DURING THOSE “very joyful days of the Easter season” that followed on the annunciation of the hemorrhages, Thérèse was abruptly plunged into what she called “the thickest darkness.” The faith she had always taken for granted—“living,” “clear,” uninterrupted by doubt—vanished, leaving her in a despair so profound it defied articulation. Once, she had found words inadequate to the “secrets of heaven”; now she discovered they were useless when trying to describe what seemed a visit to hell. Evocative, if not as precise or accurate as she would have liked, was her analogy of an obliterating fog, so thick that she could not conceive of light, could no longer imagine God’s presence.

Thérèse’s temptation against faith, as she understood it, persisted without relief until the end of her life. Writing what became the last chapters of her autobiography, she observed that her “little story which resembled a fairy tale is all of a sudden changed into a prayer.” Twenty-three, without expectation of completing her twenty-fourth year, without hearth or husband or child, without the solace of even one friend—for Thérèse had sacrificed the selfish preferences of friendship to the indiscriminate embrace of charity, just as she’d abandoned her beloved biological father for an invisible celestial suitor—Thérèse Martin had invested every hope in her vocation. What if, now that she was dying, there was no heaven?

With a courage hidden by determined cheer, the conviction that she must protect the community from her doubts, Thérèse accepted her new terror as she accepted every other spiritual trial, as the will of God, who must have found her at last strong enough to experience the misery of the unbeliever. For this was the only consolation she could draw from her unhappiness. Even meditation on the love of Christ offered no solace:

When I want to rest my heart fatigued by the darkness that surrounds it by the memory of the luminous country after which I aspire, my torment redoubles; it seems to me that the darkness, borrowing the voice of sinners, says mockingly to me: “You are dreaming about the light, about a fatherland embalmed in the sweetest of perfumes; you are dreaming about the eternal possession of the Creator of all these marvels; you believe that one day you will walk out of this fog that surrounds you! Advance, advance; rejoice in death which will give you not what you hope for but a night still more profound, the night of nothingness.”

If, up to this point in her story, it has been possible to dismiss Thérèse as a spiritual model of limited use or appeal, as little because she had never been tempted, these eleventh-hour confessions, never voiced earlier in her life, correct any such assumptions. Once she had found her initial, T, written in the sky, God’s invitation and blessing spelled out for all the world to see; now she saw “a wall which reaches right up to the heavens and covers the starry firmament.” As painful as it is to witness her desolation, the preceding passage—anguished, unflinching—excites as much as it troubles Thérèse’s readers. At last she has taken her place among us, not so much revealed herself as human as given birth to her naked self, plummeting to earth, wet and new and terrified. If we allow her to become a saint, if we believe in her, it’s because here, finally, she has achieved mortality.

Assailed by silence and emptiness, afraid of what she’d committed to the page—“I don’t want to write any longer about it; I fear I might blaspheme; I fear even that I have already said too much”—Thérèse earned her place among the moderns, anticipating the existential accusation of Sartre:

You see the void above our heads? That is God. You see this hole in the ground? That’s what God is. You see this crack in the door? That’s God too. Silence is God. Absence is God. God is human loneliness.

Convinced that her doubts were evil, Thérèse shared them with no one. She wrote cheerful notes to Léonie and to her novices; she dreamed up a long allegory for Mother Marie de Gonzague to help her superior see convent politics in heaven’s light; she fired off chatty letters that made light of her family’s worries over her health. “I shall allow the famous Doctor de Cornière to speak, to whom I had the distinguished honor of being presented yesterday in the speakroom,” she wrote her aunt. “This illustrious personage, after having honored me with a look, declared that I looked well!” she exclaimed with perhaps too evident irony; the report could hardly have reassured Madame Guérin. De Cornière was “famous” in that he was the official doctor for the community, summoned not to examine Thérèse but to attend to the more imminently dying Sister Marie-Antoinette, compared with whom Thérèse might have appeared “well” in the context of an abbreviated greeting. But no matter how she looked, Thérèse placed no faith in doctors, privately dismissing their diagnoses as the work of unenlightened people who devoted themselves to the very aspect of existence that ought to be despised, ignored, defeated.

Answering her fears with work and prayer, she developed a wry, even black, sense of humor. Almost never did she break down and allude to her spiritual trial. “If only you knew,” she admitted to the sacristan, “what darkness I am plunged into!…Everything has disappeared on me, and I am left with love alone.”

