From Céline to Thérèse.July 17, 1894My dear Thérèse, I'm going to write to you running, because these days I don't have time to look back. J. of C.
(Joseph de Cornière) is there and we are busy all day doing photography. We dress up and we do a whole story of travelers in tableaux vivants (“Excentric Voyage to the Andes Cordilleras”), it will be very funny, but in the meantime I begin to have had enough. My days seem dull to me, no more reading, no time to write, barely time to meditate, we are always up and down hills. My dear Thérèse, oh! I can't tell you what this life weighs on me... When I received your letter I was still very deep in my soul, I tasted it, I savored your letter... but now I'm like a wood, there's nothing more to get out of me. - When I received your letter, my dear Thérèse, my soul was not sad, but full of ardor to be good and to practice virtue, it was still to you that I owed that, your book from P. Surin is extraordinary and of course I'm going to buy myself one like that. It's exactly that language that I have to stick to. ... With each book you lend me I say the same thing, but I don't think I've ever found one that does me so much good as evangelical counsel. My Therese!... oh! I have made meditations on you, on our affection for both of us!..... And it seemed to me, I couldn't tell you this very well, it seemed to me that you were too much for me... that you were a support for me that allowed me to support myself too much... that I was too fond of you and based myself too much on you, that you were too essential to me... Finally guess the rest!. .. And it seemed to me that to be entirely for God I would have to leave you. ... I glimpsed the future and I believed that I would have to separate myself from you to see you again only in Heaven... Finally, my darling Therese, I was afraid and I had a presentiment of a sacrifice surpassing all sacrifices. soul flooded with graces that I have to get used to this idea. Since I last saw you I have had very deep thoughts on a host of subjects.... The cross appeared to me quite naked, and with it a host of realities... certainly the good Lord makes strange appeals to my soul, in the intimate intimacy and it is in the midst of an incredible peace and tranquility of soul. O my Therese! Why can't I talk to you! and yet I won't tell you anything, I have nothing to tell you... My Thérèse! oh! understand your Céline without her speaking to you, without her saying a single word to you!..... O life, life! And I find that life is so short, and that we will be so happy to meet up there... Everything seems like a dream to me, I'll stick with it...Thérèse! your letter was a song from heaven, a sweet melody... oh! understand everything I understood! But I love you too much, you see....O my Thérèse, my heart bothers me and that's why I have the intimate certainty that the good Lord, to reign over my nature, will still need the break, I need the cross and the most bitter tribulation....Thérèse!....These days I went outside and I suffer a lot from it, it's a continual malaise, from the more we spend our days in hysterical laughter and swoon and I am altered by loneliness, I no longer breathe. Then I'm unhappy... not being used to living with boys, it seems funny to me to spend my days in their company; however holy and pure and candid they are, I cannot get used to them. O my Thérèse, understand what I mean... These days I have scruples, and everything mixed together, with the deprivation of my exercises, makes me dry and sad... I send a big hug to my dear little sisters and our Mother. Oh! how I love them my dear little sisters! ..... Above all, take good care of yourself, it's a duty of conscience... The sheaves of daisies (models) are for rent, that Pauline does not keep them for more than a month. Mary from SC hasn't sent me yet: "the only for today... (PN-5) "And your daughter little C. (Castel), I am worried about the news!.
