ON JUNE 14, a few days after her oblation, Thérèse was in the choir, making the stations of the cross, when she was assailed by a burning sensation all over her body. “I felt myself suddenly wounded by a flash of fire so intense I thought I would die,” she would tell Pauline during the last weeks of her life. At the time, however, the two sisters remained carefully on guard against familial affection. They barely discussed what Thérèse came to regard as the one moment of extraordinary grace in a religious life otherwise marked by God’s silence and withdrawal. The taste of what she knew saints often experienced both excited and reassured her: the moment of rapture was a positive answer to her oblation, a little demonstration of what heavenly fire could do. Immediately, she began campaigning for her sister Marie and the novices in her charge to make the same act. But before anyone else could kneel and speak the words Thérèse had written, Mother Agnes had to share the oblation with a superior to make sure it made no theological missteps.
With minor changes it was accepted (not by Delatroëtte, who had died on October 8, but by Father Lemonnier, who that month had preached the fall retreat), and the official sanction pleased Thérèse. Still, she didn’t find others eager to pray for immolation, even if it was divine love that ignited the fire. She besieged Marie with intramural letters of encouragement, the gist of these being that such sacrifice wouldn’t hurt—“when we love a thing the pain disappears”—but while Marie eventually agreed to make the oblation, she was never able to desire what Thérèse desired. She wasn’t her sister, possessed, as Marie described Thérèse, “by God…absolutely possessed, just as the wicked are possessed by the devil.”
Thérèse was falling headlong into the flaming heart of Christ, while Léonie had once again faltered and left the convent in Caen, returning to Lisieux on July 20. She came to her four sisters in the Carmel parlor for a standard visit of one half-hour, timed by a sandglass, during which she wept without stopping, crying so hard, as Thérèse wrote her aunt Guérin, that they were unable to get even a word of explanation out of her. Isidore Guérin took his prodigal niece into his home, and she remained in his care until she returned, successfully, to the Visitation in 1899. Even when not overcome by tears, Léonie spoke little of her sufferings—she was best remembered for the remark “Noblesse Oblige: I belong to a family of saints and must not stain the record.” But in 1895, thirty-two and still not able to find her way, she must have felt her shame and isolation intensely.
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In October, Mother Agnes entrusted Thérèse with a brother in the faith, an aspiring missionary named Maurice-Barthélémy Bellière, who had written the Carmel asking for a sister with whom he might correspond, on whom he could count for the support of prayers and sacrifices. In her state of chronic loneliness, her lifelong anguish of separation, Thérèse was excited by the gift, perhaps out of proportion. Abbé Bellière was only just twenty-one and unsure of his future. After a first rapturous exchange of letters, Thérèse received a note from Bellière saying, bluntly, that he was entering military service. She heard no more from him until the following July, but she continued to pray for him, just as she remained faithful to all her personal projects: her work with the novices, the family memoir she had promised Pauline, and her poems, twenty-five by now, some of them quite long.
For Céline, who had countered Thérèse’s suggestion that she offer herself as a victim of love with a request for a poem enumerating all the sacrifices Céline had already made for God, Thérèse came up with a thirty-three-stanza life of Christ, which she titled “Jesus, My Beloved, Remember!” Based on the Gospels, it did not celebrate what Céline had done for God but called Jesus’ attention to all He had suffered for Céline, and returned over and over to the theme of Christ’s humility:
Remember that you wandered as a Stranger on earth.
You, The Eternal Word,
You had nothing…no, not even a stone
Céline would recall “astonishment” at this gift, a negative rather than positive surprise, it would seem from the admission that it was “only later that [she] understood how right [her] little sister was” to rebuke her in verse.
Others of Thérèse’s literary efforts were also not appreciated. As novice mistress, she wrote a short and simple entertainment for Christmas of 1895 and spent more energy and attention on a play in honor of Pauline’s feast day, January 21. “The Flight into Egypt,” based on a legendary story of the Holy Family’s encounter with a band of robbers, was in fact so long that Mother Agnes stopped the performance before it was over and scolded Thérèse for taking too much of the community’s time. Thérèse succumbed to tears, but perhaps they flowed from a compound grief. The night before, she’d presented Pauline with the completed memoirs of her childhood, and her sister had put the manuscript away without reading it and without seeing what Thérèse had painstakingly designed and copied onto the final page: her own and Jesus’ “coats of arms,” linked by a verse—“Love is repaid by love alone”—taken from Saint John of the Cross. Each blazon is filled with images that Thérèse herself decoded, lest Pauline miss any significance. Christ is represented by a vine (“I am the vine and you are the branches”) as well as by paintings of the Holy Face, the Infant Jesus, a triangle (Trinity), and the morning star. The trajectory of Thérèse’s soul is seen in a cluster of grapes offered to the Baby Jesus, a harp singing of love, a white lily, a weak reed, and a palm of martyrdom.