“When I sing of the happiness of heaven,” she confided to Mother Marie, “I feel no joy…. I sing simply what I want to believe.”

In her own estimation, Thérèse made more acts of faith during the last year of her illness than she had throughout her entire previous life. Despair, as all religious knew, was infectious, dangerous. Tuberculosis—which by November would have finished off Sister Marie-Antoinette—was a matter of constitution, of fate, the will of God.

Where was Thérèse in the course of her illness? As readers of Victorian novels know, pulmonary tuberculosis typically follows a chronic and protracted course. Infection with the bacilli, generally inhaled in the form of droplets of sputum, might precede active consumption by years, because the germs, tiny and slow to multiply, cause little damage at first and no symptoms. It takes a few months for tissue to become sensitive to the invading cells and for inflammation to result. Tubercles form around the clusters of bacilli in an attempt to isolate the infection within. These lesions either rupture, spreading the disease and leaving holes in the lung cavity, or calcify into nodules. By the spring of 1894, when Thérèse had been troubled by sore throats and hoarseness, the disease would have been well established. Two years later, with the first hemorrhages, her lung tissue had been irreparably damaged. Now she began to be troubled by coughing fits that prevented her from sleeping, which in turn contributed to the depressive effects of serious illness.

Month after month, she persevered without relief from her “temptations against the faith.” No longer proud, but no less stubborn, she waited for God. Consolation came, on May 9, in the form of a dream, one she remembered well enough to record in detail four months later. The dream was exceptionally clear and vivid, of that type the dreamer perceives as more real than waking experience. Thérèse found herself in a gallery with several other nuns and the prioress when three Carmelites, their faces hidden under veils, approached. It was clear to her that these unknown sisters came from heaven, and Thérèse wanted very much to see their faces. No sooner was she was aware of this unvoiced, fervent desire than the tallest of the three advanced and lifted her veil. She covered Thérèse with its layers, enveloping the two of them underneath, and revealed herself as Anne of Jesus, the foundress of the French Carmel, who died in 1621. The fact that Thérèse was, as she put it, “absolutely indifferent to Venerable Mother Anne” convinced Thérèse of the dream’s validity. Why conjure a vision of a personage for whom she felt so little?

“Her face was beautiful but with an immaterial beauty…suffused with an unspeakably gentle light, a light…produced from within.” The description is typical of apparitions of the Virgin and recalls Thérèse’s childhood vision of Mary, possessing the same transcendent beauty, a light that “suffused” the face, conveying unearthly love. The echo was not unconscious. Thérèse concluded that the dream—the visitation—marked the anniversary of the earlier apparition, “the second Sunday of Mary’s month,” she wrote.

Seeing Anne’s look of pure love and feeling the sweetness of her “caresses,” Thérèse beseeched the Madonna-like vision to relieve her of some of the agonies she’d been suffering. Would God leave her for a long time on earth, she wanted to know, or would He come soon to get her? “Soon, soon, I promise you,” Anne reassured. Was there anything left for her to accomplish, or was God content with His servant? Thérèse pressed, not asking the more direct questions: Why was God silent, unreachable? Was it because she had somehow failed to please Him?

“The saint’s face took on an expression incomparably more tender,” and she told Thérèse that God was well pleased with his servant. He wanted “no other thing.” Anne embraced Thérèse “with more love than the tenderest of mothers has ever given to her child.” As when Thérèse had been ten years old, ill and despairing, so now was she comforted by her vision of a luminous and accepting and all-powerful mother. She might feel herself deserted, but this was a defect of her imperfect human perception: she would not be abandoned, either to mortal suffering or to the abyss of eternal separation, the nothingness that tormented her while awake.

Aside from the gift of this one dream, and “at times a very small ray,” Thérèse found her days as long as suffering could make them. She would not ask to be relieved of any task, no matter how arduous; she attended every devotion; she drove herself to the end of her strength. Under the cloak of pretty phrases and sweet optimism was a will that frightened those around Thérèse, her sisters and the one or two other nuns who watched her carefully enough to see the exhaustion she tried to hide. Her obedience, as all who testified during the beatification process made clear, was perfect; she accepted every directive as the Word of God.

