It needs more than intelligence to understand holiness, more than sensibility to recognize it, more than a nicely balanced judgement to criticize it: a whole lifetime can be spent in the study of the Church's wonders, of spiritual books, and of the manifestations of sanctity without coming anywhere near its hidden reality. Indeed, to look at it in that way, from the point of view of a research-worker or of a dilletante, is a sign of complete blindness in its regard.

Now that I am on the threshold of the marvellous life of Sister Teresa of Lisieux I find myself face to face with the great M. Renan. He looks me up and down, he pities me. He is fully aware of the superiority given him by his learning, his ecclesiastical training, his subtle art, and his apostasy. He tends to think himself infallible and is not afraid to prophesy. He still has a certain taste for religious matters, but of religious experience he has retained only the affecting memory of a rather sickly emotional state, which gives his writing that greasy quality we call "unction." According to him, the Catholic religion is only a form of sentimentalism and so, with its rites and its music, its poets and its heroes, it must submit to the law of all such and be assigned its place in a museum of grand and alluring anachronisms: here, in company with the temples of ancient Egypt and the Homeric poems, with the enchantments of Shakespeare and the day-dreams of Rousseau, it will be a source of pleasure to the curious and the aesthetic. The Church has had its day, and he accepts this fact. Even holiness is not spared his mournful condemnation; hear M. Renan: "Holiness is a kind of poetry which, like many others, is finished and done with."

Then he adds, rashly: "Rome will go on canonizing saints [Of course; isn't that her business?] but there won't be any more canonized by the people.'' Soon after that—so soon that he might have known her personally—the little nun of Lisieux was being acclaimed by the whole Catholic world, without waiting for the verdict of the Father of the Faithful. But M. Renan was dead, so he did not have to acknowledge his mistake.

When learned men make expeditions into the realm of souls they should remember the saying of Christ to the woman of Samaria as he sits at the water-springs which they think they have sealed: "If thou didst know the gift of God." Holiness is "a kind of poetry" which wells up endlessly, for its source is not in literature, or in fancies, whether of the heart or of the senses, but in the very womb of the God of Life.

We should have to go back to the heroic ages of Christianity to find another saint so spontaneously and unanimously acclaimed and so quickly recognized by the Church as Sister Teresa. She attained the altar almost before she was in the waiting room: the intervals which Rome requires before confirming the virtues of even the best qualified of her children were shortened for her, and only fifty years elapsed between her birth in 1873 and her glorification in 1923. For the last twenty years of this half century the whole world, its heart full of joy and its hands of gifts, had hailed her and called upon her with unparalleled steadfastness. And to the question what great events, what heavenly favours, what miracles, prophecies, visions during her life account for this extraordinary popularity, the answer is, her silence, her obscurity, her very inexistence. She lived hidden, unknown except to a few friends and relatives, and to her dying day her apostleship remained a secret within the walls of a convent. That is the greatest, the clearest, and the most overpowering of her miracles, or of the miracles done on her behalf. There is no purely natural explanation to be found for the acclamation which she received. Moreover, no such explanation would suffice; not even, in my opinion, the Story of a Soul, that record of her confidences which was translated into almost every language the day after her death.

I don't want to underestimate its value or importance or influence but, whatever energy was expended in making it known, whatever appeal it has made to souls, whatever its material success throughout the Christian world, could this humble little book, in outward appearance so like innumerable other "pious books," have had the power to raise such a tide of fervour and enthusiasm, to set a match to so many tares, or rather mines going off all at once in every quarter of the inhabited globe, unless God had a hand in it? The first and sufficient cause of the popularity of this child was that God himself slipped a rare grace between the pages of her book, like a pressed flower that has not lost its fragrance, a grace immediately efficacious and capable by its very presence of opening hearts to her teaching. But, if it is a matter of grace, is it not simpler to suppose that God acts directly on the featureless crowds of those who must be led, enlightened, and directed? Perhaps it was decided in the counsels of the Almighty Wisdom that not only should no lesson from the pen of Sister Teresa be wanting in its effect but also, and above all, that her sufferings, sacrifices, and prayers, the treasury of love and expiation of her short life, should all of them be poured out again, and poured out at once, over this needy world. Persecution was rife, war was coming on with giant strides. We were threatened with terrible trials for soul and body, and hungered and thirsted after these graces.

