Biography of Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart

Chapter 1: The Student Years

At Louis and Zélie Martin, it was little Marie who opened the series of nine births that would populate the home. On February 22, 1860, after a hot health alert, Mrs. Martin gave birth to a girl, baptized the same day in the church of Saint-Pierre de Montsort, and placed under the patronage of the Virgin. Radiant, the father declares to the priest who administers the sacrament: “This is the first time that you have seen me for a baptism, it will not be the last. Marie-Louise had grandfather Guérin and grandmother Martin as godfather and godmother.

The little one, whom her mother is happy to feed herself, is as robust as she is lovely. His awakening will be early. We follow him on the trail in the memories that she will write down as in Madame Martin's correspondence. At 3 months, she stands on her legs. At 4 years old, “she is already beginning to spell quite a bit”. She kneels, morning and evening, on the chest of drawers, in front of the Madonna, to sketch out her first prayers. She meditates with her father in front of the Virgin who dominates the garden of the Pavilion and who, soon, will come to preside over family life. This statue seems to her to be of unusual dimensions: "It's like at M. le Curé's," she remarks, with a pout that already betrays the reasoner of tomorrow. Placed at the school of Providence, she progresses, but does not appreciate the environment. She is more interested in the culinary preparations which signal the arrival of Uncle Guérin. The sketch drawn of her at the age of five, by her mother's pen, already sheds light on her entire destiny: "Marie is pretty, but too shy, that does her wrong, because she is not at all bad and is very afraid of offend God. She looks like my sister from Le Mans, who cried when she was very small when people talked to her about marriage. Mary would do the same. »

Already, she “threads pearls to her crown”: acts of virtue, acts of love, which she carefully counts. She would talk for a long time about this orange-peel saucer, a royal gift from her father: a masterpiece, she considered, and which she yielded without flinching to Pauline's desire, "to have the Cel (the Sky )”. But don't let the servant dare to tyrannically control her, as she usually does to her sisters. The answer bursts out immediately: “I am very free, me. Louise Marais avenges herself by calling him: "I am very free", which takes on the appearance of a definition.

Marie's gestures of independence are countless. At mass, he was invited to lower his head when the bell for elevation rang; she balks and stares at the Host, with a gaze full of tenderness. On the street, she refuses to greet passers-by, friends of the family: it seems to her a useless formality. “You will never be loved,” his mother told him. - "It doesn't matter, as long as you love me." »

Going to the church of Montsort one Easter day, the child passes close to a lime deposit surrounded by a pile of sand. She approaches, Louise stops her: “Careful, it's burning! That's all it takes for her to climb the embankment which gives way under her feet. She only has time to free herself, uttering desperate cries, but the spruce boots are completely eaten away.

At school, Marie goes out tooth and nail to defend Pauline, so sweet, so emotional, against the teasing of her companions. Her lack of suppleness earned her, in the refectory, the infamous punishment of a policeman's hat, but she promptly threw it away until it was firmly attached to her. One day, she leaves school, indignant, because, in rainy weather, they want to send her for a walk without a coat. We understand the appreciation given by the mother to Mrs. Guérin, on April 14, 1868: “Marie has a very special and determined character. She is the most beautiful, but I would like her to be more docile”. Note the following, which reveals a very human aspect of the paternal character: "When you write to me, don't talk to me about what I'm telling you about this child, who is moreover so gifted, my husband would not be happy, is his beloved. »

Is it on his occasion that one day arises, more lively than usual, a slight debate between spouses? Madame Martin had shown some displeasure. Left alone with her, Marie, surprised and pained, asks her: "Is that what is called making a bad household"? The mother reassured her with a laugh: “Don't be afraid, I love your father very much. In the evening, she transmitted to him the naive reflection, which cheered them up for a long time: "We just have to behave ourselves," they concluded. Children are sometimes terrible observers.

By the way, it was hard to find a softer heart than this little girl had for her parents. Literally, she adored them. They were everything to her. With absolute frankness, she revealed to them her slightest pranks. The mother plays wonderfully with this quivering sensitivity. She guides the evening exam. Didn't Mary commit such and such a fault? If it happens that, having answered in the negative, the little girl then remembers some wrongdoing, she descends all in tears: “My soul is stained; the good Lord is no longer in my heart. And his mother must put all her tenderness into calming this dread and bringing the incident back to its proper proportions.

This policy of mutual trust helps to liquidate the troubled situations of which so many young souls are victims. The little one having discovered to him certain remarks, certain suspicious attitudes of some classmates, Mme Martin gently forms his conscience, initiating him into the most delicate purity. She prepares her herself to receive the sacrament of penance. “She told me, Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart would later declare, this story which made my hair stand on end: “There was a child who dared not tell her sins, and when she came to confession, the priest saw coming out of his mouth the head of a big snake. Then, immediately, she disappeared. At last, one day, she had the courage to confess her faults, and the big snake came out entirely, and, following it, a multitude of little snakes, because, when the biggest one was chased away, the others swarmed away. go away on their own, as if by magic. I had remembered that and for nothing in the world would I have wanted to hide a sin. »

The lesson was well in the style of the times; the example in question lay in all the collections of sermons where preachers drew diagrams and clichés of retreats. Fortunately, Mrs. Martin had the art of softening, by dint of confidence, what such a teaching could entail of agonizing for a childish imagination. She made it clear that the poisonous reptile was the mortal sin, the accusation of which is obligatory to the point that voluntarily omitting it would render the confession invalid.

Marie believed in her mother. Through her words, she inhaled, she drank in the religious beliefs that nourished her soul for life. She also shared in maternal tears. It was she who transmitted to us the image of Mme Martin leaning, eighteen months away, over the coffin of her two little Josephs, placing a wreath of white roses on their foreheads and moaning in front of their corpses: "My God, do we have to put that in the ground? But, since you will, your will be done! »

At the start of the school year in October 1868, Mr. Martin entrusted his two eldest daughters, respectively aged 8 and a half and seven, to the boarding school attached to the Visitation of Le Mans. This will lighten the task of his wife and they will form there under the watchful eye of their aunt, Sister Marie-Dosithée. The latter, during a few conversations in the parlour, had taken over the eldest of her nieces an ascendancy made of admiration and tenderness. She had given him a picture of Jesus harvesting lilies. Sulpician composition embellished with a text of the same origin: “Blessed is the lily which remains spotless until harvest time; its whiteness will shine eternally in paradise”. The child fell in ecstasy before this mediocre engraving. On the back, she wrote: “Remembrance of my Mare tent, I will always keep it”. There was an influence to be exploited.

The monastery of Le Mans, erected in 1822, thanks to a group of Visitandines from Blois, replaced the one that the Revolution had destroyed. It had between fifty and sixty nuns and had Mother Thérèse de Gonzague de Freslon as Superior, who would be succeeded by Mother Marie de Chantal Fleuriot. The chaplain was Abbé Boulangé, a personal friend of Dom Guéranger, who liked to visit him and entrust the miraculous Virgin prayed in the chapel with his work of monastic restoration. The boarding school, which would be closed in 1878, never had more than fifty students. Among the mistresses, we must name Sister Marie Aloysia Vallée, who had remarkable affinities of soul with Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus, and whom the young Martin girls later liked to call Aunt Aloysia. Also noteworthy is Sister Marie-Colombe Cox, professor of drawing and natural history, who combined a high prayer with a devouring apostolic zeal and who mobilized the generosity and talents of her students in favor of a "work of the starters", created for the benefit of fifty-four missionaries, including a dozen bishops. The little girls who embarked at Alençon at the beginning of October 1868 therefore did not risk withering away in a hothouse, despite the cramped conditions and the small number of their classmates.

Traveling has charm when you're young, but leaving home is a painfully felt sacrifice. The heartbreak is no less acute for the parents. When it was time to say goodbye, Marie burst into tears. She pulls herself together and observes, not without finesse, the convent and the students, many of whom belong to the aristocratic milieu. Awakened very early to the sense of equality, she is surprised to see pianos in a cloister, for her signs of opulence. At the table, she had to eat everything, "even fat", which made her heart ache. And then there are these grids, symbols of caged life. What a test for his taste for independence!

It must be believed, with the help of Pauline's friendship and the affection of her aunt, that the little girl was able to overcome her repugnance, for, on November 29, 1868, Sister Marie Dosithée showed her "very accustomed and filled with good will", still than "difficult", and of an "originality of nature which requires a great deal of care". She will soon be received into the group of “Children of Jesus”. She has energy to spare. Driven to the dentist, when invited to offer her sufferings for the soul of her recently deceased godfather, she stoically undergoes several extractions. The practitioner will admit to having never met, at this age, such a resolute patient. She was ready to face the dreaded davit again. When any further intervention was ruled out, she expressed regret: “It's a pity! This poor grandpa would no longer have been in purgatory. »

It is for his aunt that he must soon pray. Marie-Louise Guérin, more commonly known as Elise, suffered in her mediocre health the repercussions of the excessive penances accomplished in her youth and the consequences of a tuberculosis from which she had recovered as if by a miracle. It had taken prodigies of courage to force the door of the cloister. The soul taming the body, she had assumed the Rule in its entirety. Dom Guéranger appreciated her as an exemplary nun. The year 1868 saw the reappearance of pulmonary accidents, which increasingly worried those around them.

Despairing of his recovery, they wanted to spare him one last consolation: that of attending his niece's first communion. The ceremony would be anticipated by two years. The chaplain vouched for both the religious knowledge and the good dispositions of Marie, who shone both by the certainty of her answers and by the intelligence of her questions, leaving her older companions far behind her. “I was not content to learn the catechism well, we read in the autobiography; I did a lot of things so that baby Jesus would be very happy in my heart, that he would be well received there, because I thought in the depths of my soul that he had made everyone believe that my aunt was going to die, precisely because he was in a hurry to give himself to me, and this thought filled me with joy. Therese could not have said it better.

Marie takes in hand the cause of the healing of Sister Marie-Dosithée. She is sure of her business. To the nurse who declared, in accordance with the doctrine of Saint Francis de Sales, that one must above all want the will of God, she replied almost indignantly: "But, my sister, if I did like that, I would not be able to to nothing ! I do not speak to the good Lord about his will; I try to change his will”. How to respond to this childish logic? It will infallibly triumph, stemming from the faith that moves mountains.

Our boarder has taken Saint Joseph, his favourite, as his advocate. In the garden, at a place called "the little sheepfold", there was a statue of the Patriarch, in a niche surrounded by jasmine. Marie suffered from seeing her lonely and abandoned. She picked up flowers, threaded them into wreaths and offered them to her intercessor. All recess was spent there. Authority had to remind the child that collective play also had its priority moments.

As the news became more alarming, Mary stared at Saint Joseph with a reproachful and pleading gaze. “And when I had looked at him like that, either to scold him or to thank him, she wrote, I went away completely reassured and convinced that my aunt would recover. God could not resist it. Sister Marie-Dosithée will be able to attend her niece's first communion; his condition will gradually improve.

In this climate of anxiety, the preparation for the big day continued. Mrs. Martin's letters encouraged her daughter's efforts from afar. She kept them like a jewel. She showed them mysteriously to her mistresses, who admired this mother's educational gifts and the depth of her inner life.

In his preparation for the first communion, there are shadows on the board. The effort of introspection to achieve total purity is not without danger for a nervous and hyperemotive temperament. Marie goes through a crisis of scruples, which leads her to confide to her mistress the most extravagant thoughts and the least founded fears. The theme of hunting snakes, which she has retained too well, makes her see imaginary ones, which pursue her everywhere. The wisdom of the confessor, who authoritatively stops the flow of confessions and the fever of examinations, the obedience of the penitent, who bows without understanding, exorcise the bad spell. There will remain only rare sequels to which Sr. Marie-Dosithée will allude, four years later, inviting us to remove the obsession, avoiding talking too much to the child about his soul and what defiles it. For God's purposes, it was good that Mary experienced this inner torture. One day it will earn him the power to help Thérèse to overcome a similar infirmity.

The ceremonies of July 2, 1869 took place in the outdoor chapel, where the parents had access. There was a whole gathering of famous names and distinguished toilets. However, for Marie, Mr. and Mrs. Martin eclipsed all the stars of high society: “Dad was indeed very handsome and of rare natural distinction. Mama had on a very simple black silk dress, but her noble and dignified air seems to me to have an unequaled brilliance. Oh! How privileged I felt to be their child! »

During the ceremony, it fell to Mary, as she had secretly desired, to recite the act of faith. Then she made her First Communion and, according to her expression, collected herself as best she could “like a child”. The little girls in white then returned to the inner cloister; the festive meal was taken on a table over which ran garlands of jasmine. The party ended in private, not without Marie having shed a few tears at the end of what was "the best day of her life".

"The next day," she writes, "we were returned to our parents. Ah! this morrow, how melancholy it was for me! So I had reunited with mum and dad, I who suffered so much from being separated from them! With them it seemed to me that I was in Heaven, but this Heaven must have been very short, since, that very evening, they were to leave us. So my happiness was far from complete. We took a walk in the countryside. Soon I saw myself in a field of large daisies and blueberries. But to pick them, you had to leave the hand of my darling father. I preferred to stay close to him. I was looking at him, I was looking at Mum... There were depths of love and tenderness for them in my little 9-year-old heart. »

The joy of the parents was no less lively. “If you only knew,” writes Madame Martin of her daughter, “how well disposed she was; she looked like a little saint. The Chaplain told me that he was very satisfied with her, he awarded her the first prize for catechism. I spent the two best days of my life at Le Mans, I have rarely felt so much happiness. My sister felt better. Marie told me that she had prayed so much for her aunt that she was sure that the good Lord would answer her.

Indeed, the Visitandine will soon be recovering. Later, close to death, she will be able to say to her niece: “It is to you that I owe seven years of life”. As for Mary, she will show her gratitude to Saint Joseph by adopting the name Josephine for confirmation.

A so-called “second communion” notebook, which refers either to the discharge in July or to the return to school in October 1869, analyzes five instructions and three conferences given by Fr. Mathieu. Summary of child, but clear, applied, retaining the essence. Much more remarkable is the presentation of the retreat preached in June 1872 by a Capuchin, Fr. Benoît-Joseph. Sin, suffering, death, confession, the vanity of the world, constitute the major subjects. A classic arsenal of great truths at the time, which strongly impressed the young listener and seemed to have rekindled a brief outbreak of scruples in her.

The perspective of the first communion once vanished, which had kept the child in suspense and lightened the sacrifice of exile, the nostalgia for the paternal home becomes haunting. Marie sighs when the ringing of bells evokes those of Alençon. She envies the birds who can find their nests, and even the ragpickers who, with their baskets full, return to their homes. “It would be impossible for me, she confessed one day, to say how much I suffered from being separated from my parents, it is in vain that I would try to explain this martyrdom. Ah! if I hadn't had my aunt whom I didn't want to hurt, I would never have stayed seven years behind bars..."

The holidays, eight days on January 1, fifteen at Easter, six to eight weeks at the end of the school year, are eagerly awaited. In a scene of imitative harmony, Marie mines in advance for Pauline her youngest the joyful episodes of this return to the land of Plenty: the arrival of the mother in the visiting room, the bell of the tower which alerts the mistress, the long kisses reunions, then the panting of the locomotive moving off, the call of the stations, the beloved landscape that one watches from the door, the stop at Alençon station, the whole family rushing to welcome the travelers .^. Impossible to translate this intoxication. But the joys have only one time; you have to arm yourself with books and satchels again. The little girl, misty-eyed, says goodbye to her father: she is not yet installed in the train that there she is transformed into a weeping Madeleine.

Mrs. Martin's letters put balm on the wound. They have an exquisite charm. The events of the home unfold there like a film with multiple episodes. The child's replies, all dripping with tenderness, are full of those effusions in which a belated romanticism delights. They recount with great frankness misbehavior such as academic success. These are the brightest. Quite regularly, each term, Marie is awarded the Cross of Excellence, inclusion on the Honor Roll, and one or other of the "decorations", as they are called: ribbons of different colors, depending on the materials, and which is worn over the shoulder on Sundays at offices. “I was doing well in my studies, notes our boarder. One year I won nine prizes. It was beautiful for the Visitation where only absolutely deserved rewards were given. But it cost me so much to go and get them that my pleasure was halved, because I had to go through the whole noble assembly of nuns, gathered for this feast in their great recreation hall, "the Chamber", and I was very intimidated”, One day when giving him the ribbon, the first mistress whispered in his ear: “By indulgence”, this girl with a proud soul refused to wear it. 'I don't want to adorn myself,' she protested, 'with what I haven't quite deserved. »

Better than in official tributes, the quality of work translates into lasting results. Marie has an easy style, easy composition, irreproachable spelling, legible writing without being beautiful, correct punctuation, except for the point and comma totally ignored, varied and well assimilated knowledge, in short the bases of a limited but strong culture.

Was the conduct up to par? There were many negligence and mood swings, but redeemed by the promptness of the confession. “It was a need for me to accuse myself, then I had peace of mind. Sister Marie-Dosithée entirely subscribes to her niece's appreciation. It was February 12, 1872. The little girl was then 12 years old: “How I love her, Marie! What a good child! What candor! What honesty and sincerity! It's lovely. Almost every day, I see her running after me and accusing herself of her failings, and without being asked, of course. Adolescence, in this nature hostile to conformism, brings about sallies and quips which will not always be to the taste of the excellent nun. The little girl is rebuffed when she entrusts one of

his strange thoughts. “I find that there are many repetitions of words in the Gospel; our mistress of style, however, teaches us to avoid them. » Or when she had the absurd idea of ​​reciting the Pater backwards, « to see the devil », according to the process suggested by one of her companions. Obviously, she saw nothing and was not sorry, having taken certain pious guarantees to ward off the cunning of the evil one.

A certain altar of Our Lady of Seven Sorrows had a way of displeasing this overly critical schoolgirl. The Virgin looked so pitiful! The artificial flowers looked so seedy! And he and his aunt had to dust off all those poor things that the Visitandine said were "splendid." Our moderns, it must be said, would side with the judgment of the child. She was trying to express her bad mood. She had this stroke of genius: "It's not for the saints, it's for us that they put flowers at their altar." You see, my aunt, we turn them on our side, and the Virgin only has the wires”. This time, Sister Marie-Dosithée was humorous: "Why not put your dress inside out, so that the beautiful side is turned towards you"?

To tell the truth, the toilet hardly interested our boarder. Still passes for the uniform, but the fancy clothes that we wore on vacation horrified her, and above all "the little veils of white tulle" which only serve to "look pretty". At Léonie's first communion, her face will turn crimson in anger, and she will have to be freed from what she calls a “fashionable mask”. We will also give up dressing him in white for the procession on August 15. Showing off in a fashion show seemed to him an indecorous thing.

His remarks disconcerted by an unexpected je ne sais quoi where candor was sometimes accompanied by depth. They praised Pauline and her precocious charms in front of her. “But there are many others who are just as nice,” she exclaims immediately. We are astonished, we believe her jealous, we correct her. "Yet," she said, "I thought we should brush aside the compliments we were showered with." Being one with her sister, she thought it polite to return the praise.

The intention is not always so straight, and educators know how to spot it. Marie will recount the lesson in humility given to her by Mr. Martin, during a walk in the meadows of a modest estate called “Roulee”. Having put together a pretty bouquet, she said to her father: “I am going to take it to the Visitation, in memory of Roulée”. - "That's it... and then you'll make trouble with your friends, by showing them flowers from your property." The blush came to the child's forehead, and the bouquet was immediately thrown into the grass, as a punishment for vanity or, what is more likely, out of spite at seeing it uncovered.

Basically, nothing serious in all that. In July 1872, Mme Martin was able to write to her brother: “I am very happy with Marie, who is really my consolation, she has tastes that are not at all worldly, she is even too wild, too shy. If this does not change, she will never marry, for she has very opposite inclinations. »

It was in the family home, installed since July 1871, rue Saint-Blaise, that the eldest daughter blossomed to the full, leaning over the cradles, attentive to the first steps and the studious attempts of the youngest. Very intuitive, hadn't she, at the age of 10, during a visit to Mélanie-Thérèse, placed as a nurse, guessed that the little one was insufficiently nourished and literally hungry? She alerted her mother, but it was too late. The child, brought home, would soon die. More cruel still had been for Marie the death of Hélène, her goddaughter. When she heard the news, in boarding school, she let out a cry of pain. This mourning will earn her, on January 4, 1873, to be the godmother of Thérèse. So she will surround him with a restless affection. She trembles before her difficult beginnings. The joy of her holidays is to go and see her in Semallé, at the "little Rose", where the fresh milk and black bread have more flavor than all the dishes from Alencon. We will find all these memories, idealized by the alchemy of memory, in the story that the Carmelite wrote in 1909.

She herself will soon hit the headlines. On April 3, 1873, she had to be put in the infirmary of the boarding school for a tenacious fever which raised fears of typhoid. On the 5th, she was brought back to rue Saint-Blaise where her mother put her in her own room. “I was delirious, she writes, and my head was like an enormous weight that I could not move. One day I heard the doctor say to Mama: "This child must have taken some pain, because it is more like a bilious fever than a typhoid fever." It is grief that is the cause of this disease. I said to myself quietly: "That's very true, that." And I was almost glad that there was proof of my bitter sorrows. Mom took care of me, during this illness, as a single mother can. She spent hours by my bed distracting me, listening to me, despite all the work with which she was overwhelmed. It was then that I had the time to open my whole heart to her and that she understood all that I had suffered away from her. »

The maternal correspondence confirms these confidences: “She is a child of extraordinary tenderness of heart. She still couldn't get used to boarding school, she couldn't bear the deprivation of not seeing us, she told me things about it that break my heart. The situation is getting worse. The nights are crossed by delirium where the sick person thinks she is Tharcisius carrying the Host to the prisoners. You have to keep watch over it. The father, sorry, does not leave his bedside. Pauline has to spend the Easter holidays in Le Mans. Mrs. Martin is torn between the demands of the job and those of her daughter who only wants her as a nurse. After a period of paroxysm, the evil stabilizes for several weeks, the weakness becomes worrying, the thermal curve remains in the dangerous zone.

To snatch from Heaven the healing of the favorite child, the one he calls his "big one" or even "the diamond", "the gypsy", the dad makes the pilgrimage on foot and on an empty stomach to the Butte de Chaumont where a thaumaturge comes to the aid of the feverish. He wins. Health reports are getting optimistic. Strange cravings mark in the patient a return of vitality. You have to resist his whims, and the papa shows some weakness there. May 22 sees the first outing for the Ascension Mass. The forces return at a gallop.

However, it was not until October that the convalescent returned to Le Mans. Out of respect for her aunt, and doing violence to her heart, she had declined the mother's offer to complete her school cycle in Alençon. In truth, she could find no pension comparable to the Visitation.

The delay in studies was cheerfully caught up, if we judge by the eighteen nominations and the nine prizes which will sanction this new stage. And yet, a sudden preoccupation could have compromised this effort. Among the new pupils was a certain Edith, of an aristocratic family, shrewd, distinguished, with an angelic air, with whom Marie fell madly in love. Its beautiful simplicity almost fell into it. "I would have liked," she said, "to be a noble too, to have a castle and a park like her, to walk in the evening dreaming under enchanting groves, to know the world whose vanity I nevertheless understood. In the grip of this passion, she comes to regret that her mother does not have blue blood in her veins. She is flattered to hear a great lady refer to her as her daughter's friend. Alas! Edith will soon be withdrawn from boarding school by her parents who fear a religious vocation for her.

The prospect of separation is sorely felt. At the end-of-year retreat, at the same time as she says her joy at being received as a child of Mary on July 2, our heroine admits the crises of melancholy that shake her. She has painful accents. She moans about "the most legitimate affections shattered". Fortunately, there is hope of seeing each other again in Heaven! In the meantime, we write to each other, and to give her letters a more witty turn, the young girl studies Madame de Sévigné's correspondence. This is the case for repeating: "I'll give it to you in a hundred... I'll give it to you in a thousand!..." She, the savage, has herself photographed, to send Edith an imperishable memory. In this atmosphere, coquetry scores points. The aunt is moved by it, who removes the lace collar and wants the neck cleared. "In the manner of the guillotines", moaned this poor Marie, who was also banned by the austere Visitandine from certain outings deemed too social.

Maternal advice wisely curbs this eruption of sensitivity. The innocent idyll will slowly fade away. Eleven years later, before entering the Carmel, Marie will find the friend of yesteryear engaged in the bonds of marriage. She will be the first to smile at her youthful fervor. “My dreams of grandeur and nobility were exceeded. »

The 1874-1875 school year was uneventful. It was to be the last. So the final retreat, from June 8 to 10, took on the appearance of a vigil before the final return home. The preacher centers her on the total gift to Jesus, which cannot fail to reopen the inner conflict between nature and grace. “I was created for infinity, and nothing mortal can satisfy my heart. Earthly affections could neither fill him nor satisfy the need he constantly feels, the need to love an infinite being..." The image of Edith hovers over the debate: "It is in vain that I seek happiness in things here below. An inner voice tells me that he is only in heaven. »

As she advances in life (she is not yet 16), the teenager realizes that a friendship that is too natural cools her love for God. From there, accesses of disenchantment, colored by the thought of Eternity, dear to the Martins. “Often time seems very long to me, life seems sad to me... the future worries me! Then the desire to die came over me. I have been told so many times that the earth is only a vale of tears. “Will our little romantic succumb to the “evil of the century”? No, his faith is good metal. The summaries, as precise as they are elegant, that she makes of the instructions show her anxious to track down and repress her faults. After recapitulating these seven years of grace, she takes very concrete resolutions to victoriously fight the fight for charity. She also worked out in detail the regulations she intended to impose on Alençon and the directives she would follow in the education of her sisters. The star dreamer keeps her feet firmly planted on the ground.