Reading Thérèse’s account of the months following the Easter hemorrhages, one is tempted to apply the words folie à deux to the always complicated and sometimes destructive relationship between Thérèse and Marie de Gonzague, who appears in a role opposite to that of Anne of Jesus: the withholding mother, the one who did not rush to tell Thérèse that she could relax, that she could trust in God’s love if not her own goodness.

In compliance with the Rule, Thérèse had immediately reported her hemorrhages, but it was the letter rather than the spirit of the law that she served. She refused to consider the increasing frailty of her body, on which she turned with renewed hostility, not appalled or fearful but thrilled by its wasting. She, who claimed little advantage could come from mortification of the flesh, conspired with her prioress to create a new and rarefied—a spiritual—sanatorium, a set of living conditions that gave every advantage to the disease, stripped every support from its victim.

“How much I am touched by all your material attention. Ah! Believe it, Mother, the heart of your child is filled with gratitude, and never will she forget what she owes you,” Thérèse wrote the prioress, words tempting to reread and even speak aloud in order to discover the exact emphasis, the voice in which they might have been uttered, had they been uttered. Is there any irony here, any cloaked accusation? Again and again—too many times?—Thérèse gave thanks for “the dew of humiliation,” for Mother Marie’s having “never spared” her. Indeed, she was indebted to the prioress, to anyone who so effectively pushed her toward martyrdom, but can’t we detect at least wistfulness beneath the “gratitude”? Another sort of indulgence, different and gentler, might have been welcomed.

In what seems acknowledgment of her subject’s imminent departure, in July Céline took a number of photographs of Thérèse, posed alone rather than among the other members of the community. Self-conscious in the manner of the period, still they possess the immediate nostalgia of family snapshots, stealing a moment out of time even as they acknowledge the relentlessness of time, magnifying the obsession with death and impermanence that was central to the Martins’ personal culture as well as to the greater Catholic milieu. And, of course, they provide a voyeuristic thrill uncommon to the era: they mark the material progress of tuberculosis, the destruction of the flesh that was inextricable from the mysterious, spiritual alchemy that made this mortal into an immortal.

In one, Thérèse embraces the base of the towering crucifix she could see from her cell, the one in the middle of the cloister garden. Her right hand holds a branch of lilies against the nailed feet of Christ, her left is wrapped tightly around the cross itself, her eyes are cast upward. The effect, on the whole, is one of shipwreck, of sinking rather than expectation. A second pose, more often reproduced, shows Thérèse standing in the sacristy, again holding the branch of lilies, holding it firmly in both hands as if it were a tool rather than a spray of flowers, her eyes on her viewers. She looks amused, almost. Her small, prim mouth resists an actual smile, and her eyes suppress merriment: she is party to a wonderful secret. In a third, Thérèse rests against the low cloister wall, lilies beside her. It is not possible to decide whether she looks at or beyond us—perhaps both, for her expression, stern, gentle, sorrowful, is genuinely Christ-like. She holds a book, a gift from a young priest, Adolphe Roulland, and a scroll bearing words from her namesake, Teresa of Ávila: “I would give a thousand lives just to save one soul!”

Roulland, a seminarian from Paris, came to the Carmel that summer. He celebrated mass at the convent and spoke at length with Thérèse, whose connection to him was immediate and natural. Through this “Brother,” she would experience a life she found as attractive as it was impossible: that of the foreign missionary. When Roulland left for China in August, he carried with him ten of what Thérèse considered her best poems, including one composed for his “exile” in China, a romantic effort linking her own “sacrifice in Carmel” with his in “East Szechuan,” and signed “The little sister of a Missionary.”

Over the next year, Thérèse would exchange a number of long letters with her two spiritual brothers, Roulland and Abbé Bellière, who had suddenly resurfaced, asking for prayers to save him from the military life. “Tear me away from it at all costs…. Or I am lost,” he begged, and she responded with sincere fervor. Her prayers for herself might be met with silence, but at least there were two young men—representatives of Christ—who counted her petitions as valuable and placed their vocations in her hands. When two hundred “pagans” were converted in “Ho-pau-tchung,” Roulland credited Thérèse’s prayers with having “drawn down the grace of God.”

And not only Père Roulland and Abbé Bellière counted her prayers as indispensable. In 1927, Thérèse, who left Normandy only once (and then in order to secure her imprisonment in a convent in Lisieux), would be made patron of the universal missions, an honor she shared with the well-traveled Saint Francis Xavier, entombed in Goa, on the Malabar Coast of India.