ABRUPTLY, on August 5, the hemorrhages stopped, and Thérèse’s condition stabilized, although she remained so short of breath that she was often unable to speak. On August 6, Doctor de Cornière went on vacation, leaving prescriptions, and the Guérins, having consulted with the doctor, left town for Vichy, where Uncle Isidore was seeking a cure for his gout.

Excused from singing Matins, Pauline came to the infirmary each morning before breakfast to visit Thérèse. She plied her sister with questions and probed for slight spiritual realignments, determined to harvest every nuance of the unfolding apotheosis. One day, as evening approached, she lamented that Thérèse had said nothing for posterity that day. “Today, I’ll have nothing to write,” she recorded, unashamed of what strikes readers as a kind of torture.

Notes and correspondence reveal that not just the Martin sisters but the entire community speculated feverishly about which feast day Thérèse might expire on. When the Transfiguration of Our Lord came and went on August 6, the would-be mourners/celebrants settled on the next suitably auspicious and significant occasion—August 15, the Assumption of Our Lady. A deathwatch offered excitement and entertainment, release from the oppressively repetitive routine as well as a chance to witness the moving hand of God. Clearly, Thérèse tired of the scrutiny. “Don’t talk of a date,” she begged, but it was too late to argue for peace or privacy. Her death had become a shared work in progress, an agonizingly slow drama involving the whole convent.

“What shall you die of?” one of the sisters is said to have asked. (As the disease had introduced more than one life-threatening complication, her question would not have been as senseless as it seems.)

“I’m dying from death!” Thérèse answered with uncharacteristic tartness.

On Sunday, August 15, she developed sharp pains in her left side, and her legs began to swell. In Doctor de Cornière’s absence, her cousin Jeanne’s husband, Doctor la Neele, was given permission by Marie de Gonzague to enter the cloistered infirmary. Examining Thérèse, he found her right lung “completely lost, filled with tubercles in the process of softening,” and the lower left lobe affected as well—it was this that was causing the stabbing sensation in her side. By now Thérèse was getting so little oxygen that she had to pause after each word to breathe. Marie of the Eucharist wrote her father, Isidore Guérin, that the “tuberculosis has reached its final stage,” hardly a surprising report but significant in that the diagnosis made by Doctor la Neele was the first to include the word tuberculosis. Like cancer, or AIDS, or any undefeated killer, the name itself was taboo, avoided even by members of the medical profession.

Too weak to endure the long ceremonial required of communicants, Thérèse received the Eucharist for the last time on Thursday, August 19, and she felt the subsequent deprivation keenly, sobbing until she choked and considering it a punishment even more severe than the pain that was driving her past the point of reason. In the wake of the tuberculosis attacking her intestines came gangrene. Pauline’s yellow notebook recorded that Thérèse vomited almost continually from that point on. “Her stomach was hard as a rock. She was no longer able to perform bodily functions except with terrible pains.” Subjected to the indignity of enemas, which must have provided intense humiliation to a woman ashamed of even a healthy body, she found no relief. “It’s as though I were on fire inside,” Thérèse said.

Céline, the assistant infirmarian, slept in an adjoining cell, and she came to her sister whenever she cried out, but what comfort could she offer? If she propped her up to ease the suffocation, Thérèse felt as if she were sitting on spikes. She was emaciated, covered with bedsores; her bones came literally through her skin.

“Je souffre,” she said over and over. I suffer. And each time she insisted that Céline answer: “Tant mieux.” All the better. The responsorial was a way of stitching each moment to the passion of Christ, to his side that was pierced, to his thirst that was unquenchable, to the suffocating agony that ends a crucifixion.

“She was never attacked outwardly by the devil,” Céline testified at the beatification process, but one morning Céline woke to “find her in great distress, there seemed to be some kind of painful struggle going on.” Thérèse told her sister that “something very strange happened last night. God asked me to suffer for you, and I agreed. My pain was immediately doubled.” She felt the devil holding her in an iron grip, she felt his rage, and she knew he wanted to prevent her from getting the slightest relief in order that she succumb to despair.

After Thérèse’s death, some would judge that the devil had found a willing colleague in the prioress. Opiates were “almost universally used” to alleviate the pain and anguish of tuberculosis, and by now what little breath Thérèse had was spent on whimpering and crying out, an agony awful to witness. Upon his return, Doctor de Cornière advised injections of morphine. Mother Marie refused. Holiness was Carmel’s stock-in-trade, and nothing could induce her to compromise the “good death” to which her potential saint aspired. As Thérèse herself gasped, “I’m suffering very much, but am I suffering very well? That’s the point!”

The mandate to transcend was now public, subjected to the scrutiny of those beyond the community, doctors and extended family, the eager rumor mill of a provincial Catholic town, but even the faithful could be weakened by torture. In-firmarians must be careful to keep all medication out of a patient’s reach, Thérèse cautioned Céline. Tempted to take her own life, had she been an atheist she would not have hesitated, not even for the space of a second, she said.

In a similar vein of wishing to spare others the mortifications she jealously guarded, Thérèse made further recommendations for the care of the sick: more heat, better food, softer sheets. After her death, too late for her to enjoy them, these improvements were made.