Sister Marie-Dosithée described her as "a tall, beautiful, well-made young lady... a very good girl", whom she only wanted "more pious". Marie, who collected six first prizes, left the Visitation on August 2, 1875. She shed tears, but in the manner of Gargantua, mixing the joy of being born in freedom with the tears that were widespread over expired studies. She took with her from the boarding school a solid background of secular knowledge and a first-rate religious formation. She had also penetrated, without perhaps realizing it, the essential elements of the spirituality of Saint Francis de Sales: worship of humility, trust in God, conformity and abandonment to his will. Through the vicissitudes of existence, these saving principles will always float. The most shrewd of her mistresses, despite the silence of their pupil on such a subject, had discerned in her a certain germ of vocation.

Chapter 2: The Learning of Life

For two years, Marie will learn, at her mother's school, her role as educator and mistress of the house. The conditions were ideal. Canon Dumaine, former vicar of Notre-Dame d'Alençon, bears witness to this: “The union was remarkable in this family, either between the spouses, or between the parents and the children. Charm, strength and evangelical virtues were harmoniously combined in Mrs. Martin. “What a holy soul! her eldest will write of her. We don't see any like that now. She had a dignity with such great simplicity. I can still hear him reciting such profound tirades, like this one, with a celestial air: “Oh! speak to me of the mysteries of this world that my desires anticipate, within which my soul, tired of the shadows of the earth, aspires to plunge. Tell me of the One who made it and filled it with Himself. He alone can also fill the immense void he has dug in me”. Oh ! how true it was not made for the earth”! - "If you had seen her during Lent!"

It was a pity. She took nothing at all in the morning and almost nothing at night. So she couldn't take it any longer, and I remember that she said: "What Lent is costing me!" »

His piety had two poles: the church of the daily mass, the image of the Virgin, center of the liturgy of the hearth. Marie, who kept this statue in the room she occupied with Pauline, found it too cumbersome: “It is made for a school, for a very large room”. The answer had made him reflect: “As long as I live, this Madonna will remain there. When I'm dead, you can do what you want. It fell to the young girl to surround the Mother of God with lights and baskets of flowers, to set up for her, on her feast days, a whole chapel: "My month of Mary, she will say, is so pretty that he competes with that of Notre-Dame. It is quite a business to arrange the month of Mary at home; mom is too difficult, more difficult than the Blessed Virgin. He needs white thorns that go up to the ceiling, walls lined with greenery, etc. »

Despite her extreme liveliness, Mrs. Martin is unfailingly patient for her daughter. She had appreciated the way Sister Marie-Dosithée had captured her niece's heart. “With her whole character,” she said of Marie, “she needed a lot of gentleness; it was the means of softening it. She will use the same method. She initiates him to the secrets of lace. “In the afternoon, reports the young apprentice, I worked with mum. When she saw that I spoke without moving my needle, she told me that I had to work while speaking. On the other hand, she was indulgent to blunders and faulty workmanship where negligence did not enter. His eldest is moved. Having started a piece by unsewing it from the armor, she sees her mother aghast. “The lace is cut. What am I going to become ? I have three hours to fix it. » - « She didn't scold me, adds Marie. She went back to work without looking up. Oh ! what she suffered! My uncle often told us that he had never seen such a courageous woman who went through so much trouble. The maternal judgment remained most benevolent: “My dear Marie has pity on me and comforts me as much as she can; she avoids asking me anything for fear of adding to my worries. I assure you that she is completely devoted and I am completely satisfied with that”.

It is above all by taking charge of the education of the youngest that our heroine relieves her mother. Léonie, very late, following private lessons in town, she helps him as best she can. A thankless task, but how useful! She takes care entirely of Céline, whose progress is more consoling. She could not resist the pleas of Thérèse, who, less out of love for science than in order not to remain idle, wanted to take part in the lessons. On the eve of leaving the Visitation, Marie had written down rules for the education of her sisters, which constitute a little vade-mecum on the subject. She has planned everything: exercises and timetable, methods and spirit, profane aspect and moral and spiritual concerns. His pedagogy will be concrete, supported by examples. She will unite firmness and kindness, in complete disinterestedness. When the time comes, she applies these principles with an enthusiasm and rigor whose severity Mrs. Martin, who is more experienced, tempers, especially when the educator, still a novice, becomes exasperated by Léonie's pranks.

Goodwill is touching. “I took great care of my little sisters, she wrote, I spent all my mornings teaching Céline. I put an unparalleled application into it... if I had had twenty students I wouldn't have taken more trouble. Let's see her in action in the charming picture she drew for a companion on October 26, 1875: "The hour is coming when I will have to take care of Céline, because it is I who am in charge of instructing him... for a short time only. She is still too young and too delicate to go to boarding school, and I assure you that I am very happy and very proud of my mission. She can already read and write fairly well. Now she is learning a little catechism and sacred history; it amuses me a lot to show her, it's a real distraction for me when she's not mean. But, too often, Thérèse comes to disturb our serious studies by her presence. at hand, then runs away like a little thief. When she comes back, it's to tease her sister by repeating in a little mocking voice each of the words that poor Céline learns with so much difficulty. Finally, it is a pretty elf that our baby. This little droll Thérèse is nice, clever, and cute all at the same time.

There was more awkwardness than malice in this inkwell knocked over by a baby who was not yet 3 years old. Mary knows it well. She recounts with the same enthusiasm the wonder of the child in front of the Christmas shoe. She describes all the surprises: bags of candy, tiny sugar clogs, little Jesus cookies. “What seemed the most comical was to see a beautiful doll coming out of one of these boots and patiently waiting for the arrival of the mothers. This is also what gave Thérèse the most pleasure, and when she saw the famous doll, she threw everything aside to fly towards her. Unfortunately, her transports of joy do not last long, and now that she knows her charming daughter, she begins to abandon her. Today, annoyed to see that she wasn't walking fast enough, she broke the tips of her two feet, one arm is already dislocated, and soon, I think, it will be the end of this poor doll. But I'm wrong, when she's completely dead, she'll have her funeral, and really burying a doll is a lot of fun. Thérèse has already had this experience more than once. »

The one that Mr. Martin called "the little queen" had completely won the heart of his eldest, who discovered in her "an intelligence beyond her age". However, Marie does not spoil her. When the little girl, seated on her swing, replies to Mr. Martin inviting him to come and kiss her: "Don't worry, dad", it is Marie who calls her to order, provoking a scene of tears and asking to pardon. Similarly, when the toddler hides under her blankets and pretends to be asleep as her mother approaches, it is the eldest, always shrewd, who fans the game. We know what happens next and how Thérèse, seized with remorse, came down the stairs, embarrassed in her nightgown, to implore his mercy. She instructs Marie to report her minor misdeeds to her father, in particular the corner of the tapestry that she tore up. So great is the prestige of the eldest that she is moved to see the mother picking to give her two of the roses from the garden which her sister had forbidden her to touch: "... she no longer dared appear at home, says Mrs. Martin. It was no use telling her that the roses were mine, "but no, she said, it's Marie's."

The young girl marvels at such candor: "When she has said one word too much or has done something stupid, she notices it right away and, to make up for it, she has recourse to her tears. ; then she asks for endless pardons. No matter how much we tell her that we forgive her, she cries all the same. How innocent little children are! It doesn't surprise me that the good Lord prefers them to grown-ups, they are much more amiable. »

The Teresian autobiography offers a most convincing document on this chapter. “I loved my dear godmother very much. Without seeming to, I paid great attention to everything that was being done or said around me, it seems to me that I was judging things like now. I listened very carefully to what Marie taught Céline in order to do as she did; after she left the Visitation, to obtain the favor of being admitted to her room during the lessons she was giving Celine, I was very good and I did whatever she wanted; so she showered me with gifts which, despite their little value, gave me great pleasure. » Ms. A, 4 v°.

Marie writes for her part: “When Thérèse who was only 3 years old wanted to follow Céline, I made some difficulties, fearing that this baby would disturb our studies. But she was so wise, so cute that I couldn't refuse her. So she came to settle in my room with Celine and didn't move all the time the lesson lasted. I gave her beads to thread or some cloth to sew. As long as she was with Celine, she was happy. Sometimes her needle unthreaded and she tried in vain to rethread it, it was far too small for such a difficult operation! but she dared not ask anything for fear that another time the door would not be opened to her. Then big tears fell on her cheeks, but she didn't look up, afraid that I would notice. I noticed it, however, and I rethreaded the needle, then an angelic smile lit up her sweet face. What a cherub! No, I cannot say how much I loved my little Thérèse.

"One day, I found her at the door of my room, she had moved up the time of the lesson, I pretended not to be able to open the door, so to show her deep sorrow, she lay down on the floor to my great astonishment , without saying a single word, without crying out. Two or three times in such circumstances, she resorted to this great means to express her pain, I told her that it hurt little Jesus, and she never did it again. »

The hour struck very quickly when the youngest became in turn a pupil, and one of the most diligent. She was 3 years and 2 months old when her mother wrote about her: "She begged Marie to teach her, and, in two or three times, she made such progress that she would soon be able to read, if they told her. gave a lesson every day. » « She brings happiness to Marie and her glory, reports the mother again: it is incredible how proud she is of it. »

This rapture experienced in front of Thérèse's childhood can be perceived in the multiple appreciations that Marie gives of her goddaughter in her letters and in her memories, as well as in the depositions at the two trials for the Thérèse cause.

“She already had a great sway over her. » - « At 4 years old, she began to count her little acts of virtue and her sacrifices, on a sort of rosary made expressly for the occasion. She called it “practices”.

“Thérèse seemed to me, from her earliest childhood, as if she had been sanctified from her mother's womb, or else like an angel that God had sent to earth in a mortal body. What she calls her imperfections or faults were not; I have never seen him make the slightest mistake. True as it is in the balance of casuists, perhaps the praise is too absolute; this anticipated canonization hardly seems to take account of human nature. A parallel text introduces happy nuances: "It was not necessary to scold her when she was in default: it was enough to tell her that it was not good or that it hurt God: she did not never did it again... Her practices were to give in to her sisters in many circumstances. She made great efforts on herself for this, because her character was then very fixed. »

Marie did not see such virtue shine in children of the same age, so she was proud of her Thérèse. She, so disdainful of dress for herself, had not enough coquetry for her young disciples. There was nothing too good for them. Luckily Madame Martin knew how to be right and did not intend to make her daughters "the slaves of fashion."

As for Marie herself, she was already a personality. A pretty girl, with well-defined features, with a pleasing countenance, and, beneath the strong brow bones, a deep gaze slightly tinged with melancholy, she was of good size and well made in all respects. With that, intelligent and shrewd, less imaginative than Pauline, but endowed with an excellent memory and, like her father and Thérèse, with that gift of imitating sounds and miming gestures, which is so successful in games of Company.

His character was full of contrasts. The regulation adopted by her, and which takes up six very dense pages, irresistibly evokes the asceticism dear to consecrated souls: getting up very early, orientation of the intention, daily mass, two brief prayers, spiritual reading, visit to the Blessed Sacrament, examination of conscience, rosary, fortnightly confession, communion as much as permitted, not to mention everything that regulates fidelity to work, simplicity of toilet, times of silence, kindness towards all, especially towards the servant Louise.

In reality, it will have to be reduced. Mrs. Martin herself will impose a later mass, while the multiple occupations will somewhat erode the mass of the exercises. Enough will remain to constitute a serious program of piety. And yet the mother will sometimes complain that her eldest is not fervent enough. It's that Marie has nothing to do with “the model little girl”. His interior life is indisputable; she takes care to feed it. With what passion does she reconstitute, Bible in hand, the itineraries of Jesus! But it would be repugnant to her to pass for a devotee. She does not hesitate to mock "the sermons of holiness" of her aunt. She is not afraid to scratch priests and “good sisters” who show unction or stiff attitudes. Above all, she abhors self-righteousness. Rather than playing at zeal or virtue, she will willingly display a certain indifference; and this will deceive those around him about his true feelings. She will later recount the violence she had to do to herself in a very busy street in Alençon, to salute the Blessed Sacrament that was being brought to a sick person. She did not run away, however, and knelt down bravely.

With regard to religious consecration, it seems that one can discern in it a secret attraction masked by a lively repulsion on the surface. Sister Marie-Dosithée having advised her to recite the petition to "Saint Joseph, father and protector of virgins" every day, she smells a vocation trap: it is written on the sheet: "Special prayer for priests and nuns". . The formula is immediately rejected. "Everything in the cloister displeases me," she said to her mother; first I want to be free. And yet, when Mrs. Martin utters a word about marriage, she reacts sobbingly and asks that the subject never be brought up again. "But I didn't tell him the bottom of my thoughts," she confided later. The question of marriage humiliated me greatly; I found young girls much to be pitied for being delivered into slavery in this way. And I didn't want to sell my noble freedom to a mortal. »

From then on, it was no longer a question of taking care of “the sign”, as Saint Francis de Sales would have said. She wants the simplest bet. Her mother was surprised: “Marie is a bit wild and too shy; she has particular ideas. One day when she was wearing a toilet, didn't she go crying in the garden, saying that they were dressing her like a young girl they want to marry at all costs, and that we would certainly be because she would be requested! Just this thought put her beside herself, because for the moment, she would rather have her neck cut! Lately Louise was saying that a lady in the neighborhood knew a young man whom Miss Martin would do well. Marie heard this, she burst into tears, no one could console her. Judge a little if there is his equal. I do believe that she will never marry; yet she does not seem to have a religious vocation, and yet she is not a nature to remain alone”.

The young girl takes a dislike to the piece of jewelry that is all the rage at the time, a gold medallion threaded into a velvet ribbon tied around her neck. “When I wore that, she said, I thought I looked like a little lap dog. What agony, the day when he had to collect money for I don't know what charity festival in the Church of Notre-Dame! She was advancing, flushed with confusion, her expression stern, holding out the basket with an awkward, mechanical gesture. “How unlovable you seemed, my poor Marie! his mother will tell him. - "I don't want to try to please" she replied curtly, as if she were trying to justify the nickname "gypsy" that Mr. Martin liked to give her.

No romance on the horizon; but the romantic survives through the prestigious vision of Edith, which continues to occupy thought. And the imagination, riding in her footsteps, walks in fairytale settings, Madame Martin writes to Pauline who is continuing her studies at Le Mans: "Here is Marie who dreams of going to live in a beautiful house, rue de la Demi-Lune , opposite the Poor Clares; she talked about it all last night; it looked like heaven was there! Unfortunately his wishes cannot be realized: we must stay where we are, not all his life; but as for me, I will not quit until my death. Your sister, though so unworldly, never feels well where she is; she has better ambitions, she needs beautiful, spacious and well-furnished apartments... When she has something else, the emptiness will perhaps make itself felt even more1...»

Fortunately, Marie is loyalty incarnate and she shows absolute confidence in her mother. This guides him wisely. She dismissed him from the too brilliant evenings which turned his head: "It gives unhealthy ideas." On the contrary, she encourages him to frequent a circle of young girls of the same condition. Too bad for the Visitandine who is worried about it! “So you have to shut yourself up in a cloister? We cannot, in the world, live like wolves. In everything that “the Holy Daughter” tells us, there is a take-it-and-leave-it. First of all, I'm not sorry that Marie finds a little distraction, it makes her less wild, she already is so much. »

These remarks, which assert a beautiful independence of spirit and an exquisite sense of balance, prove that deep down, the mother appreciates her big daughter and, under the rough bark, discovers the richness of the sap. “I am always very satisfied with Marie; she will be an excellent girl if she continues; she takes a lot on herself and there is great progress since the visit she made to her aunt; with this she becomes very pious. » - « I am very happy with Marie; she has ideas that please me, it's the opposite of Léonie: the things of this world do not penetrate so far into her mind as the spiritual; however, it still has a long way to go to enter fully into the true path of perfection. But the balance tilts heavily in this direction. »

The key to the mystery, the young girl perhaps reveals in this confidence: "Mom, I assure you that I love the good Lord very much, much more than you think... Me, I prefer to hide my feelings . She could hide neither her perfect uprightness, nor her flawless purity, nor the essential kindness that overflowed with teasing and quips. So Mrs. Martin showed herself to be more and more optimistic about him.

When the opportunity presented itself for a retreat at the Visitation of Le Mans, she sent her daughter there, very happy to return to the boarding school. From June 28 to July 2, 1876, Marie will follow the instructions of a Jesuit, Father Crasset. Its notes express the feeling of emptiness with regard to everything earthly and the attraction of the eternal. She analyzes herself severely: “I cannot bear the slightest observation without being upset to the bottom of my soul. What annoys me the most is when people take me back for my sad or indifferent looks, for my rude answers, or when Mom urges me to be more pious, when she lectures me.. . Oh ! How boring I am and how I make it appear!... I don't like to appear devout...”

She has some very modern aspects, our Mary. So she bears with difficulty the advice of Sister Marie-Dosithée, urging her to consult the Father Predicator on the problem of her vocation. For the sake of conscience, she broaches the subject, but to evade it, or better, to liquidate it definitively. Returning to Alençon, she wrote to Mme Guérin of her joy at having seen again the framework of her studious years. “But, she specifies, I must not make you believe that I want to be a nun, because that is not at all my intention. Locking yourself up forever in a cloister must be a little sad, but locking yourself up there only for a few days is quite joyous. Her mother observes the changes wrought in her daughter and divines the divine call against which, without her knowing it, this fierce nature rears. Pauline having confided to him her desire to take the veil, this admirable mother accepts in advance, albeit with a shudder, the prospect of offering God a double sacrifice.

It is to her own immolation that she will first have to consent. Notice was abruptly given to her on that day in mid-December 1876 when a doctor from Alencon revealed to her that the gland in her breast that she had been carrying for eleven years and which had suddenly become inflamed was of a cancerous nature, without can consider neither operation nor effective treatment. The valiant woman bears this death warrant without hesitation. Her first reaction is to think of those of the girls who most need maternal support: Léonie whose closed temperament and touchy mood cause her so many worries, Céline and Thérèse who are respectively 7 and 4 years old. Her hopes are pinned on her eldest: “Now Marie is grown up, she has a very serious character and has none of the illusions of youth. I'm sure that when I'm gone, she will be a good hostess and do all she can to raise her little sisters well and set a good example for them. Pauline is also charming, but Marie has more experience; besides, she has a lot of ascendancy over her little sisters.

At home, it's desolation. Mr. Martin hands over his fishing gear. Marie barricades herself more and more in the intimacy of rue Saint-Blaise, forbidding herself even the evenings of the Catholic circle, more than ever eager to lighten the burden, which her mother intends to assume until the end, of household chores. , educational and professional.

Trials come in series. The news from Le Mans is alarming. Sister Marie-Dosithée is coming to an end. Mrs. Martin, who hides her own state from her, pays her a final visit, where she begs her in particular to take pity, from beyond the grave, on Léonie's soul. The “holy daughter” will expire on February 24, 1877, in a serenity and peace that are all Salesian: “O my Mother, she said to her Superior, I no longer know how to but love, entrust myself and abandon myself. Help me to thank God for it”.

It was twenty days after this death that Marie finally clarified the mystery of Léonie, the puny child, poorly gifted, rebellious to boarding school life as well as to all discipline, and who, despite her extremely sensitive heart and passionate love that she dedicates to her mother, darkens the climate of the house with her escapades and stubbornly shuns family gatherings. Only the servant Louise Marais exerts an irresistible fascination on the little girl. She prides herself on taming the indomitable. At the cost of what pressures and what slavery? Marie will soon realize this. She spies on the dialogues that take place mysteriously in the kitchen; she hears the threats made: "Beware of correction if you don't come with me or if you talk to your parents!" She perceives her sister's promises literally terrified and unable to defend herself. As soon as she is sure of her act, she notifies Mrs. Martin, who, distressed and indignant beyond all expression, instantly puts an end to the odious game. Poor Louise, immediately dismissed, laments so much that she obtains the reprieve necessary to care for the one who once rescued her from peril, treating her like one of her daughters. Basically, his intentions were not bad; she thought she was doing a service by bending a character that no one could train. If there is an error, it was on the side of judgment, devotion remaining out of the question. She is only forbidden to concern herself even slightly with Léonie.

It now remained to regain control of this failed education. Mrs. Martin devoted all her resources of delicacy and ingenuity to it, awakening confidence, guiding the efforts of sacrifice. Marie helped him with all her energy. She gave lessons to her sister, who became deeply attached to her. For the future, it was an excellent omen.

Madame Martin rejoiced all the more at this beneficent influence in that she felt in her organism the irreversible progress, the rapid evolution of the evil which was to prevail. Around her was going an offensive of prayer, the culmination of which would be a pilgrimage to Lourdes with her three eldest daughters. Beforehand, she wanted Marie to make a second closed retreat at the Visitation of Le Mans. M. Martin suffered from separating from his eldest, but maternal diplomacy had quickly reduced the objections and advanced the irresistible argument. The exercises took place from June 11 to 15, 1877, centered on the great truths, dominated for our heroine by the concern to do violence to Heaven, in order to obtain the miracle of the healing of her mother. Added to this was the fear of the responsibilities that the dreaded disappearance placed on her. Responsible for training the youngest, she must avoid offending them with her impatience; it must acquire, with humility, self-mastery. Resolutions are taken accordingly.

This stay at the cloister had the effect of a stopover at the oasis. She is happy to talk with her former mistresses, and also to find Pauline, from whom it costs her so much to see herself separated.

On Sunday, at the end of the retreat, Mme Martin and Léonie arrive from Alençon, and the four travelers set off for Lourdes. A pilgrimage of intense prayer, which takes place in pure faith, punctuated by painful incidents, in the disappointment of the long-awaited miracle which does not come. The courageous mother draws the conclusion: “The Blessed Virgin said to all of us, as she did to Bernadette: “I will make you happy, not in this world, but in the next. »

The last weeks that the patient spent here below, she was so consumed by suffering that when her remains were exhumed on October 13, 1958, the three doctors present, having noted that the bones had escaped all decomposition, raised deep lesions on three vertebrae at the base of the neck, as well as on the left scapula. The tortures suffered were as if inscribed in the skeleton. Powerless witness to this ascent of Calvary, Marie will speak of it later with an emotion that will tear her to tears: “In those days, there were no painkillers like today. Mama had to put up with her illness, and it was great. I can still see her sitting in her armchair; she could not turn her neck, neither to the right nor to the left. She uttered little cries, she was in so much pain. Yet she was even better than in her bed, where you had to have several pillows to hold her head up. This poor little father held her head in his hands to relieve her. Sometimes she prayed aloud. She said: “O my God, you who created me, have mercy on me. And she prayed to the Blessed Virgin with such great fervor. I remember thinking: oh! if she doesn't protect mom, who will she protect? She was so good and so brave! »

The young girl also recounts the painful escapade of Sunday July 22 when she accompanied her mother to morning mass. “It took incredible courage and effort to get to the church. Every step she took resounded in her neck, sometimes she had to stop to regain some strength. When I saw her so weakened, I begged her to go home, but she wanted to go through with it, believing that this pain was going to pass, and it didn't, on the contrary. She had a lot of trouble coming back from church... I thought I wouldn't bring her home alive. Ah! what a mass of anguish I passed! Several people looked at us in astonishment, doubtless wondering how we had been able to get a patient out in such a pitiful state. But she had wanted to go there at all costs, not feeling bad enough to miss mass on a Sunday. »

Mrs. Martin will do it again on the first Friday of August, this time leaning on her husband's arm. Then her eldest will hide her clothes from her to make such an adventure, which seemed a challenge to reason, impossible.

At this time, Marie arranges one last surprise for her patient. Having closed, for vacation, the courses she gave to Céline and Thérèse, under the pompous title of "Visitation Sainte-Marie d'Alençon", she organized a solemn distribution of prizes, which she told her aunt. Guérin: “I assure you that it was quite beautiful. I had adorned my room with garlands of periwinkle interspersed with bouquets of roses. From distance to distance, wreaths of flowers were hung. A rug covered the floor and two armchairs awaited the Presidents of the august ceremony: Mr. and Mrs. Martin. Yes, my aunt, mom also wanted to attend our prizes. What a shame you weren't there! Our two little ones were in white and you should have seen with what a triumphant face they arrived to collect their prizes and their crowns. It was mom and dad who distributed the rewards, and I who called the students. I even gave a speech, which Pauline and I had composed the day before. »

Last ray of sunshine before the cold of death. The patient sinks deeper and deeper into thoughts of Eternity. At certain times, however, her anguished gaze goes to the third of her daughters, the one who, long resistant to her advances, has now become desperately attached to her. "If I had to regret life, she sighed, it would only be for poor Léonie... Who will take care of her when I'm gone?" This cannot be the role of a father, however good he may be. Who will love her like a mother? With a rush, Marie answered: "O mother, it will be me, I promise you." Later, when relating this fact, she would add: "And I kept my promise, I always had a very special affection for Léonie, I always protected her." »

The denouement is approaching. The vision of the true homeland never left the dying woman, while her daughter, on August 16, 1877, and in the same vein, copied into her retirement notebook the beautiful lines of the Lamartinian poem entitled: Reflection , which Mr. Martin loved to declaim to his daughters:

Man, time is nothing to an immortal being!
Woe to him who spares him, fool who mourns him;
Time is your ship and not your home;
Towards the endless term let us hasten to run.
Let's trample this world and live to die;
Science, love, pleasure, life,
This shadow of the great goods that your heart sacrifices
Like a divine seed thrown behind you,
Will bloom more beautiful again, but in Eternity!