Although she was disappointed by Pauline’s seeming indifference to her labors, it had become impossible for Thérèse to resent any form of rejection: she was too eager for any chance to share in the bitter experience of God, who had Himself been rejected.
Lent arrived with its usual schedule of deprivations. In March, the order’s sixteen chapter nuns (those who voted) reelected Marie de Gonzague as prioress but required seven ballots to reach a majority decision. Unlike Mother Agnes, Mother Marie did not offer the novitiate to her runner-up; instead she suggested Thérèse become the official novice mistress, a title Thérèse refused, even though she continued as the primary teacher and adviser to the newer members of the community. Thérèse would meet with five novices now, including her sister Céline and her cousin Marie, who had left home for Carmel even as Léonie had stepped in to fill her place as daughter in the Guérin home.
On Holy Thursday, April 2, 1896, nearly a year after she had made her oblation to love, Thérèse extinguished the light in her cell and lay down on her pallet. She had felt well enough during the past weeks to observe the Lenten fast “in all its rigor.” That night she’d participated in the vigil at the altar, awaiting the holiest day of the year, the day on which death dies and the Bridegroom is resurrected. Within minutes of getting into bed, she was aware of a “bubbling stream mounting to [her] lips,” a warm flow of what she assumed was blood but did not allow herself to confirm. The inconvenient lamp, the lamp she called “ours,” not “mine,” was already snuffed, its wick lowered by means of a pin. To relight it for purposes of self-indulgence would amount to a failure of discipline. Thérèse held her soaked, sticky handkerchief in her hand and waited for sunrise.
Most young women, even a morbidly romantic one, would be frightened by the prospect of a pulmonary hemorrhage. If she chose to wait for the morning’s corroboration of a death sentence, it would be out of denial, even terror, the hope of not having to spend so dark a night alone. Thérèse betrayed no fear, at least not on the page, not in retrospect. Until this point in her life, her faith had been unquestioning, airtight. She understood her parents’ protracted deaths as spiritually precocious and economical: Zélie and Louis had satisfied the demands of purgatory while still on earth. Did Thérèse allow her excitement over the idea that exile from God, from mother and father, might be at last drawing to an end distract her from a less attractive possibility: that her most intense suffering might be just beginning? We cannot know. “Nothing is less spontaneous than a letter, nothing less transparent than an autobiography, which is designed to conceal as much as it reveals.” Thérèse’s measured words do not make her readers into witnesses. In her—our—cell, she was alone; more than a year would pass before she wrote: “I thought that perhaps I was going to die and my soul was flooded with joy.”
Upon waking she took the handkerchief to the window. What she saw “filled [her] with a great consolation.” It was of course significant to her that Christ announced her imminent death on Good Friday, the anniversary of his own crucifixion.
White wings, chaste dove, seraphic lyre.
Tears, sweet exile, brave warrior, little shepherd girl.
Lamb. Lily. Daisy. Rose.
Burning arrow, burn me away until nothing is left.
LOUIS MARTIN may have cloistered his daughters, protecting them from those aspects of secular culture he considered vulgar and dangerous to their moral development, but he didn’t—couldn’t—separate them from the popular imagery of the time in which they lived. Poems written by Thérèse prove her familiarity with the symbols and sentiments of the romantic tradition. To suggest innocence, she used a lamb; for sacrifice, a plucked flower. To speak of divine love, she had only the language of mortal sentiment. Limited as a poet, so was she as a human being. Much as she despised the flesh, she was incarnate. What were the material means of consecrating oneself to love?
