscripts that would constitute her autobiography. She never revised or erased, she followed no outline, but wrote what came into her head as she sat on a stool and bent over the book, relying on Zélie’s letters to begin her life at the beginning of her life, inventing herself in the voice of her mother.

Pauline could not have known consciously that it was a key moment for Thérèse to review her life in the faith. Along with her camera, Céline had brought notebooks with her, passages copied from the Old Testament, which Thérèse did not have in Carmel. (The Louvain Bible, the translation authorized for French Catholics, did not include an Old Testament.) In the notebooks Thérèse found a passage from Proverbs that struck with particular force: “If anyone is a very little one, let him come to me.” Did this not confirm a downward path to exaltation? Reviewing her brief past, Thérèse could see her soul’s direction and might anticipate its necessary steps. Always in a hurry, now she was even more so. She’d read and even written of the great figures, those she called mountains of the faith, Saints Augustine and Paul, Venerable Joan. But she was a grain of sand, she was working on lowliness, hiddenness, invisibility. How did one measure such efforts?

Night after night, as she traced her development, Thérèse’s heart was not distracted but informed. From earliest consciousness, she had wanted to be good, perfectly virtuous, but the only progress she made came through God. Each gain was not one of will—not even of a will as extraordinary as hers—but of love. Were the notebook entries dated, we could know exactly where in the story of her soul she had arrived during June of 1895. Assuming she worked steadily, at the even pace required by her schedule—an hour each night and no more—she would have written her way to the middle of what took her just a year to accomplish, the passage describing the Christmas “miracle” when she felt “charity enter into my soul, the need to forget myself and please others.” God’s love had transformed her at the age of thirteen, unlocked the prison of self and morbid sensitivity. Was it a further meditation on that first and essential grace that inspired her Act of Oblation?

On June 9, 1895, during a mass celebrating the feast of the Holy Trinity, Thérèse had what she described as an awakening. Familiar with the idea of substitutive suffering, of offering oneself as a victim of God’s judgment in order to free souls from purgatory, she had a sudden vision of herself as a different kind of victim. Immediately inflamed by her idea, she dragged Céline to Mother Agnes so they could ask the prioress’s permission to offer themselves formally as “sacrificial victims” to God’s merciful love—love that was infinitely more demanding, more thoroughly immolating, than his justice. Pauline was hurrying to get letters in the mail and paid little attention to Thérèse, who was too overwrought to make herself clear. Céline remembered: “The thing didn’t seem important. Our mother said yes.”

In her cell, Thérèse drew up an “Act of Oblation” for herself and for her sister, and on June 11, the two of them knelt before the Miraculous Virgin, and Thérèse read the document she had written and signed. Through Mary’s intercession, she pledged herself and Céline to Jesus:

I ask You to come and take possession of my soul…consuming all my imperfections like the fire that transforms everything into itself….

In the evening of this life, I shall appear before You with empty hands, for I do not ask You Lord to count my works….

Time is nothing in Your eyes, and a single day is like a thousand years. You can, then, in one instant, prepare me to appear before You.

In order to live in one single act of perfect Love, I OFFER MYSELF AS A VICTIM OF HOLOCAUST TO YOUR MERCIFUL LOVE, asking You to consume me incessantly, allowing the waves of infinite tenderness shut up within You to overflow into my soul, and that thus I may become a martyr of Your Love, O my God!

May this martyrdom, after having prepared me to appear before You, finally cause me to die, and may my soul take its flight….

The act, several pages long, moved through all the young nun’s ardent hopes: she wanted to love God, to exist only for the glory of His church, to be no less than a saint. She could not bear separation from God; she asked that God take away her freedom to displease Him. She wanted to be consumed by divine love, to become one with its fire, eternally safe from separation. Beneath her plea, she signed her name, Marie-Françoise-Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, unworthy Carmelite religious.

Earnest, deadly earnest. Articulating what had long existed in her heart. Asking for what had already been granted: to be incessantly consumed.