The whole family turns towards the beyond, in unison with the dying woman who, on the very day that Mary was copying the stanzas dear to her father, ended her last missive with these words: "If the Blessed Virgin does not heal, it's because my time is up and the good Lord wants me to rest elsewhere than on earth".

Marie is now responsible for describing for the parents of Lisieux the implacable scenario of the disease in its ultimate phase. On August 26, she attends with the whole family the administration of the last rites. Hemorrhages follow one another. Madame Martin died at half past midnight, on the threshold of August 28, after a very brief agony. Marie, whom M. Guérin had forced to take a little rest, was immediately called to the funeral bed. “The day after her death, she said of her mother, I often went to look at her. If you only knew how beautiful she was! It looked like she died at 20. It seemed to me, looking at her, that she was not dead, but more alive than ever, and I wasn't really sad; I felt that she was not lost, that she would always protect me. »

Thérèse for her part expressed, in her autobiography, all that her child's soul felt on the occasion of this bereavement. Marie had not been without noticing her precociousness of observation: "I was careful not to ask her what she thought, so as not to further develop the deep feelings of which she speaks." According to the custom of the time, the daughters of the deceased did not attend the funeral, which took place on August 29, at Notre-Dame d'Alençon.

Chapter 3: Life at Les Buissonnets

It soon became apparent to M. Martin that the good education of his daughters would be facilitated by a transfer to Lisieux, where they would benefit from their aunt's experience. He opened up to Marie and Pauline: “It is only for you that I would make this sacrifice, but I do not intend to impose one on you. It's up to you to say whether or not you prefer to continue making Alençon stitch. Delicately, they pointed out that he had to think of himself first. He guessed their deep feelings, and the exodus was decided. Mr. Guérin, who will be appointed, on September 16, subrogated guardian of his nieces, unearths in the parish of Saint-Jacques, the dream estate buried in the trees, which will go down in history under the name of Les Buissonnets.

While the father stayed behind to settle the business in progress, the children went to Lisieux on November 15, 1877 and, the next day, settled into their new cottage. The same day, a letter from Marie transmitted to Mr. Martin the unanimous impression: “It is a charming dwelling, smiling and cheerful with this large garden where Céline and Thérèse will be able to take their antics. Only the staircase leaves something to be desired and also the access road, "path to Paradise", as you call it, because, indeed, it is narrow, it is not "the way wide and spacious. It doesn't matter, all that is a small thing, because we are only camping on earth: today we have our tents here, but our real home is Heaven, where we will go one day to join our dear Mother. »

From November 30, Louis Martin rallied his daughters and life got organized. The statue of the Madonna will be placed in the room of the elders. There had been talk, because of her size, of putting her back in the Pavilion, but Marie, now, didn't think she was too big; she protested: “Oh! no, dad, we'll take it with us. Mama was very attached to it; you don't have to part with it. »

The eldest, who is 17 and a half, takes over the management of the household. She has know-how, authority, finesse, with a penchant for exercising those around her through her teasing. Mr. Martin, whom she loves passionately and who reciprocates, gives her free rein. He intervenes only for the essentials and pretends not to notice the errors of detail. The only point where "his first, his big," as he says, bothers him somewhat, is the frequency of his being late, especially to Sunday mass. He cares about the formation of character, good performance, economy. “At home, writes Marie, our life was well regulated. Apart from the time of midday and evening recess, we worked tirelessly. Papa wanted to see us always busy. He also sought to develop our talents and he made sure to provide us with everything necessary for our needlework or brushwork. »

Léonie and Céline enter the institution of the Benedictines of the Abbey, which Jeanne and Marie Guérin attended, while Pauline takes charge of Thérèse's instruction, Marie reserving writing lessons for herself. We strive to follow the line traced by the dear missing mother. Léonie is making notable progress, while the two youngest enjoy the devotion and maternal attention of their older sisters. Firmness and tenderness go hand in hand, Mr. Martin supporting with all his credit those who replace the mother.

Little Thérèse, in her autobiography, painted the picture of this ideal family life, which had mutual love as its common soul, heightened in tune with the charity of Christ. We cherished each other, we helped each other, and this warmth of the heart was manifested by certain outward signs: abundance of outpourings, use, which may seem excessive, of diminutives and pleasant nicknames, liveliness of expression and intensity of feelings, going so far as to give the epistolary tone the appearance of sentimentality. Each one brought his own note to this concert: Marie, positive and whole, with that touch of fantasy and that sense of nature, which related her to her father; Pauline, active and enterprising like her mother, spirited like her and so emotional; Léonie, obstinate and courageous, but touchy and charged with complexes; Céline, determined to the point of stubbornness, rich in talent and personality; Finally, Thérèse, who has been going through a crisis of hypersensitivity since her mother's death, without, however, altering her basic energy or this set of qualities whose opulence very few then suspected. As for M. Martin, he reigns as Patriarch over this little world, communicating his faith to it and enlivening it with his good humor. Every morning, he takes him to mass at Saint-Pierre. With his daughters, he attends Sunday services. He has the art of varying the conversation and filling the evening with songs, games and poems, whether the evening is held under the lamp, at dusk, or, in the beautiful spring and summer periods, that it unfolds in the garden. Sometimes, it was at the belvedere, in the room of reflection that he had set up there, that the father communicated to his elders the fruit of his readings or that he opened for the youngest "the treasure box", where Jewels and stones of all kinds were piled up, the last remnants of the display in the rue du Pont-Neuf. He did not hesitate to take his daughters on excursions or pilgrimages, or - as was the case in June 1878 - to do the honors of the capital to his elders.

More than anything, he takes care to maintain the religious flame and to set an example of the strictest penance. It is even necessary to slow it down on this chapter. Marie takes care of it, with the complicity of M. Guérin, who especially loves and admires her. She said of her father: "I sometimes found his wise advice austere, and for fear that he would become even more austere, I prevented him from reading, for example, the Desert Fathers, because I had noticed that afterwards he wanted to mortify himself too much. »

During those happy years, those of uneventful homes, an episode worthy of Shakespeare served as a distant prelude to the trials of the future. “Around the age of 7, writes Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart, Thérèse had a prophetic vision. We heard him, Pauline and I, call: “Dad! dad ! I ran to her saying, "Why are you calling daddy?" You know very well that he is in Alençon”. She assured me that she had seen him pass in front of his little garden, his head covered with a dark cloth. I saw very well that there was something supernatural there, but I tried to conceal my shock, and we took her into the garden to convince her that there was no one there. The secret of such a scene will not be revealed until later, but the four blows of fate have already been struck.

At the start of the school year in October 1881, Thérèse, as an extern, joined Céline at the Benedictines. Léonie, who had spent four years in their establishment as a boarder, had just left, but left part of her heart there. Marie, always mocking, liked to hum to him: "Abbaye, mes amours!" Deep down, she rejoiced at such an attachment, which helped to fix her inconstant sister. As for the youngest, her precocity frightens her somewhat: “She was, she will say, a deep and very thoughtful soul, I found her too serious and too advanced for her age. »

In this quiet happiness, some dark cuts occur. On February 16, 1882, Pauline returned transfigured from the mass heard at Saint-Jacques. At the foot of the statue of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, an interior illumination fixed its vocation. She must put on, and in Lisieux itself, at the monastery in the rue de Livarot, the habit of the Virgin. Great is the emotion of Marie, who will lose her lifelong companion, her partner in the government of the house. Later, she wrote down her impressions for Mother Agnès: “I had just turned 22 when you told me in confidence that you had the vocation to be a Carmelite. I had known for a long time that you wanted to be a nun at the Visitation of Le Mans, and this more or less distant future saddened me greatly. Because how can I think of separating myself from you whom I loved so much, from you who were the charm of my life! But the day you spoke to me about the Carmel, I had even more pain. I did not know the Carmel, I did not even know that there was a Carmel in Lisieux, but I knew that it was an austere Order, where one fasted eight months of the year, where one was always skinny, and I was in despair that the good Lord was calling you to such a life.

“However, I had to resign myself to this thought. We had the same confessor, I noticed that you knew how to express your soul perfectly, while I was like a log. Besides, what would I have entrusted with my soul? Your desire to enter Carmel did not make the vocation germinate in me; so I had nothing to say. However, I suffered a lot, and I remember that one day, on my way back from confession, I burst into tears when I found myself alone in my room. I then opened the Imitation and there read these words: "Having regained my heart after the storm, recall your strength to the sight of my mercies, for I am near to you, says the Lord, to restore all things, not only with measure, but with abundance and filling the measure. I immediately felt consoled. »

On April 17, 1882, a providential interview snatched Marie from the dreaded solitude. A Jesuit from the Alencon region, Father Almire Pichon, preached a mission to the personnel of the Lambert drapery. He had a reputation for holiness. His charism was to direct souls towards the Sacred Heart, the abyss of leniency and forgiveness. Having experienced the torment of scruples "to the point of madness", he had, thanks to Father Ramière, "stored the God of the Jansenists in the attic" and discovered the good God, whom he began to make known and loved, both in the pulpit - he preached more than nine hundred retreats - and in the confessional, where he spent certain days until ten, twelve and three o'clock. An immense correspondence completed this teaching. The prestige and influence of such a leadership were considerable. Also the arrival of the monk in the Lexovian city stirred up all the Philotees in search of high spirituality.

Alerted by a friend, Marie Martin, distrustful at first, yielded to curiosity. The saints do not run the streets. Why miss the opportunity to meet one in the flesh? She attends his mass and introduces herself: “Father, I have come to see you to see a saint”. The Jesuit smiled at this simplicity and confined himself to replying: "Confess yourselves." » This was done in the usual way, to the great disappointment of the penitent, who was already murmuring between her teeth: « If I had known, I wouldn't have bothered! But, in the evening, the desire haunts her to return to challenge her Saint. So here she is, the next morning, in the confessional, admitting that she felt irresistibly urged to take this step. A brief dialogue ensues, which Marie faithfully transcribes. “He asked me a few questions, asked me if I wanted to be a nun. - No, Father. - But what do you want to do? Do you want to get married ? - Oh ! No ! - Stay old maid? - Oh ! no, of course ! - SO ? Finally, he made an appointment with her, in a fortnight, at the Refuge where he would preach a retreat, asking her to write down, according to the method of Saint Ignatius, all her thoughts on religious life: attractions, objections, interior movements. He concludes paternally: “As for me, I really hope to give you to Jesus. »

For our heroine, until then so impervious to any prospect of consecration to God, it was like a discovery: a blindfold falling from her eyes. She left transformed. Jesus had conquered her. “I was caught in his nets, she writes... nets of mercy. I returned home with a light heart and filled with secret joy. So Jesus had also cast a special look of love on me. I was not tempted to imitate the young man in the gospel and go sadly away from him. On the appointed day, I went to find Father Pichon with my eight large pages in which I had revealed all the most intimate feelings of my heart... I passed my manuscript to him through the small gate and I got up to leave, but he kept me for an hour, reading it in front of me, questioning me and making me all sorts of reflections, on the spot. I can say that I spent a bad quarter of an hour there. And I, who hadn't wanted a director in the past, had one! And I had chosen it of my own free will! Or rather, no, it was the good Lord who had chosen him for me, he arrived when I needed him most, when I was going to lose my dear Pauline. I confess that he was for me the angel of the Lord. »

This is how Father Pichon inaugurated with the guests of Les Buissonnets an intimacy that would last 37 years and which would make him, in the words of Mr. Martin, “the friend and director of the whole family”. Between him and Marie a correspondence begins, whose tone of reciprocal confidence and the fervor of affection betray, in all innocence, it must be said, the sentimentality of the post-romantic age. She writes to him every fortnight. He addresses her, in the first years, every month, then he will space out, under the weight of the work. But the affection does not weaken. Obviously, our Jesuit guessed the riches of the soul of this independent woman with an explosive heart, whom he likes to call “the lion”.

Of the letters directed by him, Fr. Pichon kept nothing. He would have needed a portable library. On the other hand, we have multiple samples of his own literature. It is from a disciple of the Exercises who would have often frequented the Doctor of Geneva. “No discouragement! Bear your little faults with resignation; let us have patience, says Saint Francis de Sales, of being imperfect. “To each his own perfection. Don't become Marie Eustelle. Always be you. Not everything human is bad. Grace perfects it but does not destroy it. "Yes, yes, forget the displeased God and see the indulgent, loving God." That's the One that'll win all your heart. »

The instructions received, the kindness shown, helped to cushion the shock of Pauline's departure. On October 2, 1882, Marie accompanied M. Martin and M. Guérin who were taking the postulant to her new family. “I will never forget that day,” she wrote later to Sister Agnes of Jesus, “and I could give you the details hour by hour. When I saw the closing gate close on you that I loved so much, I cried out in pain. This poor little father was admirable as always. You understand our sadness returning to Les Buissonnets without you! »

Father Pichon comforts his direction and takes advantage of the nobly granted immolation to guide him in turn towards total gift. “I have the right to say that you love Jesus. Otherwise, would you have given him your Pauline?... Could the holocaust have been so complete if the heart had not been part of it?... This fiât sung without tears, let it resound always in the Heart of Jesus until the day when you join your beloved recluse... It is understood that I will preach your taking of the habit, is it not? He calms the alarms of his "ebullient child" confronted with the impenetrable mystery of religious life. Little by little he tames this too dashing freedom which fears the bit and the spur. To bend under the yoke of the Lord, is it not to free oneself? “To serve God is to reign. »

Marie is now called upon to play a leading role with Thérèse. By her qualities, even by her faults, she will serve as an instrument for the Lord to fashion the future Saint. She softens it by her tendency to mock and contradict. She deepened it and guarded it with a narrow, restless and bigoted devotion, thanks to the example of her broad, free piety, exempt from all convention. She communicates to him the love of the humble, pity for all misery.

Marie was insightful, intuitive. She seems to have discerned the eminent virtues of her younger sister very early on. She loves it, but it doesn't spoil it. This is what we feel through the charming memories in which, from Carmel, she would remind Léonie of the hairdressing sessions at Les Buissonnets: "If Thérèse were not curly like this on the day of her first communion (this alludes to a portrait that her Léonie considered inaccurate), you know very well, like me, that she always was, even to go to the Abbey, and that on Sundays I took the trouble to curl it around my forehead. I didn't take any pride in that, it was only to please our dear little father, who, if you remember, couldn't allow me to cut just a piece of his "little queen's" hair. It was his glory. As for Thérèse, she didn't think she was pretty, she says so herself, and in fact, we managed to prevent vanity from entering her heart... For me, none of her portraits gives it to me as beautiful as it really was. You remember this word, from a person of the world nevertheless. She said to me one day while looking at her: “That child has Heaven in her eyes”.

The eldest suffered herself the charm of her youngest. “One day, at Les Buissonnets, she notes in her diary, Thérèse asked me to explain to her what it was like to love God purely and to forget oneself. There was in his eyes such a desire to practice what I was explaining to him that I will never forget it. She had the effect on me of a warrior who measures the battlefield where he wants to fight and where he also wants to win. She was then 10 or 11 years old. I said to myself, looking at her: "What will this child be like?" I could see that she wasn't ordinary. »

And pointing, will you believe it? this sister, so loving, so sensitive to the seductions of her Therese, sometimes imposed hard sacrifices on her without her knowing it. The occasion was the visit to the Carmel, which the benevolence and open-mindedness of Mother Marie de Gonzague authorized every Thursday. The eldest came back to it as to the source of happiness. And it was she above all, with Mr. Martin, and sometimes the Guérin family, who bore the brunt of the conversation, the time being very limited, that of the passing of an hourglass: half an hour.

Later, Marie will express her regrets: “Ah! how much I repent today of not having shared with my little sisters this parlor which I nevertheless found too short for me. If I had known that my poor little Thérèse had suffered so much! I was far from suspecting it. However, I remember that one day she said to you - this memoir is addressed to Mother Agnès of Jesus - “Look, Pauline, I have the little petticoat you made for me”. Little attention was paid to his little childish twittering and afterwards I saw tears in his eyes. Poor little girl ! She thought more about it than I thought! Her poor little heart suffered deeply from these brief moments granted to her. And I did not suspect it! »

The Saint mentions for her part: “... I did not understand and I said in the bottom of my heart: “Pauline is lost for me! ! ! It is amazing how much my spirit grew in the midst of suffering; it developed to such a point that I soon fell ill. We are touching here on the crucial drama of Thérèse's childhood, with her illness of which, having experienced it with her, Marie remains for us the most direct and qualified witness.

On March 20, 1883, Mr. Martin took Marie and Léonie to the capital. They stayed at the Hôtel des Missions Catholiques, attended the Holy Week ceremonies at Notre-Dame and met Father Pichon who was preaching Lent. A telegram from M. Guérin recalled them urgently to Lisieux. Thérèse, who, since her mother's death, had shown extreme sensitivity, had felt Pauline's departure for the Carmel cruelly. The journey of his family to Paris, their absence, however brief, and his own transfer to his uncle who was not without intimidating him, added new shocks. Uncle Guérin having evoked the memories of Mrs. Martin on March 25, the evening of Easter, the child found herself plunged back into the trauma experienced six years earlier. A fit of tears at first, then convulsive tremors baffled even Dr. Notta.

At the dismayed face of the servant, Aimée Roger, who welcomed her on her return, Marie thought for a moment that her sister was dead. She found her sometimes prostrate, sometimes excited, prey to irrational movements, which no longer have anything mysterious for modern medicine, but which, at the time, appeared as the effect of diabolical interventions. Thérèse herself and M. Guérin will advance this explanation.

Of these seven weeks of trances, Marie left three stories. Two appear in the depositions at the Diocesan and Apostolic Processes; the third, in his autobiographical memories. It is the latter that we will cite extensively.

“She had terrifying visions that chilled all who heard her cries of distress… Her eyes, so calm and so gentle, had an expression of horror impossible to describe.

“Another time, my father came and sat by his bed, he was holding his hat in his hand. Thérèse looked at him without saying a word, because she spoke very little during this illness. Then, as always, in the blink of an eye, her expression changed. What did she see? Her eyes fixed on the hat and she uttered a mournful cry: “Oh! the big black beast! ! These cries had something supernatural about them, you have to have heard them to get an idea of ​​them. My father immediately got up and left crying. Then he said to me: "My poor little girl is crazy, she doesn't recognize me anymore!" »

“Other times, she banged her head violently against the wood of her bed. Sometimes she wanted to talk to me and no sound was heard, she only articulated the words, without being able to pronounce them.

“Another day, I thought I would have to watch her starve to death. Her teeth were so clenched that it was impossible for her to open her mouth. Luckily he was missing a tooth, and I said, still resorting to my usual cunning: "It doesn't worry me any longer that your teeth are clenched, I can feed you broth through that little hole." Immediately his teeth loosened. »

Marie speaks as an eyewitness. She had come to live with her uncle, at the bedside of the little one, who only wanted her to take care of her. The clothing of Pauline, on April 6, marked a lull. Contrary to all forecasts, the child was able, if not to attend the ceremony, which would have caused him too dangerous an emotional shock, at least to kiss Sister Agnès of Jesus in the parlor, who came out in a wedding dress according to the custom of the time to participate at mass in the outer chapel, and then return to the cloister to receive the habit of Carmel. Therese was then able to return to Les Buissonnets.

Father Pichon had guessed the emotion felt by Marie in the face of Thérèse's illness. He wrote to her on April 17: “I was with you... at the foot of the altar, presenting like you to Jesus his dear bride. I am also with you on your painful ordeal at the bedside of your little Thérèse”.

The child's condition had indeed become alarming again. The eldest had to resume her exhausting and highly meritorious guard. The improvised nurse noted down the smallest details of those tragic weeks. She reports the bewilderment of the practitioner, who said he had never encountered such a case. “I heard him confess to my father his impotence. He even uttered these words: "Call it whatever you like, but, for me, it's not hysteria." »

It is again the faithful nurse who will relate the miraculous outcome of this terrible ordeal. It was May 13, the feast of Pentecost. M. Martin had had a novena of masses celebrated at the Paris sanctuary of Notre-Dame des Victoires. The evil reached its climax. Therese, lying in her eldest's bedroom, seemed to sink into a sort of bewilderment. For the first time, she no longer recognized her sister who answered her desperate calls. Léonie having carried her to the edge of the window, she did not see her eldest who, from the bottom of the garden, held out her arms to her. But let's leave the floor to Mary herself. We will find under his pen the accent of invincible faith which once obtained the healing of Sister Marie-Dosithée.

“The most terrible crisis of all was the one she talks about in her life. I thought she was going to succumb to it and that this hour of inexpressible anguish which preceded the vision of the Blessed Virgin was the last. Seeing her exhausted by this painful struggle, I wanted to give her something to drink, but she cried out in terror: "They want to kill me, they want to poison me!" It was then that I threw myself with my sisters at the feet of the Blessed Virgin, imploring her to have pity on us. But the sky seemed deaf to our pleas. Three times I repeated the same prayer. The third time, I saw Thérèse fix the statue of the Blessed Virgin, her gaze was irradiated, as if in ecstasy. I understood that she was saved, that she saw, not the image of Mary, but the Blessed Virgin herself.

“This vision seemed to me to last four or five minutes, then two big tears fell from her eyes, and her soft, limpid gaze fixed on me with tenderness. I was not mistaken, Thérèse was cured. When I was alone with her, I asked her why she had cried. She hesitated to confide her secret to me, but seeing that I had guessed it, she said to me: "It's because I didn't see her anymore!" »

The next day Therese visited Uncle Guérin. The latter recommended never to upset the little girl: wise advice to spare long-scarred nerves. "Now," writes Marie, "I did not fail to antagonize her on occasion, and nothing untoward ever ensued." In the application of the hydrotherapeutic treatment, in particular, she ignored the child's scruples. "At the time of the showers that I gave her every day, I still see this little angel telling me with a pleading air when I wanted to undress her: "Oh! Married ! and great tears fell from her eyes, imploring me to leave her. “It's over in a minute, well, it's over, don't cry anymore,” I told him. It was a martyrdom for her. »

Therese knew another kind of torture: doubts about the authenticity of the strange illness of which she had been the victim. Assured that she had never lost her lucidity and no less aware of the disorders that had affected her, she wondered if she hadn't been playing the comedy, if the recovery wasn't a pretense. It was once again Marie who had the mission of reassuring her. The big sister was better placed than anyone to discern in this affair what was a mental disorder. In the same way she could testify to the prodigious character of a transformation that no natural cause was sufficient to justify. Recovery was rapid.

“Around the time of her First Communion, the Servant of God asked me to do half an hour of prayer every day. I didn't want to give it to him. So she asked me for only a quarter of an hour. I didn't allow him any more. I found her so pious and understanding in such a lofty way the things of heaven that it frightened me, so to speak: I feared that the good Lord would take her too quickly for himself. Marie, one Christmas night, had narrowly held back her youngest daughter, who wanted to insinuate herself as far as the communion bench and, thanks to her smallness, rob God. The same goes for this episode which appears in Céline's memories: “Thérèse so ardently wanted to make her first communion that she would have spared nothing to bring forward this happy day. Elie bitterly regretted being delayed for a year because of her age: “How unfortunate, she said, except for two days! If I had been born on December 31 instead of January 2, I would have made my first communion a year earlier! »

“One day when we were going to Les Buissonnets, we saw on the boulevard Mgr Hugonin accompanied by several priests. Marie said to Thérèse: "If you were going to ask Monseigneur not to delay you?" - Immediately her eyes shone with joy and, repressing her natural shyness, she was already rushing towards Monseigneur when Marie called her back. “Ah! the teasing godmother!

Thérèse had returned to the Abbey and was actively preparing for the long-desired deadline. In the evening, she received the exhortations of Marie, who remembered having once enjoyed, in similar circumstances, the maternal teachings. Marie also gave her goddaughter, who declared that she had meditated on it “with delight”, a sheet, received from Father Pichon, which reproduced sentences on renunciation. Thérèse had come into personal contact with the pious Jesuit when the latter visited Alençon in August 1883, then during his visits to Les Buissonnets.