“It was the fashion to suffer from the lungs,” Alexandre Dumas père remembered. “Everyone was consumptive, poets especially; it was good form to spit blood after each emotion that was at all sensational, and to die before reaching the age of thirty.” The tubercular “look,” pale and wasted with feverish eyes, was a standard of beauty, and of femininity. How could a daughter of Zélie Martin, who complained that she and her daughters were helpless “slaves to fashion,” have hoped to escape so powerful a vogue, one that had swept Europe and America and even surfaced in novels of the Far East?
In a French town of 1896, tuberculosis was inescapable, both as contagion and as metaphor. Zélie’s sister, whom Thérèse visited at the Visitation in Caen, had died of it; Sister Marie-Antoinette, Carmel’s thirty-five-year-old extern nun, was consumptive and would die that year. Even if Thérèse never read Hugo’s Les Misérables or Alcott’s Little Women (published serially in France in 1878 and as a book in 1880), even though she had no opportunity to see a production of Dumas’s La Dame aux camélias or the opera based on Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème, she was no less receptive to the romantic idea of redemptive suffering that tuberculosis offered.
Appropriated by writers and artists, the consumptive heroine, the woman who dies of a love so transcendently pure that it burns away its mortal vessel, was the collective invention of an age. Prefigured for centuries by the same paragons who compelled Thérèse—the Church had always associated the destruction of the flesh with the strengthening of the spirit—the specifically tubercular martyrdom grew out of the nineteenth century’s attributing consumption to refinement and spirituality, to ardor rather than germs. Tubercle bacilli infected both genders equally, but tuberculosis was understood as a feminine, and feminizing, disease, the uncontrolled bleeding of pulmonary hemorrhage imaginatively linked not only to crucifixion but to menstruation, an unclean flow that represented both fertility and the corruptible nature of woman, her inherent need to be purified.
For Thérèse, who grew up denying her physical self, the “flesh that cannot be tamed and therefore must be obliterated,” an unconscious conflation of the two distinct kinds of bleeding would have been even more potent. Having never allowed the expression of her sexuality, she granted it a power and danger that was absolute, irresistible. A single kiss, she imagined, would be sufficient to make her a “Magdalene”; if Carmel hadn’t taken her at fifteen, her alternative plan had been to run away to the Gomorrah of Paris, where she would live in a halfway home, among fallen women. The Church, in its preoccupation with original sin, encouraged even the most chaste women to identify themselves with Eve, convinced them of their need for sanctification. What difference was there between Thérèse and Dumas’s Marguerite Gautier, the courtesan who discovered true, selfless love and died of it? Thérèse would not have perceived any.
With heightened energy—a “fervor”—granted by this “first call” from her Bridegroom, Thérèse assisted at Prime and the Chapter of Pardons, a Good Friday tradition in which each nun sought absolution from her sisters. She later recalled being “transported” by her new, secret happiness. The Rule did not allow a nun to conceal physical illness from her mother superior, and in what reads as a spasm of masochistic excitement, she told Mother Marie of her hemorrhage and asked to be allowed to fulfill all the remaining Lenten obligations. She wasn’t in pain, she insisted, so why not? Astonishingly, Mother Marie agreed, and so Thérèse fasted and did her chores, stood on a ladder in a cold draft, and washed windows.
Discipline, routine, obedience to a higher order. In spas and sanatoria across Europe, consumptive patients submitted to a rule, a life punctuated by the ringing of bells. They rose on schedule, ate in a common refectory, submitted to examination by medical officers, exercised or not as prescribed, took their temperatures, endured compulsory periods of silence, turned out their lights on time and slept as directed. Like all good religious, they pinned hope of salvation on obedience.
The next night, April 3, Good Friday, Thérèse hemorrhaged again. Doctor la Neele examined her as much as he was able by putting his head through the oratory grille and auscultating through the layers of her habit. Surely she did not describe the hemoptyses to the doctor as she did later on the page—a “bubbling stream” of blood—because he made the comforting diagnosis of a burst blood vessel in her throat and allowed her to continue to work as if nothing serious had happened. Throat sprays and camphor salves were prescribed, remedies that the patient happily assumed useless.
And yet, after so dramatic an announcement, the resumption of normalcy, even a requested normalcy, was discouraging. Thérèse hoped for immediate death, but she would get an agonizingly slow one, eighteen months of martyrdom without glory, without the solace of faith. Not that she wavered in her beliefs, but she felt nothing: Jesus announced himself to her and withdrew.