IT’S TEMPTING, for the hagiographer, to begin with death rather than birth, to work backward from the more significant and conscious portal of earthly life. Death is the arena for sainthood, the testing ground. Youthful indulgence, sexual profligacy, all sins, from the venial to the deadly, are excused—welcomed—as a prelude to sanctity. Consider the case of one of Thérèse’s “mountains,” Augustine: jealous playboy, lying vandal, pagan infidel.

But not when he died. A saint’s death must be holy, and Thérèse, watching herself, knew that others were watching her as well. Suffocation, starvation, gangrene: she embraced each new agony as sacrifice, another way to love. She gave herself no opportunity for grief or anger or even impatience.

Pauline, the most thorough of Thérèse’s self-appointed witnesses, secured permission from Mother Marie to visit and speak with Thérèse when she was confined in her cell. If Pauline didn’t suspect the significance of her “yellow notebook” to strangers, hadn’t foreseen that the dialogue therein would be examined during Thérèse’s beatification process, still she had read her sister’s account of their childhood together, and she knew how invaluable Zélie’s correspondence had been to the family after they lost her living voice. There were compelling personal motives to capture as much of Thérèse as possible while she was “still in our midst.” Too, family outside of the cloister would have no opportunity to speak with her directly, and Léonie had already written Céline asking if it wouldn’t be possible to transcribe everything Thérèse said, adding how much comfort it would give her to have that contact, that sense of nearness to her sister.

By April, Thérèse was coughing blood again, and she began, bit by bit, to withdraw from participation in community life. Relieved of heavy chores, she continued to work in the linen room, sewing and mending, but found it less and less possible to recite the Divine Office in the choir. She hadn’t much breath to walk, let alone sing, but she resisted making any concession to her increasing weakness: after all, she had the indelible example of her mother’s death, and Zélie had carried on until she collapsed. Thérèse forced herself to go to recreation and hid whatever she could from the community—successfully enough that some of the sisters grumbled about indulgences granted to a nun who wasn’t really all that sick—but in fact she was often close to fainting. She admitted to one of her novices that “it took me more than half an hour to get up to our cell, I had to sit down on almost every step of the stairs to get my breath. When I finally reached our cell, I had to make an unbelievable effort to undress.”

In that cell, she asked Pauline, “When we’re misunderstood and judged unfavorably, what good does it do to defend or explain ourselves?” Thérèse wasn’t merely unconcerned with mortal opinion; she was taking her leave of earth, greedy for every last opportunity to be misunderstood and humiliated, “the means of remaining very little.”

In May, once Thérèse gave in and admitted to the prioress that she was too weak to carry on with her regular duties, Marie de Gonzague consulted with doctors and ordered a succession of treatments that, while useless against the disease, did provide further mortification. As the vesicatories hadn’t relieved the coughing that made it impossible for her to sleep, Thérèse now submitted to points de feu, or the application of burning needles, to the flesh on her back, again to stimulate circulation and healing. During this process she leaned against a table, dwelling on the suffering of the martyrs, while the doctors and the prioress “kept up a sprightly conversation of banalities.”

“Persecution has changed in form,” Thérèse wrote Père Roulland, adding that “all missionaries are martyrs by desire and will.” She spoke of his trials in China, but her own were more immediate. With the warmer weather, she was ordered to walk each day in the garden—comparing herself to the “poor wandering Jew”—and on days when the doctor did not apply the cautery needle, Céline was forced to do it instead.

In response to a request from Mother Henriette, a Parisian Carmelite who was ill and to whom Mother Marie had spoken of Thérèse’s poetry and her holiness, Thérèse wrote “An Unpetalled Rose,” celebrating total sacrifice and abandonment to Christ. It had been, in previous years, Thérèse’s pleasure to take the novices into the cloister’s courtyard and strew rose petals under the crucifix. “The rose in its splendor,” intact, was not the rose she wanted to be; she chose to spend herself entirely, to be “unpetalled…flung out / To blow away…To be no more.” Christ was the “beauty Supreme” for which she “must die.”