And on the famous day of May 8, 1884, Marie had taken care of Thérèse's toilet. She had prepared for him, in addition to the ritual dress (what the romantic Thérèse would call “the snowflakes”), a creamy white woolen dress trimmed with garnet velvet and a straw hat of the same shade trimmed with a large garnet feather. After vespers, she accompanied him, with M. Martin, to the parlor of the Carmel, to congratulate Pauline who had made her profession that very morning. The family meal over, she took the child to her room, no doubt thinking of the melancholy which had invaded her to tears once, in her boarder's bed, on the evening of the most beautiful day of her life. .

From June 23 to 29, 1884, Marie made a retreat in Vitré preached by Father Pichon. These exercises had the immediate result of deepening his devotion to the Sacred Heart. As for her vocation, it remained fixed in principle, but without the young girl thinking of taking action. Wasn't she necessary to Therese? To this postulant who was not in a hurry, religious consecration still seemed shrouded in reluctance: marriage of reason rather than marriage of love; in any case, not love at first sight. She was in no hurry to alienate her freedom. Pauline's taking of sail, which she witnessed on July 16, does not seem to have inclined her to reduce the time.

The ordeal, once again, passes through his life, disproportionately exaggerated, it must be said, by his inflammable temperament. On October 4, Fr. Pichon left for Canada. Accompanied by Mr. Martin, she joins him in Rouen, escorts him to Le Havre and stays for a long time, "heartbroken", contemplating the boat which sways towards the west. Let us collect his confessions: “I still remember, the next morning, the sweet look of my little Thérèse. I was doing her hair when I left sobbing. (Poor fool!) It does me good to recognize him today. But at that time I already recognized him, because seeing a cloud of sadness on the forehead of this cherub, I blamed myself for having come with my tears to darken his Heaven so pure”.

The dialogue with Fr. Pichon will continue on the epistolary mode: four letters per month, in the first times, some as abundant as reports. Obviously, the good Jesuit, extremely busy elsewhere, cannot keep up with this breathtaking pace; he will leave up to fourteen missives unanswered; but he does not discourage his correspondent, "the first of my children", as he calls her. He likes his spontaneity, his originality. He molds her to unconditional generosity. “We will have to unlearn how to say: I want. A saint, I don't remember which one, even avoided saying: I would like better. » - « You tell me that everything is exile, except God. And I answer you that nothing is exile in God. Let us immerse ourselves more and more in this dear homeland. » - « My hot child will have to become a lamb. » On March 25, 1885, Fr. Pichon celebrated Mass for his daughter who made a private vow of chastity. We feel that, with a slow but sustained movement, he leads her towards the cloister, dispelling her last repugnance.

At Les Buissonnets, Marie introduced Céline to household responsibilities. She continued to guide Thérèse, preparing her for each of her communions. It was in such circumstances that she spoke to him about suffering, telling him that she would probably not walk this way, but that the good Lord would always carry her like a child. The prophecy will come true only on the second point. As for the first, it was immediately denied. The very next day, God inspired in the little queen the attraction of suffering. She would have the bitter experience of it a few weeks later, and in the most unexpected form. During her Second Communion retreat, Marie declares, Thérèse saw herself assailed by the disease of scruples. It was especially on the eve of his confessions that they redoubled. She came to tell me all her alleged sins. I tried to heal her by telling her that I took her sins upon me, which weren't even imperfections, and I only allowed her to blame two or three of them that I pointed out to her. She was so obedient that she followed my advice to the letter. »

The girl instinctively applied the tactics of experienced psychologists. The cure was so well conducted that it recorded rapid progress and the child's confessor did not even suspect that she was a prey to such torture. In her autobiography, the Saint paid homage to her devoted godmother: “What patience my dear Marie needed to listen to me without ever showing any signs of boredom. »

When Mrs. Guérin invites her nieces in turn to her holiday chalet, in Deauville then in Trouville, Marie addresses her sisters with witty words in which we see her all vibrant at the spectacle of the sea furrowed by the white sails of the coastal fleet. She encourages the youngest, whom she calls her “torment”: “Let's go pearl fishing in our little boat. There are some very beautiful ones at the bottom of the sea that we are crossing. When a sacrifice presents itself, quickly cast your net, my darling little fisherman. As for Céline, more combative, and of whom she calls herself "the executioner", she harasses her with mischief, but to sign peacefully: "Your wicked sister, good at the bottom of her heart".

Another kind of correspondence will soon be established, with Mr. Martin in person. Marie had spoken to him of the travel plans of a priest accustomed to Saint-Jacques, Father Charles Marie, to central Europe and the Bosphorus, with the prospect of extending to the Holy Land and returning via Italy. The priest wanted to take Mr. Martin with him. The latter, especially tempted by Jerusalem and Rome, took the bait, but the eldest resisted, fearing excessive fatigue for him and not liking parting with her. Finally, Pauline won general assent.

From August 21 to October 6, 1885, the letters of the head of the family will bear stamps with prestigious names: Paris, Munich, Vienna, Constantinople, Naples, Rome, Milan, while the replies will be sent poste restante. The friend of the road is intoxicated by beautiful landscapes, but he always keeps in his heart the nostalgia of Les Buissonnets. The tone softened to appease the alarms of Marie, to whom these messages were addressed: “Now, my first, my big, my diamond, let's talk a bit about our little affairs. I see, re-reading your last letter, that you can't do it any better while I'm not here; continue like this you will make me happy. Poor girl, why can't I have you close to me, during all my beautiful trip!... » The religious note is felt everywhere: « Everything I see is splendid, but it is always an earthly beauty. and our heart is not satisfied with anything, as long as it does not see the infinite beauty which is God. See you soon the intimate pleasure of the family, it is this beauty that brings us closer to it. »

With the return of the father, we savored to the full this joy of living together, which stripped itself here of all selfishness, enlivened as it was by the supernatural spirit. Céline, who had just finished her studies, now took part in the organization of the house. Thérèse, plagued by headaches, and who found it difficult to bear not having her sister by her side, also left the Abbey at the beginning of the second term of 1886, to follow private lessons with Mme Papinau in town. . More and more, she clung to the eldest, like ivy to the wall: "Mary knew...everything that was going on in my soul, she also knew my desires for Carmel and I loved her so much that I couldn't live without her..." So much so that in July 1886, invited by her aunt to Trouville, without being accompanied by her godmother, she began to languish: she had to be taken back to Les Buissonnets where, immediately , she regained her strength. “And it was from that child, she underlines, that the good Lord was going to snatch the only support that attached her to life! »

Around Marie was brewing a pious plot. During the conversations in the parlor as well as in her letters, Pauline pressed her to her last entrenchments. "If you only knew," she wrote to him, "how I long for you, how I feel more and more your marked place next to me, in this blessed little cloister!" The other struggled: "I'll come in when the good Lord tells me to, but he hasn't shown me his will clearly enough." - Do not believe that it will appear to you for that. You're going to be 26, it's time to make a decision. - I won't do it on my own. Since he knows very well that I want to do his will, he will rather send me an angel to tell me. »

The angel was soon found. A note from Sister Agnes of Jesus to Father Pichon, and the latter, with the most innocent air in the world, inserts in a letter sent from Montreal on April 1, 1886, these haunting phrases: "When will I be Is it given to deliver to Our Lord the last of my two selves? It's not mine the least. When will you be Mary of the Sacred Heart? You see that my choice is made. What do you think of your presence in the family? Is it still necessary? I want a word from you to resolve these issues”.

It was necessary to answer well, and without evasion, because Marie was loyalty itself. The conclusion breaks out in the message sent in August from Sainte-Anne de Beaupré, near Quebec. “Here I am armed with the sword of Abraham, ready to sacrifice his Isaac. Do you believe that the Isaac of old was the most beloved? Oh ! no!... Well! After having prayed a lot, I believe I am the interpreter of Our Lord in giving you the signal for departure, for the exit from Egypt. Go quickly with a high heart and hide in his. The angel did not stop the iron. He has turned into a patriarch, who deals the fatal blow.

How will the haughty young girl react? “So the hour of sacrifice had come for me! Ah! I saw it, this hour, without enthusiasm. I had to say goodbye to a father I loved! I had to abandon my little sisters! However, I didn't hesitate for a moment and I told Papa this great confidence. He sighed upon hearing such a revelation! He was far from expecting it, because nothing could lead one to suppose that I wanted to be a nun. He stifled like a sob and said to me: "Ah!... Ah!... But without you!..." He couldn't finish. And I, so as not to soften him, answered confidently: "Céline is old enough to replace me, you'll see, Dad, that everything will be fine." So this poor little father said to me: “The good Lord could not ask me for a greater sacrifice. I thought you would never leave me. And he kissed me to hide his emotion.

At Uncle Guérin's, despite the penetrating tone of the letter received from Marie, it was difficult to take his vocation seriously. She was so independent and so mocking! His jokes hardly spared the convents or the "good nuns." The clergy itself served as the target of his indignation: “Why these questions of money in the church? Is it normal to have to pay to sit there? The honest pharmacist, fabricator of the Saint-Pierre cathedral, tried in vain to allege the budgetary necessities, the maintenance of the equipment, the payment of the personnel; his niece did not budge. Only the next day, when the discussion had been a little bitter, she came to apologize for her liveliness. But was his inner thought changed by it? And it was this quicksilver temperament, enemy of conformity, who spoke of shutting himself up in a cloister! Yet Father Pichon repeated: “Never have I seen a vocation as clear as yours. »

It was for Therese that the blow was hardest: her eldest was everything to her. So she decides "to no longer take any pleasure on earth..." The hours of relaxation in the attic converted into a bazaar, a planter, an aviary are over! “When I learned of Marie's departure, my room lost all charm for me, I didn't want to leave my dear sister for a single moment, who was soon to fly away... What acts of patience I made her practice! Every time I walked past her bedroom door, I knocked until she opened and I kissed her with all my heart, I wanted to stock up on kisses for as long as I needed to be. private. »

A happy diversion came to soften the bitterness of these weeks which prelude to the final separations. Father Pichon, recalled to Europe, wrote that he would pass from Dover to Calais on October 2, 1886. Marie asked her father to take her to one port or the other, to watch for the arrival of the monk. "I have nothing to refuse you, my dear," replied M. Martin. As a result of an epistolary crossover and a misunderstanding about the dates, our two travelers watched in vain for two days for the famous boat. It was finally in Paris, after many setbacks, that they joined the Jesuit. The young girl recounts her disappointment as follows: “I complained bitterly of my disappointment, telling Papa that I did not understand why the good Lord had not let me enjoy my last joy. But he answered me like a saint: "You mustn't murmur, my Mary, it's because he judged that you needed this ordeal, and I consider myself happy to have served as his instrument in letting go on this journey. I couldn't get over hearing him talk like that... It was very true, the good Lord wanted to detach me even more from the earth, even from its most innocent joys. »

Another step was necessary, a farewell visit to the cemetery of Alençon, and to some friendly families. It took place on October 6 and 7, immediately after the meeting in the capital. It was not the least heartbreaking moment for our young daughter when she knelt for the last time, surrounded by all her loved ones, at the grave of her mother and her deceased brothers and sisters. An unpleasant surprise darkens this homecoming. Léonie, who dreamed of the Poor Clares, entered the convent in the rue de la Demi-Lune, formerly frequented by Madame Martin, and manipulated by the superiors, without warning, and reappeared in her postulant's uniform on the other side of the gate. “I was caught like a mouse in a mousetrap,” Léonie would later say. Great was the elder's anger, which her father had great difficulty in calming. It calmed down at Lisieux when M. Guérin pointed out - and the event proved him right - that the experiment would be short-lived.

Entry into the Carmel had been set for October 15, 1886, the feast of Saint Teresa of Avila. Father Pichon, detained by illness, was absent at the appointment. Mr. Martin had to bite on his heart to offer his eldest to the Lord. Thérèse will express later what represented for him the one who, since the death of Mrs. Martin, had become his right arm, his support, his confidante.

Remember your beloved Mary, Your eldest daughter, dearest to your heart;
Remember that she fills your life, With her love, charm and happiness.
For God, you renounced his sweet presence,
And you bless the hand that offered you suffering.
Oh ! of your ever more sparkling diamond. Reminds you.

The departing had given her father as a memorial a beautiful copper crucifix and an image entitled “La Vocation”, representing the momentum of a soul leaving home to set sail for God. On the back, he could read the poignant reflections which Montalembert had inspired by taking on the habit of the tenderly beloved child whom he had made his collaborator. “One morning, a beloved daughter gets up and comes to say to her father and her mother: Farewell, everything is over, I am going to die to you, to everything... I will never be neither wife nor mother, I I belong only to God... Nothing holds her back; here she appears already ready for the sacrifice with an angelic smile. Proud of her smiling and last adornment, she walks to the altar, or rather she runs there, like a soldier on the attack, to bow her head under this veil which will be a yoke for the rest of her life, and which must to be also the crown of his eternity... But who is this invisible lover, who died on a gallows eighteen centuries ago, who attracts to him youth and beauty... who appears to souls with a radiance and an attraction they cannot resist? Is it a man? No, it is a God. This is the great secret, the key to this sublime and painful mystery... Only one God can win such triumphs and deserve such abandonment. »

When the heartbreaking moment arrived, it was resolutely, but without any trace of fever and as if cold, that Marie took the road to Carmel. She even wanted, in passing, to announce her departure to a family friend, who was pale with emotion as the news seemed incredible. Among the tears of her family, the one who used to say: "I am very free, me" crossed the gate and, to safeguard her freedom, immolated it to the Lord.

On the afternoon of that same day, the whole family will meet at Carmel to greet Mary behind the gate. Mr. Guérin will prefer to send her an admirable letter in which he will congratulate her on her choice, apologize for having doubted the divine call on her and add, on the subject of Mr. Martin, who had shown courage and with heroic serenity: “What an admirable spectacle is that of this new Abraham! What simplicity! What faith! What greatness! We are only pygmies next to this man! »

Chapter 4: The first steps in Carmel

The contrast is striking between Marie's impressions, when she crossed the enclosure door, and those of Thérèse when she took the decisive step: "Everything seemed to me ravishing," wrote the Saint, "I thought I was transported to a desert, our I was especially charmed by her little cell...” Her dear godmother evacuates all lyricism and declares in the most prosaic tone: “While passing under the cloister on my way to the choir, I cast a glance into the courtyard. This is exactly what I imagined, I thought. How austere! Anyway, I didn't come here to see funny things. That was my enthusiasm! I entered the choir where Mother Geneviève was in adoration before the Blessed Sacrament. His air of peace, of holiness, struck me. Then with you, my little Mother [Pauline], I was sent for a walk in the garden. My enthusiasm did not grow. The garden seemed so small compared to the immense garden of the Visitation of Le Mans and then everything seemed so poor to me. I didn't even think of the happiness of being with you, I only thought of wondering how I would manage to spend my life between these four walls. »

Let us add that Mary did not arrive at the monastery thirsty for contemplation nor corseted with asceticism; acclimatization would not be the easiest. She was lucky enough to find on the spot, in addition to the fraternal support of Sister Agnès of Jesus, who served as her "angel", the intelligent understanding of the Prioress, Mother Marie de Gonzague, then 52 years old, and who exercised the office for six trienniums, twice interrupted, that is to say roughly, from October 28, 1874 to April 19, 1902. Unfairly treated by the legend, she was certainly not without faults, but she had real gifts and authentic virtues. It has been judged too much through a report which, blocking, without counterpart, small facts spread over more than forty years and considered in a perspective of magnification, led to abusive generalizations. No superior would resist such an analysis. Equity requires that we also take into account,

concerning Mother Marie de Gonzague, from this other testimony, produced at the Trial by Fr. Godefroid Madelaine, Prémontré Prior of Mondaye:

“I knew her particularly well; I had many relations with her, either by correspondence or by conversations in the visiting room. She seemed to me to have a particularly straight judgment. In the administration of her Community, she was very desirous of the good. Judging by the external relations I had with her for a long time, her character seemed excellent to me. It is not possible for me to appreciate what was his way of being in the intimacy of the cloister. Her numerous re-elections as Prioress have always led me to believe that the Sisters favorably appreciated her way of governing. She confided to me that her character and that of Mother Agnès of Jesus did not naturally sympathize and that they made each other suffer, despite a very sincere mutual esteem. Besides, she showed no shade of bitterness in her confidences. »

Mother Marie de Gonzague always showed exceptional kindness towards the Martin family. Mary had nothing but praise for his kindness and his wisdom. One can think that independent as she was and so unprepared for a regular life, she would not have persevered if she had not met, at the head of the Community, a bias of benevolence and indulgence. It will even be necessary for our heroine, who attached herself quickly and strongly, to defend herself against the exaggerated affection which carried her towards her Prioress. Pauline will have to warn her against this frequent deviation among young people, which risks distorting the relationship with God as much as human relationships.

First novice of Sister Marie des Anges, the young girl found in this nun a mystical soul, a model of observance and devotion, good-natured and charitable: “A true saint, the consummate type of the first Carmelites”, Thérèse would say of her. However, as she was a bit complicated, easily lost in her multiple responsibilities, naïve in some ways, she may not have had what it took to train in discipline a 26-year-old postulant who had been, nine years, mistress of the house, but she will be able to push her forward.

Our beginner will very quickly be called upon, as a second nurse, to care for one of the foundresses of the Carmel of Lisieux, Mother Geneviève of Sainte-Thérèse, a severely disabled person, soon reduced to the state of a living wound. She will bring so much delicacy and good humor that the old nun, to whom she will devote a real cult, will greet in her her "ray of sunshine". The patient will willingly pass on her fantasies and her quips, saying to anyone who pointed out the novice's faults: "All the beauty of the king's daughter is within." She read that heart with the clear-sightedness of souls enlightened by God, and above all appreciated its indissoluble faith and absolute righteousness. So she encouraged him without reproaching him.

The chaplain, Father Youf, who had been in charge for thirteen years, showed himself to be a model of regularity in his function, which is, for a Community, invaluable. In poor health, suffering from cerebral anemia, he will not be of much help in guiding the conscience and strengthening the energies, excluding from confession everything that touches on spiritual direction.

In the novitiate, Marie was the only postulant. She wore the traditional little bonnet of postulants and over her young girl's dress the black cape. Her companions were three professed sisters, who remained dependent on the special regime of formation for about three years after the making of their vows. Sister Agnès of Jesus was one of them, who helped her with her watchful friendship, while Sister Marie of Jesus served above all to exercise her, at least in the beginning. Marie only came to the end by trying to smile at him whenever she met him, especially when she offered him holy water, on entering the novitiate quarter. The vanquished antipathy will turn into sincere affection. Sister Marie Philomene of Jesus completed the quartet: oldest member, who had once wanted to return to the world to care for her sick mother, and who, readmitted by dint of tears, showed exemplary fidelity, all bathed in humility. .

The five months of postulancy completed, Marie took the habit on the feast of Saint Joseph, March 19, 1887. Father Pichon was there with the whole family. He delivered the usual speech. Was it not he who had suggested to the most beloved of his directed the name of Mary of the Sacred Heart received from the postulancy? Call for the highest patronage, but also a program of spirituality that she will continue to deepen. At the meal that followed, at the parish priest of Saint-Jacques, superior of the Carmel, Mr. Martin said to Father Godefroid Madelaine, Prémontré Prior of the Abbey of Mondaye: "I am very happy, here are already two of my daughters salvation is assured; I still have one who is only 14 years old and who already burns to follow them”. At the convent, he offered in memory of this day, two large reliquaries in the form of a monstrance.

Marie liked to call him "the purveyor of the good God", so ingenious was he in filling the Community with his generosity, regularly sending it the produce of his catches, and granting it even more, in the person of his daughters, "everything the treasure of his boat”. Addressing him her wishes of Saint-Louis, she wrote to him: “May the hundredfold be returned to you in this world and in the next. May our dear mother, who left for Heaven before us, unite with us to bless you, with the four little angels who are also yours. Five in the homeland and five in exile! The family up there and the one down here are one today to celebrate you. Above all, Mary blessed her incomparable father for having subscribed so nobly to the vocation of his daughters: "O you, the best of fathers, who give to God without counting all the hope of your old age, glory is for you, glory that does not pass; yes, beloved father, we will glorify you as you deserve to be glorified, by becoming saints. The rest would be unworthy of you”.

The scarcity of intimate notes concerning this period does not allow a thorough analysis of the behavior of Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart in the novitiate. She certainly knew the euphoria of the beginnings: “It was especially in the days which followed my taking of habit that I appreciated the best my happiness. Every morning, it seemed to me to put on a costume of freedom, so for me it was a costume of celebration. It was the case to say, as in my childhood: "I am very free!" It was unbelievable how happy I was! »

To penetrate further into the psychology of the novice, one must read between the lines in the ten letters which she then received from Father Pichon, and which have been preserved in whole or in part. The monk - we also see this in his letters to Céline and Thérèse - used to pick up on his correspondents the main ideas, which he sent back to them with approval and clarification, if necessary. We have a presentiment that at the start, the young Carmelite woman goes through a phase of sensitive fervor; she is "spoiled by the good Lord", who "outdoes her past tenderness". But, very quickly, the wind turns, the horizon darkens. Her guide reassures her and calms her impatience: “Jesus is hiding. Well ! I dare say that it is a joy and an honor to be in no way a mercenary and to love him for free. No balance, no reward! Blessed is he who has not seen and despite everything has been able to believe. Take for yourself this word of the Master. No, no, don't ask Jesus for anything more than Jesus. To others its consolations. To you Jesus alone! This is to your seraphic Mother's taste. Above all, no nervousness. “Imitate Our Lord, have pity on your miseries and be in no more haste than the good Master to reach the top! »

As soon as a craving for physical mortifications intended to hasten the ascent appears - a common thing among candidates for perfection - the paternal voice tempers this fever: "Thirst for penances as much as you like!" But never anything without the confession of obedience. Community life does not fail to put the strongest characters to the test. The small incidents, the frictions, the clashes, take on proportions and tend towards the drama in the narrow framework of the enclosing walls, where there is no escape except from above. Marie is surprised to "suffer for nothing... without avowed motive..." The progressive revelation of defects hitherto hardly suspected has something humiliating for nature, as much as it is beneficial. The priest calls him back in time. He teaches her to take advantage of it.

He sends to his favorite daughter, "like a little program drawn up expressly for you", this excellent watchword borrowed from Saint Francis de Sales: "I will do with all my heart what with all my heart I would like not to TO DO ". The theory is easy; practice is less so. When the second nurse has to leave in the middle of recess, to keep her patients company, it is for her the occasion of a costly renunciation. The temptation is strong to delay a little. We must appeal to the supernatural sense that sees Christ in his suffering members.

Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart draws a great deal from the Gospel. She hardly seems to have frequented Saint Jean de la Croix. Did she even study the works of the Reformer of Avila? The liturgy, to which Dom Guéranger initiated her, at Le Mans and in the vigils at Les Buissonnets, maintains a religious culture, which is all in all fairly basic. The Eucharist is its essential nourishment. It is then up to the Prioress to settle the reception. Mother Marie de Gonzague sticks to the strict application of the Constitutions, which authorized an average of three communions per week. When, on December 17, 1890, a decree of Leo XIII transferred from the superiors to the confessors the power to decide on the matter, Father Youf did not use his right. Timidity no doubt, perhaps also a desire not to provoke comments and jealousy by applying different regimes to his penitents.

The month of October 1887 will provide Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart with an invaluable grace, the arrival of Fr. Pichon, who will preach, from the 8th to the 15th, the Community exercises and will make the panegyric of Thérèse of Avila.

This retreat, which lasted eight full days, included two daily instructions and a conference, with perhaps an additional gloss. We have a very detailed analysis of it in the notes taken by Sister Marie de Saint-Joseph, which, immediately transmitted to Céline Martin, were courageously copied by her, in her beautiful handwriting with characters as precise as they are minute, on a notebook containing one hundred - forty-four pages, of thirty-two lines each.

To read this document, and subject to the competence of the secretary in the art of identifying the veins of a speech, one has the impression that the preacher is inspired, with real independence, by the Exercises of Saint-Ignatius , but that the classic themes of the fundamental Meditation, of holy indifference, of sin, of the two Standards, of the three degrees of humility, take on in him more affectivity than logician rigor and immediately turn to loving the Heart of Jesus. The accent is placed on the baseness of the creature and the tenderness of God, which dictate to the soul an attitude of abandonment, generosity in suffering, joy and peace.

The plan is difficult to guess through the outpourings of the heart, the comparisons and the examples, which undoubtedly caught the attention of the listeners. Father Pichon triumphs in the anecdote, the piquant line, the evocation of a scene from the Gospel. He loves punchy words, contrasts, antitheses, even paradoxes. The reputation of a great orator that he had across the Atlantic does not seem overrated. The whole is beautifully balanced, leaving far in the dark the sermonists of the time, so quick to handle the argument of sacred terror and to lead to heaven by speaking only of hell. When it comes to nuns, the law of sacrifice is underlined, perhaps with a certain excess of complacency, but so bathed in love that it excludes any suspicion of pain. One senses in many places - no doubt through Margaret Mary - a Salesian influence: patience and charity towards oneself, no discouragement, cult of small efforts, primacy of charity. The call to summits is everywhere underlying, but everything is conceived and presented according to the average nun who must be comforted and stimulated.