A girl dies when she is twenty-four years old at a small Carmel in the heart of Normandy—a province not noted for its mysticism. The people there live well and drink better. Trouville is a couple of yards away, and Deauville just beyond, where the prince of this world is in charge and has already become dramseller on a large scale to the peasants as well. The body of Sister Teresa was taken to the municipal cemetery, accompanied by a few friends; nobody else took any notice. The grave was scarcely filled in when the fragrance of her goodness found its way out; everybody began to talk about her, first in one province, then in another, in France and all over Europe, in the Old World and in the New; her name was on the lips of believers and infidels, those who could still say the name of Christ and those who had forgotten it. Why should she have been chosen when there were so many others who had died about that time whose virtues had been demonstrated concretely and in public, servants of the poor, missionaries, apostles, martyrs, godly men and women of all kinds? "Teresa! Sister Teresa!" It was all Teresa. But what had she done for us during her life? Anything we could see? Anything we could touch? Nothing. Or nothing that we knew, anyway. And yet everybody was calling to her. It was enough that she had said, "I will spend my heaven doing good upon earth." That saying was snatched up repeated, broadcast. But could it be believed? It was believed; it had to be. Why did it have to be? That is a matter of love, and love cannot be explained.

Before going any further I have to make an admission. I have begun to venerate the second Teresa only lately. Moreover, I am writing this book primarily for all those, Catholics or not, who resist her attraction, as I once did. It is difficult not at once to make common cause with an unanimous verdict of the faithful; on the other hand, a delayed acquiescence gives time for reflection and allows the mind to make a less superficial examination of her whom we are asked to regard as holy. Not that I claim to say anything new, how ever trifling, on a subject that has already received so large a tribute of ink, but the confession of my personal experience may be useful to others.

At first I knew Sister Teresa only by the statues of her. Obviously the sight of crudely coloured and mawkish plaster figures could not entrance a new convert who, even in his faith, was full of futile aesthetic prejudice. In those days I Iooked to the Church for beauty as well as for truth; I had yet to learn that truth is essential but, so far as this world is concerned, beauty is not, however helpful it may be to prayer. Then I read the Story of a Soul. I don't know whether I came to this book too soon or too late. It did not bore me—but it did not captivate me; here and there it irritated me (may I be forgiven!). At the first reading I was not attracted or moved or even instructed. It may be that I was still incapable of appreciating the worth of the "little way" that it teaches, but it is more likely that I had already found it for myself in the lives and writings of other saints, or simply in the Gospels themselves, for they teach it in every line. Spiritual writers only restate in words, and saints only re-live in deeds, those things which Christ said and did; and His saying and doing are incomparably better than theirs, in accordance with the inherent perfection of His being. When He said "Unless you become as little children" He pointed out the "way of childlikeness" of Giles the abbot and the Poor Man of Assisi and the Cure of Ars and Germaine the shepherdess; Teresa of the Child Jesus comes after them, does what they did, and restores this primordial teaching that we are prone to neglect to its place of honour. One of the principal duties of the saints throughout the ages is to incarnate anew, to dress in contemporary clothes, such ancient truths as are likely to be overlooked precisely because of the appearance they have worn too long. So we see St. Francis dress himself in sackcloth, M. Vianney in a moth-eaten cassock, Teresa Martin in a first-communion frock of the fashion of 1885—and an astonished world suddenly recognizes the humbleness, the poverty, and the innocence that have for twelve, eighteen, nineteen hundred years been visible though not always seen beneath the white tunic of our Lord. So Teresa taught me nothing about simplicity, renunciation, and childlikeness that had not already been shown me by St. Germaine, St. Giles, St. Francis, St. John-Baptist Vianney, and many others. If I had read her book to the end it might have taken hold of me; unfortunately, I let it slip from my fingers.