On the afternoon of Friday, August 27, her pain suddenly eased, only to be followed by a symptom more troubling: “She was unexpectedly assailed by a real temptation to gluttony. All sorts of exotic dishes flashed through her imagination, and she was obsessed with desire for them.” This recollection from Pauline during the beatification process seems harsh in its interpretation and is perhaps better understood as an attempt to manufacture a last morality play out of what was normal physiological process. Starvation inevitably inspires fantasies of food, and Thérèse was starving. Astonished and embarrassed by the force of her hunger and by her ability for a few days to eat without vomiting, she welcomed all the Guérins provided: soups and meat, chicken, artichokes, even an infamous chocolate eclair, a pastry she requested and whose potential to corrupt was overstated, to say the least. But if sin could arrive in the form of a pleasing smell, how much greater was the transgression associated with food, food that had substance, taste as well as aroma, food that “sustains the body, corrupt life on earth, and thereby kills the soul, life everlasting.”

“I have an appetite that’s making up for my whole life,” Thérèse lamented. “I always ate like a martyr, and now I could devour everything. It seems to me I’m dying of hunger.”

A photograph taken on August 30—the last of the living Thérèse—recorded her final trip outdoors. Rolled in her bed onto the cloister walk, just outside the door to the choir, she holds her crucifix in her right hand, rose petals in her left. Her face has at last lost its characteristic roundness and betrays nothing so much as exhaustion; her eyes meet ours with the slow, affectless stare of someone for whom a smile or a frown costs too great an effort. Not merely wasted, she is small within the photograph’s composition: Céline has included a corner of the garden and framed the bed within one of the walkway’s arches. From out of its deep, black shadow, bed linens, nightdress, and rumpled veil glow white.

Thérèse’s final remission and excursion through corporeal pleasure were finished on September 14, and her last days were characterized by a weakness so extreme that the slightest noise upset her; the ministering touch of one of her sisters was an assault on her nerves. Still, she answered questions; she never failed in patience. “Both Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart and I took her pulse for a long period of time,” Pauline recorded. “She didn’t show any sign of fatigue at first in order not to cause us anguish, but finally, not being able to stand any more pain, she began to cry.”

But, “You don’t have any intuition about the day of your death?” Pauline pressed.

And, “Who will receive your last look?” everyone wanted to know. Like the loyal child she was, Thérèse answered that were God to leave her gaze free, the good-bye was promised to the prioress.

Outside the infirmary window, a dead leaf hung from a strand of spider’s silk, and Thérèse watched as it twisted in the breeze, “a picture of myself,” she called it, “my life hangs only on a light thread.” And yet hang it did, for fifteen days.

On Wednesday, September 29, a “very heavy” death rattle began and, even without talking, Thérèse gasped for air. The community assembled around her bed to recite the Latin prayers for the dying.

“Mother, is this the agony? What must I do to die?” she beseeched Mother Marie, who could tell her only that the doctor confirmed that death was imminent.

That evening, Abbé Faucon came and heard her last confession, proclaiming her soul “confirmed in grace.” Given a teaspoon of morphine syrup, she begged to be left alone during the night, but the prioress insisted that Céline and Marie keep watch, with Pauline in the adjoining room. They slept, while Thérèse remained awake, holding a glass of water so as not to have to ask for any.

“I no longer believe in death for me,” she said the following day, only hours from release. “I believe only in suffering.”

“You never seem to be tired of suffering,” Pauline had remarked a few days earlier. “Are you tired of it?”

“No! When I can’t take it anymore, I can’t take it, and that’s it!”

On September 30, for the first time in weeks, Thérèse sat up without assistance and called on the Virgin to come to her aid, imploring God to take pity on her.

“All of a sudden,” at five o’clock, her face changed and Pauline “understood it was her last agony.” The community assembled as they had the previous day, all twenty-four nuns crowding into the infirmary, welcomed with a smile from Thérèse. They watched and listened as a “terrible rattle tore her chest,” saw that her face was blue, her hands purple. It was at last, as Thérèse said it would be, the occasion of her arrival into her true life, and the work of her dying was like that of childbirth: her limbs shook, and she soaked her covers and mattress with sweat. The community watched for two hours until, at seven, Mother Marie dismissed them.

“Am I not going to die?” Thérèse begged when she found herself alone once more with her family, her sisters and her mother superior.

“Yes, my poor little one,” Mother Marie answered. “But God perhaps wills to prolong it.”

“All right, all right, I would not want to suffer for a shorter time.”

She looked at the crucifix in her hand. “Oh, I love Him,” she gasped. “My God I love you.”

Transported by ecstasy, her face went from its mottled dark hue to white, her eyes brilliant with peace and with joy. The prioress called all the community back to witness how “she made certain beautiful movements with her head, as though someone had divinely wounded her with an arrow of love, then had withdrawn the arrow to wound her again.” The arrival of the Heavenly Bridegroom, the paradoxically sexual and purifying Christ, like the father whose kisses ensured his daughters’ virginity, was described in detail in the notes Thérèse’s sisters took as they watched her die.

Pauline didn’t measure the minutes but said her ecstasy lasted “the space of a Credo,” as long, we are made to understand, as it might take Thérèse to recite the tenets of her faith, to reunite her with the long absent joy of faith.

At 7:20 on the evening of September 30, Thérèse Martin, age twenty-four years, died.

Outside the infirmary window, Pauline recorded in her notebook, the strand of silk that had held the dead leaf broke.

“After her death”—her consummation—“she had a heavenly smile. She was ravishingly beautiful…she didn’t seem any more than twelve or thirteen years old.”

Returned to a state of preadolescent innocence, that of a child bride, Thérèse’s body was washed and dressed in her Carmelite habit, her black veil crowned with a white bridal wreath, her paillasse and pillow strewn with lilies.

Céline set up her camera to record a last image of her sister. Eyes closed, head inclined to the right, Thérèse looks more beautiful in death than ever she had in life. Her features seem to have been refined rather than ravaged or coarsened by suffering; they genuinely convey the sort of beatific peace we imagine saints to possess.