Let us pick out, throughout the instructions, a few key thoughts, some of which will reappear from the pen of Marie, Céline and Thérèse herself, who immediately became aware of them.

“When will we despair of ourselves to hope for everything in God? When will we accept with our other crosses the cross of discouragement, the cross of impotence?

Did not Our Lord make you his wives? Didn't he lavish his graces on you? Don't be slaves! Become children.

It is the small virtues that make the great Saints.

How happy the good Lord is when he meets a little soul completely abandoned to his good pleasure!

There are souls who owe their salvation only to their faults, even shameful ones; and on the last day they will thank the good Lord...oh happy faults!

It is when God makes a soul feel its baseness, its nothingness, that He forces it to utter a desperate cry to Him. Oh ! blessed are the desperate!

Jesus suffered with sadness!... without sadness, would the soul suffer?

The martyrs suffered with joy... and the King of martyrs suffered with sadness! And the first word of his agony is this: "My soul is sad unto death." Our Lord is afraid of his bitter chalice, he is afraid of his holy vocation!...»

The retreat ends with this cry of hope: “Oh! never doubt!... Confidence is the lever of great souls... but it is also the resource of small souls! It's trust that saves souls...it's their breath...it's their life! Oh! Trust! Trust ! Trust " !

For the time being, it is only a question of bringing to fruition the vocation of the "little queen". The latter, strengthened in her sensitivity by what she calls her "conversion" of Christmas 1886, wants to go to the cloister the following Christmas, on the threshold of her 15th birthday. The deadline will be cruel for Mr. Martin. His health is not without cause for concern. On May 1, 1887, on waking, he was struck by a first attack of cerebral congestion, fortunately averted on the spot. Can we impose this new sacrifice on him? “Marie finding that I was too young, we read in the Story of a soul, did everything possible to prevent my entry. Did the eldest sister doubt the divine call on her youngest? Not at all, but she still treats her like a child. In a letter of May 1887, she calls him: "My baby so grown up and still a baby for me". - “My opposition, she will say, was mainly due to the young age of our sister, and the fear I had of the grief that our father would experience, because Thérèse was the real ray of sunshine in his life. »

When Thérèse had obtained the paternal acquiescence, on May 29, 1887, at Pentecost, the dear godmother silenced her objections: “I let Mother Agnès of Jesus encourage her, she testified; for my part, I would gladly have blocked his entry; but as my conscience would have reproached me, I confined myself to saying nothing. It was in the face of Thérèse's courageous steps with M. Guérin, Canon Delatroëtte, the Bishop of Bayeux, perhaps also because of the enthusiastic assent of Mother Marie de Gonzague and the foundress Mother Geneviève de Sainte-Thérèse, which Marie passed from neutrality to vigorous support. The correspondence exchanged on the occasion of the trip to Italy shows her supporting the hope of the postulant, but constantly directing her towards conformity to the divine plan. She picks up on the metaphor dear to her youngest child: “Baby Jesus is not so sleepy as he seems in his little cradle, and I imagine that his beloved little toy really touches his heart. » She returned to the charge the next day, the Prioress having, for the occasion, lifted all the restrictions of use in epistolary matters: « Rest in the Heart of the good Jesus, abandon yourself to Him and He will not abandon not his little Theresita. At the hour, at the minute he wanted, she will enter his house and He will not be at all embarrassed to make her open the doors. »

After the apparent failure of the pontifical audience of November 20, Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart applied herself to soften the disappointment. There is in her an intrepid faith that nothing disconcerts and which always makes her detect in the labyrinth of the test the providential thread; it bursts out with a prophetic accent in this letter to Thérèse: “You can say in all truth like the Virgin Agnès: “He placed his sign on my forehead”. Yes, darling little child of Jesus, He marked you as his little bride with the sign of the cross. But you wouldn't be his if it wasn't so. You wouldn't be privileged if you had never brought your lips close to its bitter chalice..."

“Have you noticed the words of the Holy Father addressed to you: “You will enter if the good Lord wills”. It is very profound, my little Thérèse. Ah! if you only knew how much mystery it contains! “You will enter if the good Lord wills”. A word from the Holy Father is a word from Our Lord himself. It's as if Jesus were saying to you: "My child, if I want, you will enter, if I want despite all the contradictions, despite all the no's, you will enter, if I want, tomorrow hearts will be changed, because I hold them all in my hands!...” To rejoice your heart, I know very well that you would have had to hear a yes. But Jesus wants to experience the trust and abandonment of his Theresita to the very end. He wants to gild his little ball and not break it..."

Recalling her previous hesitations, the godmother adds: “You know very well that up to now I have paid little attention to your wishes. I wondered if God's hour hadn't been preceded by us. But now I know not! He gave us proof. And I'm sure his will will be done. »

What moved Marie no less was to learn that Leo XIII laid his hand for a long time on the head of M. Martin, who was introduced to her by Canon Revérony as the father of two Carmelites. “I am full of the blessing of the Holy Father,” she wrote to her dad. Ah! I'm not surprised he gave you a special look. He, the representative of Our Lord on earth, had to be inspired by Him to understand you, O revered Father! He blessed your white hair, He blessed your old age!... It seems to me that it is Jesus Himself who blessed you, who looked at you!... There is nothing left to see and taste in this world. I find that after that there is only Heaven. But isn't that a sweet image? »

Events were to justify Marie's optimism. Whether Rome had intervened or not, on January 1, 1888, Thérèse received a letter from Mgr Hugonin, Bishop of Bayeux, through Mother Marie de Gonzague, leaving the admission of the postulant and the choice of date. Sister Agnès of Jesus, to avoid the aspirant having to enter in winter, obtained that it be postponed until after Easter. Painful delay, which displeased Mr. Martin himself, only concerned about Thérèse. After a moment of confusion, the young girl used it to better adapt to the divine will. She already lives in thought in Carmel. On February 21, for Marie's birthday, she tells her the touching adventure of the "lovely little lamb and everything

curly”, which his father gave him, and which, alas! was to die the very day of his birth. " Oh ! yes, she concluded gravely, on earth you mustn't get attached to anything, not even the most innocent things, because you miss them when you least think about them. Only what is eternal can satisfy us. »

On April 8, 1888, the farewell meal took place at Les Buissonnets. Léonie was present, having returned on January 6 from a six-month trial at the Visitation in Caen. The next day, when the postponed feast of the Annunciation was celebrated, Mary was with the whole Community at the closing gate to welcome Thérèse, whom her kneeling father had just blessed for the last time. That same evening, moved by the story told by Céline, by the courage with which M. Martin had let Thérèse go, she wrote him a note expressing her gratitude and her admiration. “Oh! what a father we have! So I am not surprised that the good Lord takes all his children from this incomparable father! He is too dear to his Heart for him not to regard him and his family with a very particular love. How she must smile at you from above, our good mother, how she must be delighted to see her beloved boat so well steered by you towards Heaven. O the best of fathers, how responsible we will be if we do not become saints, if we do not follow in the footsteps of your generosity!

What was the dominant impression of Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart on finding Thérèse? A sort of admiring astonishment at the physical growth, the balance, the moral mastery of the one she had grown accustomed to looking at through the prism of early childhood. Later, she opened up to her sister Pauline: “I can't say that I felt a sense of happiness when I saw her go through the gate. No, because I was thinking of that poor little father who was going to be deprived of his treasure. But she, what a celestial creature! I seemed to see an angel! And how she had grown, my little Thérèse! Through the grid, we don't really realize like when we are next to someone. Yes, she seemed very tall to me, and also very pretty. The good Lord had placed all the graces in her”.

Marie was appointed to serve as an "angel" to her youngest child: which implied that she would initiate her into the common customs of common life, that she would teach her to get by in the breviary and the prayer books, that she was close to her in the refectory and sat at her side in the recreations of the Community in which the novices then took part in their rank. From there, multiple occasions of contacts and exchanges, in addition to the licenses of the feast days where one could converse two by two. Marie had no scruples about taking advantage of it, but she immediately sensed Therese's amiable reserve, who had no intention of granting herself the slightest natural satisfaction. “I often tried to stop him, she declared, to say a word to him that seemed useful to me. I sometimes gave her the reason that I had to teach her to look for the Office of the day, only three weeks after her entry into Carmel, she said to me on one of these occasions: "Thank you, I have found today; I would be happy to stay with you, but I have to give it up, because we are no longer at home”. And the "angel", kindly dismissed, secretly shed very human tears.

Such an example, however, could only stimulate the fervor of Mary, who was preparing for Profession. In this perspective, she wrote to Fr. Pichon how much she would like the scriptural verse to be applied to her: “Who is this who comes forth from the desert, leaning on her Beloved”? “It's from the desert that I want to arrive with him, from the desert of my desires, of my satisfactions, of all of myself. Nevertheless - she thinks that there is talk again of sending her spiritual father to Canada - she experiences a certain dread in front of the possible demands of the inner Master. As affectionate as he was demanding, the Jesuit, invited to preach the taking of the veil, was delighted to find "the happy lion tamed by divine love", but, on May 12, 1888, the very day she entered her great retreat preparatory, he wrote to him: “Leave the human, immolate everything without reserve, without pity. I don't want you to be spared like Isaac. I don't want the sword to hang. Blessed sword that will cut through everything that binds you to the earthly, to the human, to sink you into the bosom of Jesus”.

These words do not remain without an echo, judging by the letter in which, on the eve of her vows, Marie asks for forgiveness and the blessing of her father at Les Buissonnets. “It is very sweet for the diamond to go and enshrine itself in the Heart of Jesus and not in that of a mortal spouse! » Only the hidden treasure counts « Yes, sell everything to buy it! Quit everything! And it is still too little. »

During the retreat preceding her profession, Mary, having noticed an act of abnegation by Thérèse, sent her a note in which she expressed the satisfaction of the divine Friend, who gave thanks for the sacrificial flowers and said to his future wife: “Come back to comfort me again, love me for those who don't love me”. She signs: “A little loner to whom Jesus said that in a low voice”. Young Thérèse's response includes, at the end of the first paragraph, a word interrupted at the bell and not taken up later (LT-49). The godmother will testify to this at the Trial, not without adding humbly: "One day when she saw me, on the contrary, finishing a line after the hour, she said to me: "It would be much better to lose that, and do an act of regularity . If only we knew what it is! » For the moment, it is Thérèse who is apologizing: « If you only knew how much I repent of having told you that you called me too often. Oh ! after your Profession, I will never hurt you”. She compares her sister to the Eagle and assimilates herself to the reed, but her correspondent is hardly mistaken. She does not read these sentences without emotion, which resonate like a distant prelude to the message of spiritual childhood: "Ask that your little girl always remain a very dark little grain of sand, well hidden from all eyes, that only Jesus can see. May it become smaller and smaller, may it be reduced to nothing!..."

The future professed was able to embrace her family one last time, during the canonical interrogation preceding the definitive commitment, this official dialogue on the motives and the complete freedom of the vocation taking place before the ecclesiastical Superior of the monastery, in the chapel exterior. At the time, vows were made in community intimacy. It was May 22, 1888. It fell to Therese to place the crown of roses on her sister's forehead. This one, twenty years later, would sum up her impressions: “As for the day of my Profession, I have no other memory of it, except that it looked exactly like that of my First Communion. My soul was at peace. Jesus had called me and I had come to Him. What happiness can be compared to that of responding to his voice? He had called me... Him! Who can understand what it is to be called by God? What a mystery! Is he not the Master of his creature? And he invites her to love him... He asks her if she wants to love him. But since he is Love, he cannot act otherwise, because love must be free. Only what is touching is that he desires to be loved and that he appreciates the love of his poor little creature. And it was Thérèse who crowned me! Prelude, and as assurance, of my eternal crown! The evening of my Profession, I cried like the evening of my First Communion, because the second beautiful day of my life had passed”. When is the party that will last forever?

The taking of the veil took place the next day in the presence of the family, and enriched by a sermon by Father Pichon. The religious then gave, from May 23 to 28, a retreat in a series of instructions preparing hearts for the solemnities of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Carmel of Lisieux With brilliance, he handles his favorite themes, all centered on the Sacred Heart : prayer, humility, love of God, fraternal singing, above all suffering, this being decidedly the favorite chord that he excels at making vibrate. He opens austere horizons to his audience: "The Saints, when they were at the feet of Our Lord, it was then that they encountered their crosses" - "Holiness consists in groaning, in suffering, in waiting in our miseries... Holiness must be conquered at the point of the sword, one must suffer, one must agonize. Therese applauded these abrupt formulas which, later, she would overcome. In the confessional, Father Pichon swept away her final scruples concerning her illness and her healing by the smile of the Virgin. He assured her that she had never lost her baptismal innocence. She feels liberated. As for his sister Marie, more attentive to human gravity, and who believes that Calvary will present itself soon enough without having to run there, she rather lingers to deepen the doctrine of the Sacred Heart and to offer him the homage of unflinching confidence.

Chapter 5: At Carmel with Thérèse

Mayor, new professed, does not claim to achieve the classic type of Carmelite in love with silence, solitude, regularity. Even in her offices as second nurse, refectory assistant, later as temporary employee also baking altar bread, she brings a touch of fantasy. Nevertheless, she thrives in her vocation. She defines the monastery as “a blessed nest”, a “little earthly and almost celestial paradise”; it depicts “the charms of this delicious panorama which rests the heart”; she congratulates herself on sailing in the "boat of Carmel leaving for Heaven". She wrote to her father: “What happiness to be with the good Lord, what a privilege! On this chapter I would not stop. I find myself so happy, so happy with my lot! The world can laugh at us and not understand us. In the meantime, we have what he does not have. What a brilliant alliance, what a desirable future! To be the wife of the King of kings, what honor and what have we done to deserve it”? However disparate they may be, the metaphors convey the same joy. Such a former nun, disconcerted by a quirk, a discrepancy in language or a paradoxical reflection, may wonder if this savage is in her place in a convent of contemplatives. For Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart the question does not arise.

Trials loom on the horizon. First, the threat of a new departure by Fr. Pichon for Canada; then the increasing deterioration of Mr. Martin's health “Very often, notes Marie, I had asked myself while thinking of dad: How will his beautiful life end? I had the secret presentiment that it would end in suffering, while being very far from suspecting what this suffering would be. But when she came, one day during mass, I saw her price so clearly that I would not have wanted to exchange her for all the treasures of the earth. And what merits our dear father must have acquired! But as he was right to tell us: "My children, do not fear for me, because I am the friend of the good God" At that time, the story of Job came back to my memory, it seemed to me that it was his as ours, and that Satan, again appearing before the Lord, had said to him: "It is not surprising that your servant praises you, you fill him with blessings!" Strike him then in his own person and you will see if he will not curse your name. But the name of the Lord was not cursed, on the contrary, it was always blessed in the midst of the most bitter trials. »

The sacrifice had a double prelude. In May 1888, the old man, seized by grace, at Notre-Dame d'Alençon, felt inclined to surrender completely: “My God, it's too much! Yes, I'm too happy, it's not possible to go to Heaven like that, I want to suffer something for you! The following June 15, he subscribed with enthusiasm to the confidences of Céline who announced his vocation to him. “The good Lord is doing me a great honor by asking me for all my children. If I had something better, I would hasten to offer it to him. »

Shortly after, psychic disorders occur: amnesia, anxiety, hallucinations, caused by attacks of cerebral arteriosclerosis. Worn by his old dreams of a hermit life, the patient disappeared for several days from June 23 to 27. A map sent from Le Havre will make it possible to find him, but, at Carmel as at Les Buissonnets, the alert had been high. Traumatized to the height of her sensitivity, Marie relates the reassuring words of Mother Geneviève: “Don't worry; I heard a voice that said to me: “Let them not worry; their father will return tomorrow; he has nothing. " - "Hearing these words, she adds, I still remember that I said to myself: "We count for nothing!" " Now I understand. Yes, it's true that all he suffered and we with him, is nothing compared to the glory that resulted. »

The nun encouraged her father in tender letters that revealed anxiety: "These crosses, these anxieties, these trials of life are for me a stroke of the oar that pushes my little boat well ahead into the sea, and shows it closer to the blessed shore and the unalloyed joys that await us there... So, all my energy goes to that side and I am hungry and thirsty to be holy and to make my profit from everything that happens. Thinking of a friend of M. Martin who found him too timid in business, too disdainful of money, she adds: “To each his taste! Some kill themselves for present goods, and their hair turns white to earn millions; for us, aren't we free to amass millions for the next life? Ah! my dear father, when I think of the treasure amassed by you, I am almost afraid. Ah! May the good Lord not dare to give it to you right away, this treasure! It seems at times that he cannot insist on crowning his saints. But wait, my God, you have eternity...” For Saint Louis, she sends the patient a medallion as a gift where she put her own hair Between the father and his eldest, the ties are closer than ever .

The pain reached its peak two months later. Father Pichon having to embark at Le Havre for Montreal, Mr. Martin, accompanied by Léonie and Céline, wanted to greet him on departure. At the stage of Notre-Dame de Grâce in Honfleur, he experiences one of his darkest days. The messages sent by his daughters to the Carmel reflect an extreme distress. An unexpected improvement makes it possible to reach Paris the somewhat delayed Jesuit. It is the signal for a brief period of remission which will authorize the presence of the Father when Thérèse takes the habit.

What were the relations of the two sisters associated with the same novitiate at the time? Marie portrays them both in a word to her father: “Your Queen is truly worthy of this title, she is a real little Queen, a perfection worthy of her King. For me, alas! I'm still the hard working diamond. She resorts to the songs of Les Buissonnets to underline her often fruitless efforts: “I do like my comrades, when I come across a small ditch that is very easy to jump, I often get straight into the mitant. But the good Lord is so good that he quickly comes to pick us up”...

Thérèse ignores falls. “Externally, her eldest will say, she was just like the others... Everything was inside”. And in her diary: “Often I relive in thought the time when our little Thérèse was in our midst and I find that nothing can render what we have seen. What perfection in everything and yet what simplicity! Everything about her was simple and at the same time so deep! Everything that can be said and written about it does not give me its true portrait, you must have known it. I myself could not retrace it, but it is engraved in the depths of my soul like a celestial vision that nothing can alter. »

Here is what betrays a certain weakness in Marie, who recounts the fact in all simplicity: however, she let it appear so little that, thinking on the contrary that she loved this Sister very much, I had a certain feeling of jealousy, and I said to her one day: "I cannot prevent myself from entrusting you with a that I have... I imagine that you love my Sister X better than me and I don't find that fair, because finally the good Lord has made the family ties, but you always receive her with such a happy air. that I cannot think of anything else, for you have never shown me such pleasure in being with me. She laughed heartily, but told me nothing of the impressions of antipathy that this nun gave her. »

The dolent godmother, who never hesitates to present herself in an unfavorable light, cites another point in which she herself served, very unconsciously, to exert Therese: “One evening, I accidentally took her lamp. The next morning, instead of reproaching me, she contented herself with pointing out to me with a smile a certain little defect there, as if to point it out to me. I was surprised to see that she hadn't wanted to break even the ordinary silence, for one thing, however, that seemed necessary. And, later, I saw in her manuscript that, not only had she practiced silence in this circumstance, but also and above all poverty”.

Between the two sisters, the dialogue is sometimes tied, and even in the epistolary form. We have inherited, for the Carmelite period of Thérèse's life, twelve letters addressed by her to Mary and seventeen that she received from her. These exchanges are preferably made on the occasion of retreats. Thus, preparing for the vesture of January 10, 1889, the postulant wrote to her eldest: “The poor little lamb can say nothing to Jesus, and above all Jesus says absolutely nothing to him. The big sister goes on: “Here below the cross, here below exile, the arid desert. Doesn't the Child Jesus on his straw say to him, to his darling little fiancée: what did he come to seek in this world where he was so little loved? A cross to die... Ah! the language of Jesus is not that of the spouses of the earth. Sometimes it's silent, on the best days it looks like he wants to hide. Why is that ? It is he alone who knows the ravishing mysteries of the other life and what treasures of graces, what precious diamonds he is laying up for his wives as he calls them to the celestial banquet. That's why he doesn't tell us anything here below..."

On the eve of taking the habit, Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart offers her goddaughter, while commenting on it, the precious image, once received from her aunt in Le Mans, which shows the Child Jesus harvesting lilies. She ends with these words: “All my heart to my darling Angel, whom I adorned for Jesus on the day of his First Communion and whom I will adorn tomorrow, the day of his engagement”. It is indeed up to Marie to comb the opulent hair which was the honor of Mr. Martin and which must fall under the blows of scissors. She puts so much love and so much art into arranging the beautiful blond curls that the patient Thérèse, who knows her godmother is not very punctual, sighs from time to time: “That's good! Enough ! Enough ! We're not going to be ready for the ceremony. At 8 a.m., the little Queen can finally cross the closing gate and enter the chapel, on her father's arm.

M. Martin had recovered for the occasion all his vitality, all his serenity. There was something glorious about the offering of such a young girl, whose virginal freshness enveloped herself in so much prestige, which seems to have touched the entire audience, and first of all the Bishop, who, contravening the , intoned the Te Deum, while a sheet of snow, responding to the secret desire of little Thérèse, covered the courtyard and the cloister with a veil of whiteness. Marie tasted to delight the triumph of her sister and that of her father. It was the intoxication of Palm Sunday before the terrible Passion.

In the immediate future, it will be the ordeal, “our great wealth”, as Thérèse would say. Since Mr. Martin's condition required special care and incessant monitoring, Mr. Guérin had him transferred on February 12, 1889 to the house of the Bon Sauveur in Caen. The last visit to Carmel was heartbreaking. The family will have an ex-voto placed in the chapel bearing, with the fatal date, this cry of faith: "Blessed be the Name of the Lord!" The wound is none the less raw. “I feel, writes Marie to Pau me, that it is an incurable wound, that my heart is broken forever.

However, she must overcome her own pain to boost the morale of Céline and Léonie, who have settled in Caen, near their patient. And when the two young girls returned to Lisieux and boarded with their uncle, Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart felt the dismemberment of Les Buissonnets, made necessary by the situation. The nice cottage evoking so many happy years! Upon receipt at the Carmel of part of the furniture, she wrote: "When I saw this move, these old remains of Les Buissonnets which brought back a thousand memories, and poor Tom following behind the cars, I could not m to stop crying... So that's what life is!...” But the consoling note immediately arose: “We will see one day in Heaven our dear father enjoying endless happiness. Ah! how light his sorrows will then seem to him!” Hence this confession to Céline: “When you seemed to desire religious life, I was as if annoyed that all of us were considering only that. Today I think in a completely different way and I understand the words of this poor little father who told us in his simplicity: “Another one pulled from under the cart”.

In the visiting room, you have to hear clumsy remarks, indelicate reflections on paternal seclusion. Marie comes to the point where she can no longer pronounce her father's name without sobs choking her voice. Always original, she said one day to her sisters: “We have such a great humiliation that even if one of us became a saint, she could never be canonized by the Church. This against which Therese strongly rebelled. Another time, Uncle Guérin having, in Marie's absence, spoken quite crudely of mental illnesses, young Thérèse observed in a distressed tone: “Oh! Fortunately, Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart was not there! What pain she would have had! How she would have left with a sad heart! How I thank God! »

The godmother underlines the energy of her goddaughter. On the occasion of a bachelor's degree, the two sisters discussed the prophetic vision that Thérèse had had, long ago, of the bent old man, with his head wrapped in a cloth. They suddenly had a revelation of its deep meaning. It was indeed their father who had thus appeared, "bearing on his venerable face, on his whitened head, the sign of his glorious ordeal." Moving detail, during his illness, in his spasms of anxiety, he liked to cover himself with his handkerchief. “Like the Adorable Face of Jesus which was veiled during his Passion, so the face of his faithful servant had to be veiled in the days of his sorrows, in order to be able to shine in the Celestial Fatherland with his Lord, the Eternal Word! .. ”

However, Thérèse's profession was approaching. It had been delayed by eight months, but Marie clearly explains the reason for this measure, which had nothing pejorative about it. “There was no other motive than his young age. As regards, in fact, her dispositions, all the nuns and our Mother Prioress gave her this testimony: "That she was a very fervent novice and that we have never seen her commit the smallest infidelity to the Rule. She never asked for any dispensation. »

The preparatory retreat is the occasion for a whole exchange of correspondence. The eldest alluding to the "heavenly harmonies" that the Savior arranges for his fiancée, the latter rectifies. Jesus speaks to him on another keyboard. She describes her honeymoon in the aridity, in the dark - the Manuscript will say: “In the tunnel. » - « If it is dark for my little girl, continues Marie, it is not dark for her Husband and it is in the sun of Eternity that he prepares his wedding basket for her. The goddaughter thanks the dear godmother and, without seeming to touch it, reveals her to us in a nutshell: "Are you not the angel who led and guided me on the road to exile until I enter the Carmel? Even now you are still for me the angel who consoled my childhood and I see in you what others cannot see, because you know so well how to hide what you are that on the day of Eternity many people will be surprised”.