I was neither disappointed nor sorry. I reminded myself that we must revere all the saints, but that among so many we are free to exercise a preference and to choose specially certain ones according to our time and country, our position and age, our character and temperament. Teresa was not for me. I could not deny that she was for my time, but on this point I was not of my time. The tinselled and sugary manifestations of devotion to the "little saint" (the abuse of this diminutive drove me frantic) had successfully hidden from me the greatness and perhaps originality that was surely hers. There were too many roses, too many flowers of all sorts. I could see nothing but roses; a few thorns underneath them, of course, but then any saint without thorns is an impossibility. I reverenced her in her statue—from afar.

However, her miracles made me think a bit. I knew sick bodies that she had cured, souls that she had changed, scholars who knelt at her feet, persons of high spirituality, used to the heights of St. John of the Cross and the first Teresa, who nourished themselves on her words; I saw that she was the refuge of very dear friends who came to Christ only through her or lived in Him better by her. It required a strong effort for me to try again. I went at last to Lisieux, the Story of a Soul under my arm, resolved to see everything, to read everything, and to dare everything—even the chapel of her shrine.

I know that I am now going to upset many people, and I apologize in advance. But I must point out the stumbling-block that is the way of persons like myself; if I don't, they will not follow me and I shall have failed in my object. The others may be shocked by me, but their convictions about St. Teresa will remain unharmed. And that is what matters.

The chapel of the Carmel at Lisieux is at the end of a narrow courtyard and has a frozen look outside. On entering one strives hard to find some attraction in it. Were it plainer, it would not be half bad; there is a crushing excess of ornament, as useless as it is bad, yet this might be overlooked. But on turning to the right to venerate the holy relics, we are at once up against the masterpiece of hideousness and stupidity that has the high honour of sheltering them. The pseudo-renaissance cupola and its worthless stained-glass windows are the least of the absurdities. The shrine itself is showy, clumsy, quite without beauty: let that, too, pass. And I am not particularly offended by the brocade and velvet with which the recumbent image of the saint is dressed up in its gold and crystal cage. Certainly it would be preferable for this flesh-aping marble, polished, tinted, "idealized" beyond words, to be habited in woolen serge; but then in Italy and Spain the most obscure martyrs can be seen covered with jewels and glittering fabrics like stage princesses: they are in glory, so why not glorify them? What I cannot tolerate are the shrine's supernatural guardians, two gigantic angels and a child musician: they are carved so flabbily in a marble so white and soft that they seem to melt like sugar while you look at them; the child has a harp in one hand and a flower in the other, and with the flower it plays the harp. To complete the crime, the sculptor (doubtless an "eminent" one) has set out on the steps several things like marble—sugar in the form of scattered roses and—to crown the horror—from a dense oily cloud there rises a ponderous bronze cross. I will not dwell upon the decoration of the walls, pale blue "draperies" made of stucco and dripping with roses in relief. The uniform spirit of the repository, pretentiousness, jingling poeticalness, and pious adulation give a confusing unity to the whole thing. The Madonna by Bouchardon, a little affected but good, which hangs at the back and once smiled upon the saint, is hardly noticeable amid its expensive surroundings. And remember that this gilding will never be dulled, this stucco never fade, this marble never lose its shiny surface—for the lighting of candles is forbidden: bulbs of electric light have superseded them. We are among the new rich, whose drawing-room furniture has cost too much not to be kept like new.

It would be laughable, if one could find the heart to laugh. It makes the visitor ashamed of his country and of his century, ashamed that he lingers among such enormities. He feels the spirit of the image-breakers rising within him. He is sorry for Teresa and asks her forgiveness for these outrages.... Shut your eyes. Recollect yourself. Think. Forget that sculptor; forget those who, with the best possible intentions, gave him his orders and directed his hand. Smell the real roses that cover the floor: they are fresh every morning. Catch the fragrance of goodness that somehow breathes from those bones. Be humble about your likes and dislikes, humble yourself even to the extent of accepting ugliness.... But reason persists: why does God allow it? Why does Teresa allow it? Why has God let the devil have this triumph, that this holy place should be in the front rank of monstrosities of Catholic ecclesiastical art in the twentieth century? Does the soul no longer inform the body, and the spirit the flesh?