Mother Henriette liked the poem, with one reservation. She found its vision of sacrifice incomplete and wrote back requesting another stanza in which, after death, God gathered up the scattered petals and reassembled the flower so that it might shine for eternity. Thérèse refused: that wasn’t what she’d meant at all. She wanted annihilation, “to be unpetalled forever, to make God happy. Period.”

The drive toward nothingness was hard for Thérèse’s less mystical Catholic sisters to understand. Their lives as religious were dedicated to a kind of account book of sacrifices made in order to purchase spiritual advancement. Thérèse’s impulse to destroy self seemed to them a repudiation of orthodoxy, of the idea of individual salvation and resurrection, the reward promised to the virtuous.

“Die now,” Pauline wrote, crying so that she could hardly see the page, unable to sever mortal bonds with the ruthlessness of her little sister. “Die quickly so that my heart may no longer have any attachment here below.” Incredibly, it was not until the end of May 1897 that she learned of Thérèse’s previous, initial period of hemorrhaging, now more than a year past. Abashed by her older sister’s shock, Thérèse asked Pauline’s pardon, using a metaphor to which she would return. If she had hidden something of the body’s “envelope” from her little mother, Pauline may be sure that “the letter”—her soul—“is yours.”

Very little strength was left within her sister, and Pauline thought carefully before asking Marie de Gonzague to order Thérèse to continue her autobiographical work. She didn’t want to further exhaust Thérèse, but, convinced of the value of the work, she found herself unable to resist any means of draining what wisdom and grace she could from a young woman who she believed had direct access to God. Letters from Pauline to Thérèse—letters written in private, even as she was spending evenings with their recipient—made one plea after another for Thérèse’s prayers and posthumous attentions, wringing holy metaphors from every possible source. “This evening,” Pauline confessed in one such note, “near the Blessed Virgin there was a very bright candle that had overflowed and the wax formed, on the side, the veritable mold of a little lamb pleading. I thought that the light was you and the little lamb was myself.”

During the first week of June, Thérèse embarked on the final portion of what would become her Story of a Soul. She wrote sitting in the garden, in the invalid chair that her father had used and which the Guérins delivered to the convent so that she might enjoy a little time outdoors. Under the shade of chestnut trees, she was not “able to write ten lines without being disturbed”; one or another member of the community interrupted her with “idle chatter,” with cut flowers she would “prefer to see swaying on their stems,” tokens of affection she had perhaps taught herself to undervalue.

In her moments of solitude, she recounted a story to provide an example of how she had grown in her ability to shrug off human judgment. Interestingly, it is a story of a key, and not any key but that to the communion grate, the same that unlocks the Body of Christ, offering mystical union to every Catholic. In July of 1891, recently appointed as aide to the sacristan, Thérèse had this key in her possession and came to return it to Marie de Gonzague while the prioress was ill with bronchitis. Met at the door by another sister, she was prevented from seeing Mother Marie, from interrupting her rest. But Thérèse insisted: it was her “duty” to return the key, and she “wanted absolutely to enter in spite of the fact that she was pushing the door to prevent me.” Of course, the argument woke the prioress and Thérèse fled, allowing the other nun to accuse her of being “disagreeable.”

“My heart was beating so rapidly that it was impossible for me to go far,” she remembered of the event, and yet she sat on the stairs not to get her breath but to savor a “victory” she’d won over herself, the victory of allowing another sister to misinterpret her, of not remaining to vindicate her position.

Like many of Thérèse’s stories, the story of the key is one of minutiae, “of making so much fuss over such little things.”

And yet small events form most of the fabric of a life, and the memory presents a drama replete with iconic figures: the mother, ill and unavailable in her cell; the daughter with a key to return—the key to everlasting life; the guard at the door who introduces a misunderstanding; the failure to reach the powerful mother; the flight into lonely “victory.” Six years later, Thérèse was still sifting through these highly charged moments, savoring a lesson: the failure to connect was all to the good if it taught her to despise human measures. What wouldn’t she have construed as purifying?