Thérèse instructed Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart to illuminate, for her entry into the Chapter where she would pronounce her vows, the Child Jesus of the cloister for whom she was in charge. She always shows up for her sister the "little girl", but the eldest is not mistaken. The ceremony over, Mary reads on the back of an image representing a Nativity, the thoughts that her sister wrote for her: "Now her face is hidden from the eyes of mortals, but for us who understand her tears in this valley of exile, soon his resplendent Face will be shown in the Fatherland, and then there will be ecstasy, the eternal union of glory with our Spouse. »

Thérèse's sail was set for September 24. It was overshadowed by the absence of M. Martin, whom we had hoped to bring to the parlor, which M. Guérin formally objected to. Little Therese felt the shock, enough to moan. Disappointed like her, Marie wrote to her in the middle of the night a missive dripping with tenderness: “I think of you so much that I can't sleep, I need to say a little word to you from Heaven. You know better than I what you are to your Spouse, but nevertheless let me repeat it to you. We never tire of hearing such a love song. You are, beloved little child, his favorite among all... In his very Heart he has collected your tears, they have mingled with his, for you are now one with your Spouse. »

A few months later, Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart left the novitiate. She will continue to take care until the end of Mother Geneviève de Sainte Thérèse, who was to die holy on December 5, 1891. She had learned a lot from her contact. This nun, who had shown him so much understanding, was indulgence personified. Was she not pointing out that Jesus, far from overwhelming the Samaritan woman with reproaches, had bestowed upon her a eulogy: "In this you speak the truth"? Above all, she revealed to her nurse the secret of turning suffering into love. Twenty years of illness, twenty months of torture in the slow disintegration of the body, had not been able to alter his patience or his joy. Marie admired, not without a certain dread, such serenity. In her old age, she will know how to profit from the lesson.

It was on the occasion of the funeral of the foundress that she pointed out this trait of virtue of her youngest: a lay sister said to her: "It is clear that these bouquets come from your family, because you put them enough in having, while those of the poor, you despise them". I wondered what Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus was going to answer on hearing these unjust words, but she looked at this sister with the most amiable air and hastened to accede to her wish by putting the least flowers beautiful in evidence. »

From the Bon Sauveur, the news arrived more optimistic. The return, many times expected, of Mr. Martin to his home, could finally be realized on May 10, 1892. Perhaps this is the place, to deny certain false allegations and dispel erroneous assessments concerning the evolution of the , to cite the certificate drawn up, at our request, by Dr. Henri Couléon, head doctor of the Psychiatric Hospital, with the help of brief notes taken from the Book of the Law, the other files from this period having been destroyed: “Medical observations report a psychic weakening with alternations of excitation, depression and mental confusion. Considering several previous apoplectic strokes followed by transient paralysis, we must conclude, as regards the diagnosis, to a psychic weakening of vascular origin, consecutive to cerebral arteriosclerosis. »

On May 12, the old man was taken to the parlor of Carmel. If he could not express his feelings, he was sensitive to the words exchanged in front of him. When his daughters took their leave, he stared at them for a long time with his eyes misted with tears, and, raising his finger aloft, murmured this single word: "Heaven!" Marie was never to see him here again.

On February 20, 1893, Mother Marie de Gonzague, who had reached the end of her two three-year terms, contributed to the election in her place of Mother Agnès of Jesus, then 32 years old. This promotion filled Mary with joy. The two sisters, however different they were, and perhaps for this very reason, had always had a mutual affection and admiration for each other; they were but one heart and one soul. The future would bind them even more. This friendship which had helped Marie to enter Carmel and facilitated her adaptation would only grow with the years.

The new Superior, when appointing the direction of the novitiate to the Prioress who had left office, begged Thérèse to help the latter by serving skilfully as adviser to her companions with whom, moreover, she would ask to remain when her time of formation was over. accomplished. She would be their angel, and Mother Agnès did not think it necessary to inform Mother Marie de Gonzague of the assistance thus requested from her sister. Delicate mission, likely to create many conflicts of authority, but which the innate tact of the young nun was able to make accept without serious clashes. A providential mission above all, which will allow her to spread her message, which will force her to mature in it, which will raise her to the summit of charity.

Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart slipped imperceptibly with regard to Thérèse from the role of elder to that of disciple. It is intuitive; she does not have a temperament to allow herself to be absorbed by work; she has time to observe. It seems that she was the first to guess the mystery of love hidden behind Thérèse's 20s. “One day, she wrote, I watched her pass under the cloister and I said to myself: “When I think that no one here realizes the holiness of this soul! "It's no wonder because she was simplicity itself." - “I saw, she notes again, a young postulant overwhelm her with reproaches, say the harshest things to her. Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus kept a perfect calm, and yet I guessed the extreme violence she must have done to herself to hear such biting words with such serenity. » Marie marvels at this beautiful balance combined with a real openness: « She was so pure and so simple at the same time that we could entrust her with any temptation on this subject: we felt that she would not be. not disturbed”. Already possessed her the passion of the most distant. Marie, seeing her searching the library, asks her what she is looking for. “A book on missions. I like them, the missionaries. »

When Thérèse handles the pen and the brush, Marie will have recourse to her talents more than once. Out of a total of fifty-eight poems, six will be composed at his request. But she saw herself put to contribution, in 1894 and 1895 for the feast of Mother Agnès of Jesus, on January 21. Thérèse hires him for her project for a play – the pious recreations 1 and 3 on Joan of Arc, which takes place in two parts: The shepherdess of Domrémy listening to her voices and Joan of Arc fulfilling her mission. It took all the ascendancy of the little one for Marie, so fiercely hostile to performing, to agree to go on stage for the first time. She admits to having pulled it off “pretty decently”. - “I was not at all intimidated and I was full of my subject. »

In the first play, she plays Saint Catherine, who instructs and supports the good Lorraine. But she admits that it was Thérèse herself - she interpreted the role of Jeanne - whom she had in mind when she sang to her, with all her tenderness and while repressing her tears: "I am your sister and your friend I will always watch over you, For in the eternal Fatherland You will be placed near me. Soon the celestial hills Where the virginal herd grazes Will open their divine springs to You, Transparent as a crystal. And in the countryside, With your companions, You will follow the Lamb, Singing the New Song. "If you had seen, she adds, his angelic air looking at me and also his expression of love so deep which answered mine! I can say that in this that moment I tasted something of the happiness of Heaven." The following year, for RP-3, Marie represented France, Thérèse again incarnating Jeanne. The testimony is no less eloquent. "By saying: I come to you, arms loaded with chains, I walked towards her so that she could take them off. fet of a true Joan of Arc. What a noble and warlike air! Ah! she was indeed a Joan of Arc. »

On June 1, 1894, Thérèse put into verse, at the request of her sister, who was haunted by the thought of the hereafter, the themes of time and eternity combined in the offering to God of the present moment. It's the hymn “Just for Today”. The finale betrays the hope that already lifts Thérèse's soul: I will soon fly towards you, dear Face, When the day without setting on my soul will have him; So I will sing in the Holy Fatherland the Eternal today. On this same feast of the Sacred Heart, Thérèse gave Marie an acrostic poem as a gift which she entitled “the portrait of a soul that I love”, and which she signed: “A heart of a grateful child”. It is worth quoting because it expresses the essence of the description of our Carmelite:

Poetry 6: The Portrait of a Soul I Love

M Oh I know a heart, a very loving soul,
A having received from Heaven a sublime Faith,
R nothing here below can delight this ardent soul:
I There is only Jesus whom she calls her King.
E Finally, this beautiful soul is great and generous,

D soft and lively at the same time, always humble of heart.
U n distant horizon... the luminous star

S are often enough to unite him to the Lord.
A I once saw her loving independence
C seek pure happiness and true freedom....
R spreading benefits was his enjoyment
E t always forgetting himself, his only will!...

C It was the divine heart that captivated this soul
OE work of his love, worthy of the Creator
U one day i will see her as a pure flame
Rto float in Heaven near the Sacred Heart.

A grateful child's heart

The law of state duty would call Mary to more prosaic duties. Towards the end of June 1894 she became temporary: she would have to follow the preparation of the meals, to organize the menus, the service of the tables, the distribution of the portions. She was delighted to be able to keep a close watch on her younger sister, whose health never ceased to worry her. Therese experienced this: “Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart, being temporary, made me do many mortifications. She loves me so much that I looked spoiled, but the mortification is greater in this case. She cared for me according to her tastes, which were absolutely contrary to mine”. Marie agrees, after the fact: “When I was on temporary staff, I was never able to find out Thérèse's tastes, and, unwittingly, I made her practice serious mortifications. On the days, for example, when the dinner consisted of beans, not knowing that they hurt her, I filled her plate and since she had been recommended to eat everything and she did not want to disobey, she was sick at every time. She only shared this detail with me when she was in the infirmary. »

Marie has not renounced the sense of family. Everything that touches his family moves him. When she learns, on July 29, 1894, of the death of Mr. Martin, for whom she had a real cult, sadness overwhelms her, but to give way immediately to a feeling of supernatural plenitude: "I remember, will write she said, that in the morning, after having received the news of her death, I looked at Heaven on the courtyard and I thought: “What happiness! Now he is in Heaven, he lives in another world, and he is happy. In the afternoon, Madame Maudelonde asked us to come to the visiting room. I also remember that in the evening I was at the serving table; So Sister Saint John of the Cross said to me: “But what do you have today? You have a figure absolutely as if you were in Heaven”. I replied: "It's not really surprising that I have a face of Heaven since my poor father is there this morning." Basically, I felt such happiness to see him finally delivered from this poor earth! »

This death freed Céline, who had been the saintly old man's nurse until the end. Marie never stopped encouraging him during these six years. Céline joined her sisters at Carmel on September 14, 1894. Léonie had, on June 24, 1893, attempted a new attempt at the Visitation of Caen, which she would have to leave a second time on July 20, 1895 at the t hour when Marie Guérin would prepare, in turn, to find her four cousins ​​in the fence. From Canada, Fr. Pichon followed this collective flight towards the cloister and towards union with God. Marie regularly sent her veritable memoirs, which were embellished, for Saint Almire, with acrostic verses composed by Thérèse at her request. The answers are more and more spaced out. Overwhelmed by retreats and confessions, the Jesuit goes straight to practical advice, in which we find the echo of his correspondent: “Getting more communions, what a bait! what a source of emulation! Spare nothing to deserve it... with your dear Lamb for Prioress, you have to make yourself very small, put yourself under everyone's feet, be forgiven for being so much her sister. Beautiful harvest of renunciations, sacrifices, thorns and roses flushed with the blood of your heart... Reading the story of the small and large storms that your pen confides to me so filially, I remembered this pretty word from Fénelon "God polishes a diamond with another diamond". - “I willingly forgive you for not liking books. Everything becomes simpler in our soul as we advance towards Eternity. Taste, taste more and more the Gospel. But I blame you for not daring to call Jesus your Spouse. So fi! The heart has boldness. Dare and Jesus will smile at you. These epistolary consolations will become rarer. The monk has sick eyes. To spare them, Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart is reduced to blackening only two pages, and in large print.

At a time when the influence of Father Pichon was declining, that of Thérèse took over. When the latter will pronounce her act of offering to Merciful Love, she will think of associating Mary with it. The latter showed on all occasions a real revulsion for extraordinary ways. Within the Community, she did not exactly pass for a mystic. But under the voluntarily hardened bark, Therese knew what was hidden of valiant faith and authentic piety. One day when the two sisters were employed side by side to wither the grass of the meadow, the dialogue began on this kind of oblation and the proposal was made in clear terms: "Do you want to join me?" - "Of course not," was the answer. I don't want to offer myself as a victim, the good Lord would take me at my word and suffering scares me far too much. First of all, this word victim really displeases me. Our nun did not surrender immediately. "I accepted," she noted, "that she give me this act, as she had just composed it, but I reserved

think again before saying it. Having read it, I pointed out to her that she did not speak of the Sacred Heart, and it was to please me that she then added: "Begging you to look at me only through the Face of Jesus and in his Heart burning with love". Then further: "I want to work for your love alone, with the sole aim of pleasing you, of consoling your Sacred Heart and of saving souls who will love you eternally". It should be understood that, in these sentences, only the passages mentioning the Sacred Heart come under Mary's suggestion. Satisfaction thus obtained, she bowed – for her, the independent, this word had a meaning – in front of Thérèse's tender request. “She was so eloquent, she will say, that I let myself be won over and I don't regret it, either. »

No doubt also she mixed in her thoughts the elevations of Thérèse concerning the act of offering. She told Thérèse about it one day when they were together in the library, asking her, since she herself was unable to do so, to synthesize all this into a poem on the Sacred Heart. Therese hesitated. She admitted that she did not see this devotion like everyone else. The aspect of the repair did not appeal to him. Only the vision of Consuming Love seduced her, which was certainly at the center of the apparitions at Paray-le-Monial, but to which, at the end of the 1895th century, Catholic opinion seemed less sensitive. She reflected and, finally, accepted: which earned us, probably in October 23, the poem PN-XNUMX, a canticle made up of eight verses of eight decasyllables, where, in a very dense form, the reflections of one and the other Carmelites.

On Saturday March 21, 1896, Mother Marie de Gonzague replaced Mother Agnès de Jesus at the head of the Community. According to the indications in the book of Foundations, the new prioress entrusted the direction of the novitiate to Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus. She begged her to take on the job herself, wishing to play only an auxiliary role at her side. In fact, if she did not hold the title, she exercised the function. This mark of high confidence, this situation which had become official, by giving the young nun an increase in authority, drew even more to her the attention of Mary who, after having gauged her holiness, quickly came to sense her message and go to his school. In this way, with astonishing lucidity, she precedes all her sisters: and Mother Geneviève who was frightened by the boldness of the "little one", and Mother Marie de Gonzague and Sister Marie des Anges, who had the merit of encouraging Thérèse, but without penetrating the extent of her supernatural ambitions, and Mother Agnès of Jesus herself, overworked by her duties, who waited three months before reading the manuscript of the Story of a Soul and paid little attention to the act of offering and to the wound of love which shortly followed. This clairvoyance explains Marie's decisive interventions to bring her goddaughter to deliver her supreme teachings.

She fears losing her prematurely. “On the night of Thursday to Good Friday in the year 1896, she says, she was seized, as she tells it herself, with the first spitting of blood. I met her in the morning, pale and exhausted and exhausting herself with housework. I asked her what was wrong with her, she seemed so bad to me, and offered her my services. But she simply thanked me without telling me a word about the accident that had happened to her. The affair had no immediate serious consequences, but Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart remained on the alert. We guess that she was more eager to question the patient, eager to wring her spiritual discoveries from her. It was thus that, made aware of a particularly evocative dream that Thérèse had had on Sunday May 10, and eager to receive from her details of the graces that had filled her retreat on September 8, she asked for a detailed account of it. .

On September 13, Marie gave him a letter with a moving accent: "I am writing to you, not that I have something to say to you, but to have something from you, from you who are so close to the good God, of you who are his privileged little wife, to whom he entrusts all his secrets. The secrets of Jesus to Thérèse are very sweet and I would still like to hear them. Write me a quick note, this may be your last retreat, because the golden bunch of Jesus must make him want to pick...” Memories of the past flood in; a restrained admiration pierces every line. Ah! if she, too, could "exercise herself in the art of loving." To remove any hesitation, she adds at the end - and the word does not lack flavor, between the four walls of the cloister - "Our Mother has allowed you to answer me (by return mail)".

Within three days, she was given possession of what would become Manuscript B: an autograph memoir consisting of five folios written on both sides, and comprising an introductory leaf and pages addressed in direct style to Jesus. The mention of September 8 which appears at the top of these has not yet received a definitive explanation. Did Thérèse predate it? Does it only communicate a document already conceived and written during its retirement? Whatever these hypotheses may be, we are here before one of the most beautiful jewels of mystical literature, which Thérèse will sign: “The very small one”. In these incandescent phrases, whose lyricism sprang from absolute sincerity, Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart suddenly discovered the incomparable greatness of her whose first steps she had guided. She had read the autobiographical manuscript written the previous year for Mother Agnès of Jesus, and the final flights which touched on the sublime. But she now held in her hands, in these modest sheets, a single document in which charity overflowed like a flow of molten lava. She softens, she cries, she understands that the one who produces such a masterpiece is already no longer of the earth; she especially suffers from feeling so far from her, and, very feminine in this, she cannot help expressing her pain. This is the subject of the letter she addressed to her sister on September 16, 1896.

"I have read your pages burning with love for Jesus, your little godmother is very happy to possess this treasure and very grateful to her darling little daughter who thus reveals to her the secrets of her soul. Oh! say on these lines marked with the seal of love...Like the young man in the Gospel, a certain feeling of sadness seized me before your extraordinary desires for martyrdom.Here is the proof of your love, yes, you possess it love, but I don't. You will never make me believe that I can achieve this desired goal. For I fear everything you love. This is proof that I do not love Jesus as you do. Ah! you say that you do nothing, that you are a poor weak little bird, but your desires, what do you count them for? write to your little Godmother if she can love Jesus like you..."

These reflections reveal in Marie a real perspicacity. She perceived the genius of Thérèse, she recognized in her a Saint of extraordinary dimensions. Moreover, she feels that her message is universal. How to resolve this contradiction? She, Mary, who distrusts sensationalism, who does not intend to run in front of the holocaust or play the great soul, how can she find herself concerned by these effervescent effusions? Let us bless this case of conscience and the frankness with which she poses it. This earned us, the very next day, an admirable clarification from Thérèse, without which perhaps a certain obscurity would have hovered over the path of childhood. Quickly, she breaks the misunderstanding. “My desires for martyrdom are nothing, they are not what gives me the unlimited confidence that I feel in my heart. » What pleases God, she specifies, « is to see me loving my lowliness and my poverty, it is the blind hope that I have in his mercy. Here is my only treasure, darling Godmother; why shouldn't this treasure be yours?..."

That Mary is reluctant to make an oblation to justice which implies a certain magnanimity and exposes her to the heaviest trials, what is surprising in that? But here it is a question of something else: “...understand that in order to love Jesus, to be his victim of love, the weaker one is, without desires or virtues, the more fit one is for the operations of this consuming and transforming Love. The mere desire to be a victim is enough, but you have to agree to always remain poor and without strength. It is trust and nothing but trust that should lead us to Love...” raises more objections.

Moreover, open as she was with her sister, Thérèse discreetly hid from her the most terrible of her martyrdoms. “In an intimate conversation (at Easter 1897), testifies Marie, she asked me if I had sometimes had temptations against the faith. I was surprised by his question, for I was unaware of his ordeals against the faith: I only learned of them later, especially by reading the Story of a Soul. So I asked her if she had any herself, but she answered in an evasive way and diverted the conversation. I understood then that she did not want to tell me anything, for fear of making me share her temptations, and I was very struck by her prudence on this occasion. » A letter to Fr. de Santanna completes this deposition: « In the course of the conversation she said to me: « How good is the good God! It seems to me that when I see him I can't help crying because he's so good... He'll make me feel sorry for him! »

Made bold by her previous successes, Marie did not hesitate to call on Thérèse's pen. On June 12, 1896, for the feast of the Sacred Heart, she obtained the poem PN-33, four stanzas entitled: "Ce que je see soon for the first time! Here we find thoughts familiar to the eldest of the Martins. But Thérèse introduces her lifelong dream, on the way to becoming a dazzling reality: "You know it well, my only martyrdom It is your love, Sacred Heart of Jesus. Towards your beautiful Heaven, if my soul sighs, It is to love you, to love you more and more".

An intimate conversation between the two, in May 1897, will earn us a piece of high doctrinal significance. Therese extolled before her sister the omnipotence and promptitude of the help given by the Blessed Virgin. Touched by the simplicity and depth of her teachings, Mary asked her to write for her what she thought of her heavenly mother Thus was born the poem in twenty-five couplets of eight alexandrines, entitled: "Why I t' love, O Mary”. PN-54. Thérèse would later say of this work: “My little Canticle expresses everything I think and what I would preach about the Blessed Virgin if I were a priest. We must be grateful to Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart for having been at the origin of this Marian sum, of an entirely evangelical inspiration, and which anticipates the way in which the Second Vatican Council will approach the same theme.

In June 1897, Thérèse was going to give her eldest, as well as Mother Agnès of Jesus and Sister Geneviève, another more personal gift. Sensing that her end was approaching, she bequeathed to them an image of the Child Jesus mowing the lilies, similar to the one that Marie had received, at the age of 8, from her aunt Visitandine, and had given to her goddaughter for her taking of the habit. The Saint stuck it on a light cardboard and framed it with several thoughts, including this one which sums up her soul: “I see what I believed. I have what I hoped for. I am united to Him whom I loved with all my power to love”. On the back, she copied, as a farewell, words borrowed from the letters of the angelic martyr Théophane Vénard. She ended with these words: "Me little ephemeral, I'm going first." One day we will meet again in paradise and we will enjoy true happiness. » (see LT-245).

Tuberculosis spreading its ravages on an exhausted body, it was necessary, on Thursday, July 8, to transfer the patient from her cell to the infirmary of the Holy Face located on the ground floor. She found there, arranged on a console, the Virgin of the Buissonnets. Marie slipped into her ear these lines from her recent canticle: "You who came to smile at me in the morning of my life Come and smile at me again, Mother, here is the evening!" Then, astonished at the fixity in Thérèse's gaze, she asked: "What do you see?" » - « It's not like the first time, oh! no, it is the statue that I see and which seems so beautiful to me! In the past, look, it wasn't placed like that… I saw it from the side, do you remember? In the past, you know very well that it wasn't the statue...” “She didn't finish, concluded Marie, but I understood.

During these last weeks, thanks to the benevolence of Mother Marie de Gonzague, Thérèse's three sisters were frequently at her bedside, Sister Geneviève (Céline) serving as nurse. Mother Agnès of Jesus transcribed the patient's words, which would later constitute the Novissima Verba. Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart, for her part, collects mainly with a view to transmitting them to the family, certain traits or words, several of which concern her personally.

On July 10, she wrote to her cousin, Jeanne La Néele: “I am as if I had been buried under a heavy cross, and that is indeed what the good Lord has done. It seems to me that I am no longer of this world, that I have already left before our dear angel. Everything seems so vain, so artificial to me when I see eternity so close, when I see on the threshold of the other life a little sister whom I love so much, who is like a part of myself. She was disillusioned. “The good Lord would rather perform a miracle to rob us of this angel who so desires to possess him, than he would perform one to leave him here below. I won't give you any details about his patience, his cheerfulness, his holiness. I renounce it, because it is untranslatable. It is a delightful abandon, the confidence of a child who knows he is loved by the best of fathers, a boundless confidence. The July 14 letter to Mme Guérin betrays personal reactions to this heroic constancy: "I find, like you, that one has the right to be proud to have such an angel in one's family, it is a grace : it seems to me that the good Lord says to me:

"You see everything that needs to be done, you see all the way to follow, imitate her"... In such a short time to have arrived there! Father Youf said to our Mother: “You have a second Mother Geneviève. Mistletoe, but this one is ripe before its time and Jesus wants to pick it to make it the delights of his Heaven... Seems like I'd be fine the rest of my life without saying a word. I need more than ever silence and recollection, I need to converse heart to heart with the One who alone always remains to us. »

Thérèse had just completed her memoirs which would later form manuscript C. She had a presentiment of the good that this work would do; she thought of her activity beyond the grave. She opens up to Marie - it was July 13 or 18 - "If you only knew how I make plans, how many things I will do when I am in Heaven!" - What projects are you doing? asks his sister. - I will begin my mission, I will go there to help the missionaries and prevent the little savages from dying before being baptized. The dying little girl felt burdened with souls.

Let us also record this remark, at first sight disconcerting for those who do not recognize in it the pure reflection of a child's soul: "Around the month of August 1897, approximately six weeks before his death, I was near his bed with Mire Agnès de Jesus and Sister Geneviève. Suddenly, without any conversation having led to this word, she looked at us with a celestial air and said very distinctly: "You know very well that you are caring for a little Saint." I was very moved by this word, as if I had heard a Saint predict what would happen after his death. Under the influence of this emotion, I moved a little away from the infirmary. »

The big sister was especially distressed by this martyrdom which worsened and prolonged beyond all forecasts. Thérèse said to him: “We don't know what it's like to suffer like that, no, we have to feel it”. - “And I, answered Marie, who asked the good Lord that you do not suffer much; this is how he answers me.” - “I asked him, corrected the Saint, that the prayers that could put an obstacle to the accomplishment of his plans for me, He does not listen to them. On another occasion, Marie could not restrain this cry of compassion: "What pains me is the thought that you are going to suffer again." - “Me, I don't have any pain, protested the patient, because the good Lord will give me the strength to bear it. »

A little robin, Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart testifies, came from time to time to visit her, so she protected all the birds in the garden. And one day when I wanted to set traps for the blackbirds that were devouring the strawberries, she said to me: "Don't hurt them, they only have life to enjoy." When I am in Heaven, I promise to send you fruits, if you do not destroy the little birds. And there came fruit every year after his death. She also prevents her eldest from uprooting a sickly, withering shrub: "For me, who is about to die, I beg you, give life to this poor rhododendron." Which is worth it to flourish again in the courtyard of Carmel.