Thérèse had arrived at a point far beyond her old struggle with scruples, one she described to her cousin Marie of the Eucharist as “a lot of self-seeking, your griefs, your sorrows, all that is centered on yourself, like spinning around on the same pivot.” The difference between the vicious circle of narcissism cloaked as piety and the amusing top spun by Jesus would be the force behind the revolutions. Was it the whip of self-seeking or the hand of God? Before she died, would Thérèse herself reach perfect detachment, become that mystical bride lost in Love? Certainly her hunger had been so long thwarted, and was now so great, that she considered only eternal satisfactions. “Nothing that is called happiness in the world can satisfy it,” she wrote her sisters, speaking of her heart. “I find nothing on earth that makes me happy.”

“Detach your heart from the worries of this earth, and above all from creatures,” she exhorted Sister Martha of Jesus.

“Work solely for Him and do nothing for self or for creatures,” she advised Abbé Bellière.

•••

Struggling for breath as she wrote in her wheelchair parked in the shade, Thérèse still fantasized about a foreign mission. What attracted her, she admitted to Mother Marie, was not so much the occasion to proselytize and win converts, but “I dream of a monastery where I shall be unknown, where I would suffer from poverty, the lack of affection, and finally, the exile of the heart.”

Abandonment to divine love was the only means Thérèse had found of defending herself from human abandonment—by mother, father, sisters, the thoughtless girls at convent school. Mysticism offered her a means of redefining the experience that had proved again and again so devastating. To reduce it to the logic of the playground, if she couldn’t beat them, she’d join them: Thérèse would forsake Thérèse. Abandonment would no longer be the enemy, but the goal, whose victim remained the same: earthly Thérèse, vulnerable Thérèse, human Thérèse.

The flow of language, like blood from a wound, testifies to the violence of the experience. Thérèse consistently evoked the idea of immersion in divine love with verbs that were destructive, murderous, vengeful. To achieve union with the divine, self must be humiliated, it must be exiled, broken, burned, despised, unpetalled, pierced, incinerated, rent, consumed, flooded, flung out, squandered, withered…There were many ways to evoke the rage of the forsaken child.

If anger was unavoidable, so, for Thérèse, was its object. Whom could she destroy? Not her mother, pious in life, saintly in death, “Princess and Lady of Honor of the Heavenly Court”; not her four virginal sisters, praying in convents; and certainly not her grieving, self-sacrificing father. Only herself, the problem child whose problem was self and whom the wisdom of the Church gave Thérèse the most praiseworthy reasons to destroy: Love. The saving of souls. The consolation of Christ.

Nothing could be more arduous than the methodical dismemberment of desire, the renunciation of pleasure, the brutal suppression of personality, but the reward was incalculable: the clamor of self silenced, its ravenous hunger satisfied once and for all; the threat of separation undone; suffering which, Thérèse rightly judged, had been plentiful in her short life, vanquished. Christ, whose love she characterized as wine, dangled a narcotic promise, even as she endured a torture that most consumptives offset with morphine.

Yet, for a girl wedded to the obliteration of self, heaven was entirely personal, cast in the shape of her parents. “If you find me dead one morning, don’t be troubled,” she told Pauline, “it’s because Papa, God, will have come to get me.” This is no turn of phrase, as another comment from the same period demonstrates. Anticipating her reception into heaven, Thérèse worried that her expectations of its wonder and perfection might in fact be dashed by a less amazing reality. “So I’m already thinking that if I’m not surprised enough, I will pretend to be surprised just to please God. There isn’t any danger that I’ll allow Him to see my disappointment.” The echo of her Christmas conversion is so strong, it seems impossible that it might be unconscious, but one of Thérèse’s most compelling and curious qualities is this seemingly impossible conflation of mystical reach and infantile wish.

“Ah the Lord is so good to me that it is quite impossible for me to fear Him. He has always given me what I desire, or rather He has made me desire what He wants to give me” (emphasis added). A skeptic would say that Thérèse gave the name God to her internal strategy for survival. But perhaps every mystic finds the way to the divine through a rent in his or her psyche, a wound that might, in a lesser soul, result in self-absorption, vanity, avarice, envy.