At the bedside of loved ones awaiting death, tenderness is expressed less by words than by gaze and silence. Seeing Marie who lingered to contemplate her, Thérèse said to her: "Godmother, how beautiful you are when your face lights up with a ray of love..." She guesses in Marie an ulterior motive, a regret. Oh! it's not jealousy, because Mother Agnès of Jesus herself admitted it: rather the pain of feeling somewhat eclipsed by Pauline in the affection of her youngest child. Then, embracing them both with the same gesture, and as if to melt them into a single attachment: "Little sisters, it was you who brought me up." »

In the very name of this love, Thérèse warns against the need for friendship and confidence which risks hindering the search for God. “So I won't be able to pour out my heart to Mother Agnès of Jesus! exclaims Marie. - "There would only be in case she needed consolation." On your side, you must never speak to her for your consolation until she is prioress. I assure you that is always what I have done. So our Mother had given her permission to speak to me, but I didn't have it and I didn't tell her anything of my soul. I find that this is what makes religious life a martyrdom. Without it, it would be an easy life without merits. She does not hesitate to say to her eldest: "You have a proud nature..." Marie, who reports the word, continues: "As I asked her if I would become a Saint, she answered: "If you want. ..”

Thérèse, she will practice until the end, and in all areas, the most rigorous abnegation. “Three days before her death, declares our Carmelite, when she was tortured by fever, she deprived herself of asking for water in which we put a little ice; she also refrained from asking for grapes when someone forgot to put them within reach. Seeing her looking at her glass, Marie noticed her mortification and said to her, "Would you like some ice water?" She replied, “Oh! I want it so badly! - “But, I continued, our Mother has obliged you to ask for everything you need, so do it out of obedience. » - « I ask what is necessary for me, she tells me, but not what makes me happy; so when I don't have grapes, I wouldn't ask for them. »

Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart will be marked by the death of Thérèse. “In the morning, I ran to get Mother Agnes of Jesus who said to her as she entered the infirmary: “How did you spend the night, poor little martyr”? Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus looked at the statue of the Blessed Virgin and said with an angelic expression of resignation: “Oh! I prayed to her with fervor!... » - « It is really pure suffering, because there are no consolations. No, not one! »

“She was panting, her tongue was so parched it hurt to see, she was in so much pain that we dared not leave her, and that day our Mother allowed the three of us to stay close to her for Mass. The whole day passed thus in anguish. “If this is agony, what is death? she said with an untranslatable accent. She seemed abandoned by Heaven and earth. His abandonment made us think of that of Our Lord on the Cross. »

Marie was so impressed that during the day she left the infirmary for a while and confided her anxiety to several of her colleagues. She hesitated to join Thérèse, wondering if she would have the courage to see her in the grip of such torments. She prayed with all her soul for the grace not to sink into despair. So what was his consolation when these terrible battles ended in ecstasy. Let him do the talking for the outcome. “... At the time of his death, at 7 a.m. 15 in the evening, she pronounced, in a broken voice, her last act of love. The sufferings were then at their peak, and she had to make a supreme effort to pronounce, not only from the heart, but from the lips, these words, looking at her crucifix: "My God, I love you..." It is immediately after she had her vision. Her gaze fixed on the top reminded me of the one I had seen in her childhood, when the Blessed Virgin appeared to her and healed her. It is something of Heaven that is impossible to describe. A sister passed a torch in front of her eyes, but she did not seem to notice it, for already, I am sure, she was enjoying the divine light. She raised her head, which she had bowed until then; her face was no longer congested as it had been during her long agony, but of a whiteness as it were transparent and of an admirable beauty. She remained in this attitude for several minutes, then she bent her head and exhaled gently in her ecstasy of love. It was Thursday, September 30, 1897. I felt then the assurance that God had answered her prayer and that it was love that had broken her bonds, as she had desired. »

“After his death, I asked to stay with Mother Agnès and Sister Aimée of Jesus who were in charge of burying him. The features of the Servant of God reflected an ineffable grace, she seemed to be 12 or 13 years old. couldn't take my eyes off it. It was like a glint of heavenly glory appearing on his face. In the choir, in front of the gate where she was displayed, her expression became more serious, she no longer looked like a child. But I noticed that on the morning of October 4, when the coffin was closed, despite certain signs of decomposition which were already beginning to appear, she resumed that childish look that I had seen in her in the infirmary. »

Let us again gather this feature which shows how much Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart, without certainly glimpsing the path of glory on which Thérèse was embarking, had, more than any other, discerned the eminent holiness which was concealed under the obscurity of this brief existence. . Death consummated, she piously collected certain memories of the deceased. Seeing her wretched sandals that had been patched up so many times - the alpargates, as they are called in Carmel - she wanted to pick them up. A lay sister objected: “You won't keep that filth! And, snatching them from his hands, she threw them into the fire. Later, this nun, who had acted in this case only out of charity for Mary - one does not use what was used by a patient - bitterly regretted her inconsiderate gesture. “One would have seen,” she said, “how far his poverty went. »

Thérèse was not long in spiritually visiting her who was mourning her. “The day after his death, Marie testified at the Apostolic Process, after an act of charity, I felt his soul draw near to mine in such a feeling of joy that I cannot express it. »

Chapter 6: In the wake of Thérèse

Chapter 7: Ascension of a Soul

On July 12, preceding her death, Thérèse had said to her sisters: “Don't think that, when I am in Heaven, you will only have joys. This is not what I had, nor what I wanted to have. You may, on the contrary, have great trials, but I will send you lights that will make you appreciate and love them. You will be obliged to say like me: "Lord, you fill me with joy by all that you do". What Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart feared more than anything was the ankylosis alienating the freedom of movement: “It is not possible for God to ask me that”. And that was precisely what he asked for. The independent will be placed, for eleven more years, in a state of subjection which will purify and accomplish it. On February 26, 1929, to save her having to go up and down the stairs leading to her cell, she was placed on the ground floor, in a recently built infirmary, which she would occupy until the end of her life: “ It's a great sacrifice for me, she notes the same day, but I feel that I would hurt God if I were sad, because He does everything he can to soften it for me. . Yes, he gives us in all the hundredfold. »

A Sister of admirable devotion will henceforth be attached to her service, always ready to respond to her calls, for the patient did not like isolation. It is this nun who will guide her to the refectory, fortunately located nearby. The cripple walks painfully, weighed down by the years, more and more stooped, leaning forward, in a humiliated gesture, “like Christ carrying his cross, she underlines. She still drags herself through the daytime hours of the Office, but it hurts her to no longer be able to go to matins. She sighs: “It casts a shadow over my life. Optimistic all the same, she is not one of those pusillanimous who sued Heaven for their disappointments: "Is it God's fault?" If my temperament is made to adapt to these miseries, does it have to work a miracle to take them away from me?... But the enchantment consists in our heavenly Father turning everything around for our benefit. It is not his hand that causes the ills, it is his hand that heals the wounds, those of our body as well as those of our souls. »

The suffering went crescendo until August 1932, when the successful intervention of a famous homeopath from Paris stopped the progression of articular rheumatism. Marie was still able, although at a slower pace, to take part in meals and collective recreation, to take an interest in cooking, to pay and receive visits. Seated at her table, she was busy, with her deformed and numb but not paralyzed fingers, making reliquaries, placing under glass, in a metal frame and on a background of red cloth, an image of Thérèse, surrounded by a sort of chain, a fragment of the shroud, having wrapped the bones of the Saint, and the corresponding inscription. This obscure, meticulous work, which she produced in thousands of copies until the end of her life, required application, finesse, tactile agility.

Efficiently helped by her nurse, Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart fulfilled her provisional duty until 1933, when she handed it over to Sister Geneviève of the Holy Face. This year saw indeed a resurgence of its troubles. She caught cold during a two-hour session in the visiting room and endured severe pain in her left side. An energetic treatment averted the danger, but, towards the end of January, attacks of sciatica broke out which transformed into torture the few steps to be taken to join the Community. Marie testifies, in this situation, to an admirable patience, self-indulging: "I no longer want to think about anything but the present moment, to suffer from minute to minute" - "It is not so much suffering that is pleasant to the good God. It's to want everything he wants” - “Nailed to a cross, this is the portrait that Jesus left of him. »

When she has to move, she punctuates the route with anxious calls: “My God, help me, I can't take it anymore”. The legs refusing any service, she must resolve to use the gift of Mrs. Post, a wheelchair that an inclined plane will allow to introduce to the Choir. It is one more step on the road to subjugation. She feels it cruelly, every morning, when she is pushed in her car to the Oratory where she attends mass.

Confronted with the immobility which plunges her into full drama, how will our nun react? She plays neither the Stoic nor the great soul; it remains altogether natural and supernatural. In no way aiming to give work to the Congregation of Rites which awards liturgical honours, it is part of what Joseph Malègue called “the middle classes of holiness”. Let us collect his cries of distress: "My knees are like in a vice" - "During recess I feel my soul as in an abyss of loneliness and unpleasant things... so I pray to the good God internally, I say, "O my God, have mercy on me, I beseech you. Without you I would despair. » - This morning, on my way to the Oratory, I read on an ex-voto: « Sister Thérèse, thank you ». So I felt like an anguish, and, with tears in my eyes, I said to myself: "So it's only me that it doesn't relieve!" Oh ! no, she does not come to my rescue, and yet she loves me”. This morning I couldn't take it anymore. It is something to be taken into one's own person. If I didn't have the good Lord, I don't know what would become of me”. - “The devil gets involved. He wants to tempt me so that I despair. » « But in these terrible moments, she declares, I never stopped praying, calling on God to help me: « Come, come! Hurry up! “Finally, prayer remains my state of mind”. She has the loyalty to add, "If I weren't crippled, I certainly wouldn't think about it so much." She admits having said to the Lord: “It is your duty to come to my aid”. And again: “I know very well that you will not abandon me, but I ask you not to even pretend to abandon me. " Every morning, she travels in thought the fourteen stations of the Stations of the Cross: "What a profound mystery to see a God become man, to suffer thus for us and to appear so unhappy that the soldiers said to Simon of Cyrene: "Help- him because he might fall on the way. It is an unfathomable mystery of love. »

We read in the Community the biography of a Saint “who had a face inflamed in suffering”. This is what excites the verve of our Marie: “Little Thérèse did not have an inflamed face, however she smiled all the same in suffering, she was cute. I would like to smile, too, but, my God! what a pain I have! “Poor godmother! How we prefer it thus, courageous, but without panache, and so close to us!

“Little Thérèse, she notes, suffered with love. She was firing on all cylinders. Me, I suffer by complaining. However, I would like to imitate him a little bit. With Jesus she cries out to the Father: “Why have you abandoned me? Spiritual consolations elude her. She is still “in an arid and waterless land”. She opens up to Léonie: “Often, when I am in darkness, I like to repeat these words of the creed: I believe in eternal life”. - “At night, when I feel that it is impossible for me to turn around, to change my position a little, I have to cling to the good Lord so as not to despair. And all day long, I tell him: "Have pity on me", because, at times, it's as if I no longer felt I had faith. It's like an abyss in me. » From her work table, she can question, in the courtyard of the infirmary, the statue of Thérèse seated, the Gospel on her knees. It is in vain. “I beg her, she does not answer me. Or rather, she corrects, if she turns a deaf ear, it's because she's not blind, "and it's precisely because she can see very clearly that she doesn't bother me. don't answer. Marie has enough lucidity to conclude: “Would you believe that I consider it a grace to walk in darkness? Our Lord wishes thereby to increase my merits. » In the darkest hours, the Sky forms its horizon line: « Then we will talk about our exile and we will be very happy to have suffered. It will seem to us very little compared to the happiness that we will have acquired by these sufferings. Meditating on the wedding at Cana, and thinking of the intoxication of armies of health and activity, she sighs: "Today I have no more wine." But the Gospel text makes her change her mind: “At the banquet of my life God was not mistaken. He saved the best wine, that of the event, for the end”. The memory of her goddaughter leads her to confidence: "At times, when I think of little Thérèse, who is of our family, such a great Saint, I am as if overcome and tears come to my eyes... For that she leaves me in this state of infirmity is that there are surely great graces hidden down there. »

As she grew older, Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart of this autobiography, the success of which proved prodigious: "I know it by heart, but I always find some new treasure in it... I breathe in it a perfume of the Gospel". His prayer is simplified; it always evolves around the Pater or some verse suggested by the liturgy. At Christmas 1934, the letter writer delivers the text that nourishes her "You will find a child wrapped in nappies and lying in a crib... Let us love more than ever the effacement, the humility, the simplicity in front of such a mystery". At the end of her career, as imperiously as in the past, the "little doctrine" imposed on her, of which she had received, in September 1896, the dazzling synthesis. It dismisses glosses that complicate or sweeten. Mother Agnès of Jesus lent her a work in verse, which claims to illustrate the way of childhood: “Not interesting, replies Marie. All the time there "turns around" around the same thought... Until the end of our life we ​​will have to endure all these productions for the love of God and out of charity for all those who rack their brains to explain the simplicity of a soul... Peace! The peace! But there will be no peace! »

In the same tone, which verges on paradox, she rejects the theses, which Céline indignantly points out to her, where the problem of suffering is approached in terms that seem to question divine mercy: "Don't talk to me about all these dissertations of doctors and all scholars in spirituality; I don't believe in anything, I leave it all behind, I'm just a kid who can barely stutter and can't say anything but aa a. The following night - it was December 26, 1937 - a dream showed him the Virgin presenting a child to him, under the astonished gaze of a monk who looked like a prophet. Immediately, I woke up, she writes, and I understood that a new era had opened for souls; this is indeed the “little way”, the mystery of mercy explained by a child. Don't talk to me about other mysteries, I only understand this one. »

the mother idea which delighted Thérèse, what one could call the dialectic of misery and Mercy, Marie twists and turns it in all directions, translating in her own way: "I am capable of anything, but He too is capable of anything”. Rereading the notes of a young girl in her retreat notebook from 1876, at the Visitation: “O my God, one day you will ask me everything... and if I present myself before you, the. empty handed? she reacts immediately: “Ah! now, I am not afraid to present myself to the good Lord with empty hands, because I know that He alone can fill them. »

Statements of impotence are crowded under the pen of our heroine: “I am very down to earth and as cold as time”. - “I will die in my hedgehog skin. » - « I am a poor godmother, ruined in every way. Pray for me because I don't make amends as I get older. I am well aware of this, and if I did not rely on the infinite mercy of God, I would have been in despair a long time ago. » - « For nothing I have tears in my eyes. How miserable I am! But I like to remember these words of the good Father Pichon: “The most miserable are the favorites of his mercy”. And isn't that what our little Thérèse wrote: “What happiness to bear our crosses weakly! This is indeed my case...” - “So I have to be happy to walk like a turtle, not to be able to go as I would like, here or there, finally, to be crippled. The truth is that it's a very big gain for me, I feel it. »

The annual return of Teresian solemnities and the visits of Princes of the Church, which they occasion, constitute neither an attraction nor a diversion for the patient. She admits this to Léonie, with the somewhat brutal frankness that characterizes her: "You don't know how much everything weighs on me now. The good Lord no doubt allows it to purify my soul. But even the parties in honor of our little Saint leave me like an ice cube. No doubt I thank the Lord for using her to make himself known and loved, and I console myself for my insensitivity by thinking that it may also serve him to make poor sinners more sensitive to his graces. And then, I stop there, without thinking any longer, because I am truly like a log. Only the contemplation of Jesus suffering saves her from the doldrums. “One day, I was humiliated to see myself so infirm, when, fixing my eyes on the Holy Face which is in the choir, these words changed my dispositions: “He was considered as a man smitten by God and humiliated” . After that, should we complain and wish to have nothing to suffer? »

Confidence indeed constitutes the other facet of the diptych, a confidence which in no way bets on personal merits, but relies solely on God. Mary has perfectly assimilated the mystical conception which is at the heart of the act of offering. “I want, like Thérèse, to put all my trust in the One who operates the will and the doing. And this trust, I ask my Jesus, hoping that my little Thérèse will get me to be able to say like her: “The Lord took me and put me there! » « I am a poor woman who has no wealth other than that which her Husband would like to give her. “I no longer envy any Saint, O my God, be my holiness yourself. To drive away the black butterflies, she willingly hums this refrain from a canticle to the Virgin: "Heaven is my homeland, I am of the chosen people. My brother is called Jesus, And my Mother, Mary."

The word "Father" has a magical calming effect on her, at the same time as she recognizes in him an almost irresistible power over God himself. “The hand of the Lord is gentle and tender; it is that of a Father. And if it touches us, it can only be to relieve us, not to make us suffer. » - « Those who have had their heads too hard, the good Lord has pity on them all the same in his great mercy. That's what he will do for me. " On each anniversary, faced with a balance sheet that she considers not very glorious, Marie concludes the examination with a cry of hope: "May Jesus erase all the dust that I have caught during the long years of my pilgrimage here. down and turn them into precious stones, for he said, "When your sins are red as scarlet, they will become whiter than snow. » - « By dint of jolting, our journey will come to an end, and we will fall, with what joy! in the arms of God. So this Father, more tender than the most tender of mothers, will not ask us what we did during the few days of our pilgrimage here below, no, but how we loved him.

She joins there the highest, the purest Teresian intuition: to use everything, joys, sorrows, works, successes, failures, to please Jesus: "This thought of pleasing him does me good, it helps me more than earning merits for Ciel because I have no confidence in what I can earn, but I want to please him by trusting him. From then on, the meanness of what she calls her “ant works” matters little! Charity at the center of the most banal action is nuclear energy that springs from the atom. “I was just reading theStory of a Soul and I came across the passage where little Thérèse speaks to her novices and I said to myself: “O my God! a life devoted to things so small, and yet so great in your eyes! Must our little things, done with love, be precious to you! »

Theory commands practice, and first of all on the burning ground of Community relations. On February 16, 1935, Marie delivers to her correspondent in Caen her resolution for retirement: “Always the same. I like to meditate on these words of Our Lord to his Apostles: “My little children, love one another as I have loved you. So I want to apply myself always to be charitable towards my sisters, to love them as Jesus loves them, to see their qualities rather than their faults. Don't they do everything they can to please God? And he loves them with an infinite love. Would I be more difficult than him, who is infinitely perfect and who supports our imperfections and our miseries of all kinds?... And I who am imperfection itself, and who demand perfection from others! What an aberration of mind. »

Make no mistake about it. Its vivacities of yesteryear are well damped. The solitary life, the bite of pain, the spirit of prayer curbed what was too fiery in the temperament. When Mother Agnès of Jesus called her sister, who was preparing to enjoy a hearing of the little singers of the basilica, the act of renunciation was consented to in all serenity: “You have to make sacrifices”. Marie looks helpless, but not sullen. She knows how to laugh and jokes willingly, she still likes, in recreation, to throw out a funny or catchy word, mischievously highlighting the folklore of the psalms: "Gebal and Ammon and Amalec, Oreb and Zeb... and Zébée and Salmana", forbidding to sing "the lamentations of Jeremiah", mimicking his entry into Paradise, all caparisoned with faults, but defended by Thérèse, who will reply to the indictment of the devil's advocate: "I who know her well, I tell you that she is very nice, my godmother. » - « Then the angels will bow, and I will be in Heaven. » She is amused by the way of scandal that she causes when she plays the miscreant, launching in the middle of a conversation on the Eucharist: « I will soon have my hour of adoration. Do you think it makes me happy to be in the dark, gouging out my eyes, to see, between the bars, a little Host who is not going to show me anything of the treasure she hides?”

Does she foresee a touch of triumphalism in the evocation of the great days of the pilgrimage? Quickly, she brings us back to the reality of faith: “We must rejoice only in the glory of the good God. Otherwise, we are not in the truth. When we seek to highlight her personal role in the Teresian adventure, she humbly replies that having received much, she has wasted much: “It is not the same thing to teach or to do. Come on, let's leave it. It is the good Lord who will see. “It is especially in the private interviews, during the licenses, that she pours out deliciously, drawing on the inexhaustible repertoire of Alençon, Le Mans, Les Buissonnets. A cheerful companion, in a word, always original and so lively, of which we are obliged to say that she is still completely out of the series.

It happens that the old men cower chillily on themselves. With Marie, it is a broadening of horizons that age causes. In November 1936, she confided to her nurse: “During all my religious life I have, so to speak, done nothing with the intention of saving souls. Now I only think of that, of offering my trial for the salvation of souls. I really have to help little Thérèse who is Patroness of the Missions. And I think about it often. Do you believe that I save some? It is my only strength to hope for it. The following January 4, she returned to the charge: “There are days when I feel so distressed that I tell myself that I could not suffer any more. I feel as if abandoned by Heaven. The devil tempts me into resignation... It is only the thought that I am saving souls that gives me a little courage. » - « Except to love the good God and to sacrifice oneself to save souls, everything is hollow. » - « I feel so sad to see myself so helpless, so crippled, I run after freedom without ever being able to catch it. Too bad, but as long as I catch souls! »

She thinks of a slavery that is otherwise tragic, that of those chained to hatred who, at the gates of hell, in the words of Dante, “leave all hope”. “It is terrible, she writes, never to have the smallest moment of happiness, never to see God. If we only knew what it is!... These souls will be like wandering stars for whom a storm of darkness is reserved for eternity. This is what wrests this cry of generosity from him: "I would agree to remain on earth, in this so painful state of soul and body, until the end of the world, if the good Lord wanted it, in order to to save more souls. »

Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart has a predilection for the underprivileged of society. While the song of the International salutes in them "the damned of the earth", it places them in the aristocracy of Heaven. “It is there, as our little Thérèse says, that we will know our titles of nobility, and then the great ones of this world will very often be below the humble and the poor of today. She was moved by the thought that workers, temporarily under construction at Carmel, may be unaware of everything about the supernatural order: "I ask the good Lord to have a secret grace yes they deserve eternal life." When we pity her, she points out that there are darker miseries. Lepers especially excite his pity. She irresistibly thinks of them when she can dispose of a generous offering. How she would have understood the conciliar remarks on the poor Church and the Church of the poor! “I was thinking this morning, she writes, of the way in which Our Lord went about establishing his Church. He could have taken learned men who would have vindicated his doctrine. No, he took ignorant people, sinners... It's marvelous and how touching. »

Among the specific intentions that solicit our Carmelite, the Vicar of Christ is in the lead. Pius XI willingly appeals to the votes of his daughters of Lisieux with the one he has made “the Star of his Pontificate”. When he is grappling with persecution, when he suffers, when death awaits him, Mary redoubles her entreaties. When we surprise her in her nocturnal insomnia, if we ask her what she is thinking, she invariably replies: “I pray for the Pope”.

She still and always feels a special mission to Léonie, who, from the Visitation of Caen, tirelessly begs for the Lexovian chronicle and the crumbs that fall from Thérèse's table. She goes out of her way to inform her, entertain her, edify. Sometimes his letters are veiled in an accent of melancholy: “Those who could tell us something beautiful, something new, are those we love and who have gone before us to Heaven. But they are silent, they do like Saint Paul, who, after having been caught up to the Third Heaven, could only tell us this: "Man's eye has not seen, his ear has not has not heard, his heart cannot understand what God has in store for those who love him» But why get lost in complaints and vain recriminations? “We are really in the age of infirmities. All this misery is the ringing of the bell announcing the arrival of the train. Yes, soon we will be at the port. In the meantime, let us endure with courage, or without courage, the troubles of the journey. »

Within the Community, as we have said, the favorites of Mary are, in addition to the sick, the sisters of the White Veil, who with her nurse surrounded her with their care, and the tourières. To these she continues to visit; she sends them charming notes, not without advising them not to become attached to them, for she does not intend to arouse around her person a cult of pseudo-relic. As for the bedridden nuns, despite the difficulties of access, she wanted to give them a word of comfort. " Oh! take me, she said to her nurse, to cheer them up and interest them. They wait for me, and when I don't go, they get sad. »

Although she denies directing people's consciences, the ties that bind her to Thérèse earn her a small clientele, which she encourages with her letters and her interviews. The composition is very eclectic; it features Victoire, the former servant of Les Buissonnets, who has become a merchant of the four seasons; at his side, a childhood friend of our heroine, Louise Coulombe; and a retired high official, widower of that Edith whom Marie had loved so much. She will lead all three of them, in very different circumstances, and after a proper initiation, to perform in her presence, in the parlor, the act of offering to Merciful Love.

The advice she lavishes on her correspondents is only a reflection of Teresian teachings. To Mrs. Post, she tirelessly repeated the sovereign primacy of grace: “We are in the divine elevator. Jesus carries us in his arms, and at the end of our life, we will find ourselves back in the place he has destined for us from all eternity. It will be given to us freely because our good will is enough for it. What can he expect from our nothingness? Nothing. He only asks us to love him and trust in his infinite goodness”. To M. de Mesmay, who was climbing a harsh Calvary, Marie repeated the price of the cross: "When I see you so resigned in the midst of your growing infirmities, so always submitted to the will of the good God, I thank him for these graces so great that he grants you, I have more and more the assurance that at the end of this life, there will be no purgatory for you. This is the flower that our Thérèse has in store for you. Now is the time of your purgatory, take courage, even if you feel no courage. »

For his old companion from Alencon, our Carmelite exorcises the ghosts of Jansenism. “At the beginning of this new year, I have the same reflection as you: will my hand tear off the last leaf of the calendar?... and like you, I would be frightened to find myself face to face with the justice of God. . But, my little Louise, that's not it at all. You are beside your business. We did not enlist for nothing in the legion of Thérèse, in the legion of souls dedicated to Merciful Love... Do not imagine a God armed for you with his justice when you appear before Him, that makes him pain is not being in the truth. To be in the truth is to recognize that we are nothing, that we have done nothing to deserve Heaven, that it is given to us by grace, and that the infinitely merciful Lord will give it to us for nothing. , or rather because of Him who won it for us. »

When the same correspondent is distressed by her coldness at the Holy Table, Marie responds with the example of Thérèse, "who had no sensible consolations..." - "We have only more merits to feel nothing, she adds. The summit of this apostolate is the conversion

of a hypersensitive and unstable teenager who had thrown herself precociously into the worst promiscuity and who had to be placed first in a refuge, then in the Good Shepherd. Our Mary becomes attached to this child, discovers in her “a rich nature”, even perceives intuitively that she is a prey for Christ. But you have to overcome her revolts, calm her bitterness, overcome the shame she has of herself, the dread of total gift. Fifty letters, spread out from 1935 to 1940, will bring to the poor girl the proofs of an affection which never gives up. It is a true education of confidence, in the style of spiritual childhood. “Thérèse saw you all alone, looking for happiness, and she said to herself: “It is I who will help her find the happiness to which her soul aspires, I will show her that there is no other on earth than to serve the good God and to love him, because he alone is worthy of his love, his heart is not made for creatures, it is too big for them to be able to satisfy him fully. » - « There is in you enough to make a saint. »

The young girl opens more and more to grace, but she knows the impatience of beginners and also the backward glances and missteps. Marie, maternally, guides, takes up again, stimulates this wavering will, though thirsty for the ideal. To those who are sorry for their often fruitless efforts, they keep repeating: “It will be the work of your whole life, you will never reach the perfection you desire. It is the good Lord who, seeing your good will, will give it to you at the moment of your death. We have to put that into our minds, because it is the reality. The thought of the apostolate is suggested many times, through Thérèse's advice to her novices. “For an act of virtue practiced in the char, we can save a soul”. Prayers and sacrifices give effectiveness to the advice, which gradually bears fruit. The young person, long rebellious, begins to glimpse the breaking of the bonds that keep her in the world. She is afraid of not loving enough, but her old friend from the cloister reassures her: this fear is already love.

On October 15, 1936, in the midst of the turmoil of the Popular Front, the Community celebrated the fifty years of religious life of Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart. The latter, who abhorred ostentation and resented having any honor shown her, had to say: "I underwent this ceremony to do the will of God." Nothing was missing from the party. The jubilee, a flowery stick in her hand, was led to the choir gate in her car draped in white. Mgr Picaud, Bishop of Bayeux, presided over the mass and recalled the fraternal ties which had united the heroine of the day and Thérèse. In the intimacy, a poem of circumstance, composed by Mother Agnès of Jesus, unrolled, in thirty three stanzas, the eventful film of this existence completely dedicated to God.

Gifts poured in from everywhere. Pius XI signed with his own hand a watercolor which represented him giving his blessing, while Thérèse, postulant, crowned her eldest who had just made profession. Father Marie-Bernard, from La Grande Trappe, himself brought the sculpted motif which, at the request of generous Canadian donors, he carved for Les Buissonnets, and which evokes the Virgin of the Smile curing little Thérèse. Marie contemplates the work for a long time and declares with great emotion: “I can still see Thérèse's gaze staring at the Blessed Virgin. It's unforgettable. The present she had coveted above all else, the one that gave her the most pleasure, was a chalice intended by her for a young priest, her nurse's nephew. She thus combined her Eucharistic worship and her debt of gratitude towards the humble Sister who cared for her with so much self-sacrifice and whom she had made the confidante of her thoughts and her memories. She herself would soon empty the sacrificial cup to the bottom.

Chapter 8: The Last Step

On his old days. Marie could, like Céline, compare herself to a “shaky castle”, or in memory of Saint Ignatius of Antioch, speak of the “ten leopards attached to her steps. Age brings with it an accumulation of infirmities. If inner freedom remains untouched - "a great soul is mistress of the body it animates" - the zone of physical independence shrinks ever more.

On March 8, 1937, the condition of our Carmelite suddenly worsened; a hernia, contracted for several years, ignites to the point of putting his life in danger. The weakness of the heart prohibits any surgical operation. The patient, who can no longer eat, receives the sacrament of extreme unction. She prepares for death with serenity, not without experiencing the anguish of her total incapacity to act. “I who love my freedom so much! I feel that it is the good God who does everything in my soul”. The spectacle of nature relaxes her: “I see from my bed a small shrub growing. I love the garden, it's relaxing, it's pure. “An unprecedented treatment, which could be described as miraculous, saves her in extremis. After twelve days she can finally take communion and exclaims, at the arrival of Jesus-Host: "I have been waiting for you for so long!"

She will know a new reprieve, but more disabled than ever, suffering from angina pectoris and uraemia, while the rheumatic pains are accentuated, her hands are writhing, and she has trouble holding her head straight. From now on, she will eat in the infirmary with her nurse and will no longer take part in the exercises of the choir: which makes her desire, according to the expression she borrows from Saint Peter, “to abandon her tent”.

To encourage herself, she reads the Novissima Verba. Mother Agnès of Jesus, who collected these last words of Thérèse from day to day, also notes, for our edification, the reflections of her eldest, during her long way of the cross. The voice of nature is not absent, but it is always the voice of grace that has the last word: “I pray to the Blessed Virgin as if she were living by my side. I say to him: “Oh! come to my aid. You can see in what distress I am, obliged as in a public place, to submit to so much care, because of my impotence. » - « When I see the little birds flying, I say to myself: Alas! I can't, I'm immobilized without being able to move. Who will give me wings like a dove? And I'll take my flight, and I'll find my rest, but he's not on earth” - “It's unheard of to feel so weak all the way! Not a shadow of courage! Not the shade! And addressing Our Lord: "Help me to love you, because I couldn't do it alone." She calls it “breaking through her cocoon to fly away”.

She always rebounds towards love: “Ah! how not to love a God so powerful, so great, so good, who does everything for our good! If I went to hell, I would tell him for all eternity, “My God, I love you. Although it is feared that she will tire herself, she asks for her work and always works on her reliquaries. “It's not that I find pleasure in it, but you have to know how to get bored to get bored. She is under no illusions. "This morning, when I got up, I said to myself: 'I mustn't think that today will be better than yesterday. Oh ! No ! Every day, we have new sorrows, so I prefer to accept them in advance. »

The thought of her misery does not trouble her. It has long been rooted in infinite mercy. Nothing can shake it. “I am very close to the port, I ask my divine Spouse to burn all my faults in his love. - "Often I say to God: I would like to be a Saint, that's why you called me to Carmel, but I want it to be to please you, because you enjoy seeing our soul beautify. Out of delicacy for Him, she forbids herself, as much as possible, from venting her complaints. We find in her, on a level more accessible to human weakness, the echo of the feelings which animated Therese in her terrible last years. This is not a simple phenomenon of verbal mimicry. We sense the effective and permanent action of the Thaumaturge, who visibly supports her "dear godmother", on the trail that she herself has cleared. Marie, moreover, confided in her: “Sometimes nothing interests me and I am internally so exiled! But, at the same time, I feel like a hidden force, like someone helping me in secret and telling me: “Don't worry about anything”. - “One has only to say: My God, I love you. That's enough to fill a day. »

Our nun found herself more and more sealed off between four walls. On Sundays, however, when the weather permitted, she insisted on taking a tour of the garden in her little car, among those flowerbeds and flowerbeds that reminded her of so many things. She willingly stopped at an auspicious angle, to greet "the blessed vision of peace," as she called it: the dome of the basilica rising above the trees. She recalled the walks that Madame Martin liked to take on this hill, during her visits to the Guérins.

What was his joy when, on the occasion of the National Eucharistic Congress of Lisieux, Cardinal Pacelli, came as Legate of Pius XI, to inaugurate it solemnly! Despite her repugnance for official receptions, she had once said: “I very much want to know all the cardinals who pass through the monastery, because one of them might one day be Pope; and I would be happy to receive in Carmel the blessing of the future Vicar of Jesus Christ”. It was served as desired. On July 12, 1937, whoever would accede to the Sovereign Pontificate two years later entered the cloister. Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart attended her mass and received communion by her hand, in the infirmary where Thérèse had died. She was presented to her by the Bishop of Bayeux as “the one to whom we owe the story of a soul. » From the Prince of the Church and his brilliant retinue his gaze was directed towards the image of the Saint: « When I think of what she was doing! It was so little! But she put so much love into it! Also we can say that the good Lord has piqued his honor to make it worth, to the point of giving it all the glories imaginable. »

It was in this same infirmary that Bishop Picaud celebrated Mass on May 22, 1938, for the fifty years of profession of our Carmelite. There was no longer any question of an outdoor party. Gratitude and joy were concentrated within. She blessed Heaven with the subjugation of religious life, which once inspired her with so much revulsion: "Everyone loves his freedom: yet it is the source of many evils, and we will never be able to thank God enough for having called us to his service, to the true freedom of the children of God. »

The triumph of Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart, in these painful years, was to be able to offer to the Lord the young girl whose conversion and Christian education she had taken charge of. She smashes her last objections: "When your nature seems to revolt and claim its freedom, tell it that it is claiming its chains, because true freedom is not giving oneself to Jesus, and not to the world. , who only makes slaves?” Her correspondent alleges that she is too miserable for such a vocation. “Who is worthy? » replies the nun. It is a purely free gift. “When you think that a God so powerful and who needs nothing, approaches his poor little creature to ask for his heart, He who is loved by millions of angels! But it's not for Him, it's for us that He does this, because He loves us and knows very well that He alone can make us happy. »

The young woman, named Yvonne, finally decides to take the habit, at the Bon Pasteur in Le Mans. Mary exults. She encourages him from afar, urges him to make the act of offering, inquires into the smallest details of his existence. She wanted the Carmel to provide the postulant with her first nun's robe, for a tourière Sister to represent her to her adopted goddaughter when she made her profession under the name of the Saint of Lisieux. She will even offer as a gift, an extremely rare exception, her own photograph. Like her youngest at the issuance of the vows of Sister Marie of the Trinity, she had the effect of Joan of Arc at the coronation of Charles VII: “Now I can die, she said”. In this spiritual promotion she saw a real moral miracle: "It was little Thérèse who wanted to give me the consolation of bringing this soul back to the good God, to

to show that with my little sufferings united to those of Our Lord, I can save souls. What a mystery! It was such a darkened soul, but now see how it rises with love towards the good God. I prayed so much for her! Prayer is something. Our Lord said to Saint Margaret Mary: “A soul who prays can console me for a thousand sinners. »

Yvonne will soon fall ill. Mary will lavish on her messages of tenderness, will exhort her to joy, and will offer her last trials for her. She will entrust it before her death to the care of Sister Geneviève of the Holy Face. His protege will have to leave the convent to rest. She will return to it, to leave again for health reasons in July 1942; she will enter the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Saint-Vigor, where, eaten away by tuberculosis, she will pass away a few years later in admirable feelings. In memory of the friendship that bound her to Thérèse's godmother, the Carmel had wanted the Shrine of the Saint, during its national journey, to pay the dying young woman a final visit.

Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart was also interested in Charles Maurras, whom Pope Pius XI, given the religious interests involved in this affair, had specially recommended to the merits of Carmel, in a letter addressed personally to Mother Agnes of Jesus. It was alongside her, practicing, there again, discreetly, this “exquisite art of the second rank” which was her grace, that our nun had the opportunity to approach the leader of Action Française in the parlor. She was moved by her uncertainties in the face of the mystery of faith; she was astonished that an intelligence of this quality honestly confessed to being powerless to overcome them. She who found God with the simplicity of a child was all the more compassionate in the face of these hesitations, this secret confusion, which she grasped obscurely. Arguing was futile. Mary prayed. The very day before her death, she will testify how dear this cause was to her. One can think that his intercession was not unrelated to the happy ending. How to believe, Lord, for a soul dragged along by His dark appetite for the lights of day? Lord, put her to sleep in your certain peace Between the arms of Hope and Love!

More than ever, faithful to the spirit of the two Thérèses, Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart felt she was a “daughter of the Church”. When someone spoke to her about an article in which a publicist complacently exposed the scandals of medieval Christianity, she replied quickly: "It's curious, it seems to me that nothing could shake my faith." I find, on the contrary, that the Church must be very large not to have foundered, to go through everything. I've always had a lot of faith. » - « A centigram of faith, she said, is enough to remove all the evils. No doubt we are talking about the night of faith, but it is a starry night; the real night is the absence of faith. “The material sun is a small thing. It is God the true sun, it is he who enlightens our soul, who brings joy to our lives, when he wants. It is God the infinite beauty, the true, the only beauty, the source of all beauty, of all joy. And the joy that shines in the soul Is the sun of both. “The rest, she says again, is real rubbish. »

Marie frequently returned to memories of her youth. Willingly she repeated, as M. Martin had formerly done, the word of God to Abraham: "I myself will be your very great reward." » - « Sometimes, she wrote to Bishop Germain, on February 21, 1939, I question the future and I say to myself:

How to die? Because death is a mystery. But also, how can you live on earth, when infirmities envelop you? When I was little and someone wanted me to do something I didn't like, I answered: “I'm really free! But now I'm no longer free, no longer at all, and sometimes I don't dare to think about it anymore and I say to myself: “How can I live? So, I have no other resource than to entrust myself to the good God, who prepares for us an eternal life of freedom and love, and who allows our passing sufferings, united with those of Jesus, to procure it also for so many lost souls, who don't know which way to reach this freedom. »

The souls ! it will be until the end his passion, his torment, his reason for living. At the beginning of January 1939, she declared: "When I went to mass yesterday, I was in a lot of pain, and then I was embarrassed, compressed, my arms hurt... But I offered this to the good Lord to get some poor sinful soul not embarrassed and lost all eternity. »

The weaker the organism, the more vulnerable it is, prey to viruses and microbes of all kinds. In March, it is a bronchitis that shakes the patient, and for several months, dooming her to exhausting fits and insomnia. She was nevertheless able, on May 5, 1939, to take part in the session, whose fraternal charm she tasted, where the Community celebrated Céline's 70th birthday and her own birthday. She philosophizes about the event. “The other day, she wrote to Mrs. Coulombe, I said with some pain that I would never have expected to be so disabled.

at age 80; that if I had known in my youth what awaited me, I would have dreaded old age. But, come to think of it, I am completely "out of business". I should say, on the contrary: I did not know how to make, at 80, such a beautiful inheritance. In reality, isn't it a beautiful heritage that we will have won here below by our physical or moral sufferings? For a month and a half, I have been a prisoner, unable to leave because of bronchitis. It is a great deprivation for me not to be able to be taken to the garden on Sundays. I offer the good Lord the sacrifice of this walk, so that sinners are not deprived, all eternity, of rejoicing in the celestial gardens, where we will meet with so much happiness. »

The Real Presence will always remain in his eyes a subject of astonishment. “Sometimes, before the good Lord, I said to myself: “What it is all the same to have faith. I'm there in front of lighted candles and a little white circle that I can't even see, and I have to believe it's Our Lord. It is still very mysterious. She recognized there what we have dared to call "the coquetry of Divine Love" which hides itself so that we seek it, but desires that we find it.

As for her heavenly goddaughter, she had never felt her so close to her. “I know a beautiful story, she begins one day in an inspired tone. There was once a little girl named Therese who became the greatest Saint of modern times, and that little girl was our sister. She in no way separates her from her family. "His unique glories," she asserts, "are the answer to our great sorrows and humiliations of old." The holiness of the child has its roots in that of the parents.

Will the rose-sower have no regard for the affliction of her poor godmother? Twice she came to visit her, as mentioned in the correspondence addressed to Léonie: "It was January 29 (1939), during the night, I suffered a great deal from rheumatism in the knees, and a very devoted Sister of the White Veil, who lying in a cell next to me, had done what she could to relieve me, so that my legs and knees no longer felt twisted, which sometimes happens. After many attempts, unable to succeed, she said to me: “I am going to ask our Saint to come to your aid. And she withdrew quite sad, but confident. A few moments later, I felt like someone was very gently putting my legs straight, without any effort, and I had no doubt of a supernatural intervention. My nurse's prayer had been heard and my little Thérèse had really come to my aid. I no longer suffered at all and I was able to sleep through the night. »

Another time when Mary, seized with a throbbing pain in her shoulder, found herself paralyzed and unable to cover herself, the Saint “came down” and with her fraternal hand, raised the covers and soothed the suffering. "Now go back to Heaven," the patient had told her, after having thanked her. Instant smiles, fleeting encounters.

When the war broke out, Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart, who had inherited Mr. Martin's proud patriotism, painfully felt the national anguish. It invites us to place our hope in the Lord, to soar above human vicissitudes. “As long as the kingdom of God comes,” she repeats, “everything else is a trifle. » Er she willingly quotes the words of Saint John of the Cross: « Do not let yourselves be saddened by the unfortunate incidents of this world, for you do not know the goods they bring and by what secret judgments of God they are disposed for joy eternal of his elect. »

She experienced it herself. When she goes through her octogenarian past from memory, she sees it punctuated with incidents where she recognizes graces. "God writes straight with curved lines", says the Portuguese proverb. Returning to her illness in 1924, our nun noted: “My years of infirmity were necessary. I still couldn't go to Heaven like that, after jumping from one foot to the other, with a shovel and a rake, in the garden, pulling weeds and planting almost everything. » - « So what did I do in Carmel? Nothing. It was high time that the good Lord gave me a more lucrative job: the one I do in my old age and which consists only of suffering a little to save souls. The Lord is too good to have chosen me everything that is most opposed to my tastes, and I thank him for it with all my heart. He knows what he wants from me and I trust him completely. » - « I can't be sad. It's as if someone was supporting me underneath, in spite of myself. »

She had always been used to looking at herself with a detached look. It is certainly not she who would have posed for posterity. The anti-Pharisee that she will remain to the end does not care passionately about the opinion of men. This is reflected, in pleasant terms, in this note from 1925: “When I am dead, I know everything that will be said of me. It will be said, for example, that at the end of my life, I had rheumatism which prevented me from walking and that I could not bear them too badly. It will no doubt also be said that I had a beautiful soul, and then we will add a few spiritualities that I would have said in a few corners, and then also that I was a little original, and then we will end by saying that little Thérèse is came to get me, and I think it will be the truth because I ask her every day, and also the Blessed Virgin and Saint Joseph. »

The thought of death hardly frightened our Sister; she had always been familiar to him. Along with eternity, freedom and mercy, it was one of the leitmotifs that she most willingly orchestrated. Let us gather, over the years, his testimony on this theme. In 1900: “Death is something much simpler than you think. Oh yes ! it must be very simple to fall into his father's arms!... And very sweet at the same time. In 1925: “Thinking of this day of death which saddens nature so much, I suddenly had this inspiration: 'It is the day of great mercy'. What I felt was so deep. I understood that this is the moment when the good Lord causes the torrent of his mercies to overflow over the soul. He gives her, without any merit on her part, all that he has resolved to give her from all eternity. » In 1929 : « I have the idea that I will not be afraid, at the moment of death. The day of death is the most beautiful day of life. » In 1931 : « It is a grace not to be afraid of death. But it is an even greater grace to say, with our little Saint: “It is what He does that I love”. In 1939: “Jesus, our Savior, conquered death by his Resurrection. What do we have to fear? We can go through where he went, with confidence and without any apprehension. But, for that, it is necessary that He himself puts us in this disposition, otherwise, our thoughts on this point are all

to sadness. But, when he wants it, they are all in hope. »

The intimate notes of Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart - rambling reflections, as we have seen, and in no way a diary of the soul - end, on December 4, 1939, with thoughts concerning the agony of Jesus and his thirst for salvation. of all men. She would like to "compensate" him for failures and ingratitude. The last word is for the apostolate: “My God, I am entirely yours, I hope everything from you. I hope that, by all the little sufferings that I offer you, I will console you and give you all the souls you desire, O my infinitely good God! When I think of your kindness, like our holy little Thérèse, I need to cry. »

The year ended on a very big ordeal. The vigilant nurse who, for nearly ten years, lavished her care on the patient, had to leave for the clinic on November 27 to undergo surgery. Marie felt this separation cruelly. She surrounded her companion with an uneasy affection, always fearing that she would tire herself excessively. To be deprived of it had the effect of truly heartbreaking. Only escape from above restores serenity. “When one is so advanced in life, she wrote to Mother Agnès of Jesus on January 1940, XNUMX, one feels a particular melancholy, like a traveler who has said goodbye to so many things that he will never see again. But he still has new and infinite horizons that he will soon contemplate with the One who made his heart so big that He alone can fill it. »

To Léonie she addresses this last message: “I try to make money from everything to pay for the place in Heaven of so many poor creatures who think only of having good places on earth! And again, I wouldn't be able to pay for their place or mine if Jesus didn't put all his merits in the balance. The nurse returned to the monastery on January 4, 1940. It was only to notice a persistent cough in her patient which worried her. On Tuesday the 16th, the fever soared, while the heart panicked. Those who cared for her opposed her going to the Oratory, Marie protested with all her might: “I want to see our Mother. When she was in Pauline's presence, she begged: "Have pity on me, at least you who are my friends." We decided to have her take communion. The doctor, called urgently, diagnosed pulmonary congestion on the right side.

The chaplain, Canon Travert, administered the sacrament of extreme unction to the patient. He loved this soul, fresh and pure as a mountain flower, with its snap judgments and its verbal findings. Above all, he appreciated her sincerity and humility, which made her too severe for herself. “Oh! the dear godmother, he said! Without suspecting it, it is she who directs me. Receiving her regrets about her past miseries, he had reassured her: "Don't be afraid, your lamp is well lit." »

After a relative improvement, the violent recovery no longer left the slightest hope. When told that she was dying, Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart expressed her satisfaction: “It is not sad to die. See how quickly it happens. She was peaceful as a child, attentive to those around her, having for each one a word of kindness! She received with particular tenderness the five Sisters of the Tour. She thanked with a beautiful smile the nun who helped to lift her. The latter was afflicted with deafness, so every evening she gave him a mark of friendship from which, for nothing in the world, she should not be distracted. “Poor little girl, she sighed, she doesn't hear. She only has that. Ah! you don't have to hurt her. »

On January 17, Marie was installed for a few hours at her desk, but she was as if absorbed and spoke little. She was still able to take communion that day, as well as on the 18th. Mother Agnès of Jesus sent her an autograph letter from His Holiness Pius XII, who blessed the Community and charged it to transmit a paternal message to people for whom much had been prayed for. ! " Oh ! she exclaimed, how good the Holy Father is! How he cares for souls! » A brief dialogue began with the Prioress: « I don't have the shadow of courage » - « You are however very close to Heaven and I believe that you will enter it without any detour - Oh! how I desire it! - Are you afraid of death ? - No way ".

While they were putting her back to bed, with incredible difficulty, she offered, with an apostolic intention, her ultimate sufferings: “Souls! souls!... There are so many who don't love the good Lord! Oh ! it's so sad ! To her sisters who pitied her she replied gently: "It will have an end." Around 22:30 p.m., after the office of Matins, the Community gathered around the bed where the dying woman was valiantly fighting her last battle. She welcomed her Sisters with a beaming face, then she seized the crucifix and brought it to her lips, saying: “I love you”. It was his last intelligible word.

The end being long overdue, most of the nuns withdrew, ready to return at the stroke of the bell. But at 2 o'clock in the morning - it was January 19, 1940 - the denouement came quickly. The dying woman, lying on her right side, got up, found the strength to sit down and uttered, without exhaling any sound, a rather long prayer which we guessed was the Pater, followed no doubt by the act of offering to Merciful Love. Immediately afterwards, she raised her head to fix alternately above, facing her bed, the Holy Face, the image of Therese and the statue of the Blessed Virgin. Then she lowered her eyes a little, gave her nurse a grateful look, and exhaled softly.

Buried on January 23, his body rests in a vault laid out under the reliquary of his glorious goddaughter. A few days before her death, in anticipation of the feast of January 21, Saint Agnès, Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart had written down, predating them, her wishes to Mother Agnès of Jesus. In this posthumous document we read these sentences which constitute the summary of all his faith as of all his hope:

“I often wondered: “But what will we do in Heaven, all eternity? These words of Our Lord suddenly came to my mind: "Eternal life consists in knowing You, You and the One You have sent". It is not too much eternity to know the infinite goodness of the good God, his infinite power, his infinite mercy, his infinite love for us. These are our eternal delights which will know no satiety; our heart is made to understand them and be nourished by them. Often, before receiving Communion, I like to say the act of contrition: “My God, I am very sorry to have offended you, because you are infinitely good, infinitely lovable, and sin displeases you. It is not because I fear a reproach or your punishments, but because you are infinitely good, perfect, and, out of love, I must always seek to please you; it must be my only goal, my only happiness. Down here, I understand a little of what you are, but in eternal life, when I see you face to face, I will have a clearer knowledge of You, my God, who are my Creator and my Father and who have given me such great proofs of your love..."