After a long time of reflection and resignation it must be conceded that the cultus of Sister Teresa is associated with other external things besides these. There is also in Lisieux a superb cathedral. There is the touching house Les Buissonnets. There is the cemetery, with its little enclosure for the Carmelites, on an apple-covered slope in the greenest of the valleys. Above all there is the devotion, the true devotion, of the humble folk who fill and transfigure the chapel at every hour of the day. In the presence of that lowly child and of her God these deformities and insufficiencies, the images, rosettes, and pious ditties do not matter. They are only a means: prayer goes far beyond them. Yet the surrender we are longing to make must wait for one more argument: Was all this stuff really necessary? Could we not have done without it?

No. Probably we could not. Those of us who are put off by it are only a small minority. Teresa was given to her own times; humanly speaking and in her earthly aspect she was made a standard for them, and the devotion she excites has taken the external form which it required. If it was to find its way gently to the burning secret of her soul her age had to have this unreal display—the cheap scents, the romantic poetizing, the Christmas-card roses, the statues kin to the marble groups that adorn the more expensive hotels. We need not try to explain it away, for it does no wrong to Teresa. The Lisieux way of doing things, the taste of her devotees and of the worthy nuns who cultivate "accomplishments" in honour of their sister, was her own, that of her family and of her "world." Where and when could she have learned anything better? It is supreme everywhere throughout Europe and America, and is lovingly fostered by a huge bourgeoisie. Its reign is far from over, for it makes headway among the mass of the people and successively contaminates each new level of the middle-classes. It cannot be denied that most people like it. God bequeathed it to Teresa—and she uses it.

I do not mean to say that we have the saints we deserve; we never deserve the saints we have. But we are given the saints whose outward appearance is most likely to attract us. Are souls then to suffer because appreciation of art has been withdrawn from society through the fault of the bourgeois Republic? Jesus Christ did not die for artists and men of good taste alone: they can go to Chartres and some of them will come back converted. The crowds that descend on Lisieux and carry away its trash as well as its graces to the ends of the earth find themselves quite at home; everything there astonishes and delights them. The atmosphere of complete at-homeness invites their enthusiasm and confidence, till they are free, without knowing it, from the pretty—pretties that have led them on. As they pray they find the real Sister Teresa underneath the sugar roses and cheesy clouds, behind the platitudes and pet-names that take all the salt out of her most heroic story: Teresa, the ascetic of the wasted body and bruised heart and unbending will whose sacrifice was ceaseless, who lived on and died from a love that was all pain. That is what lay behind her smile; I have read the Story of a Soul again, and it is beyond question. Some jam must be mixed with the powder if the multitude is to take so bitter a medicine. She mixed a little herself. The convent of Lisieux has added more, perhaps too much; but doubtless they did well, since so many faithful souls have found the physic palatable.

I am speaking for the others, those who are sickened by the jam, deterred by the sham art, driven to flight by the rain of roses; and for their sakes I erase the garlands from the margins of the book of her unutterable confidences, take that distressing pastry stuff away from the walls of her chapel, reject the photographs that have been touched up, deliberately or involuntarily, to "give her a more suitable expression." I wish that I could go further and display in these pages nothing but her consumed and conquering soul—the equal in warmth and energy, if not in poetic genius, of that which made another Teresa the glory of Spain: its superior, if superior be the word, in firmness, even hardness—for to my judgement the first Teresa had a greater tenderness. But I cannot write only of her soul because, to make her comprehensible, she must be put back into her fleshly integument and shown in her own time and place, among those lower middle-class folk who provide the means by which she pleases them and whom, by a fair exchange, she recalls to their highest duties. To this I must resign myself, and my own origins are an advantage, for I resemble Sister Teresa of Lisieux in that I was born of the petite bourgeoisie, in a provincial town, and at about the same time. If I had never left that town perhaps I should have shared the taste in religious art of her family, her convent, her followers—in other words, her own. It might be better for me if I did.

Approaching Alencon from the railway station by the rue Saint-Blaise there is to be seen on the right-hand side a fine sixteenth-century mansion with a courtyard in front; it was formerly the town house of the Guises and is now the residence of the chief administrative official. Opposite it on the other side of the street is a small house, also built of brick and stone but as modest as the other is grand; yet with a certain style about it. Its front is broken on the ground floor by a door and two windows, and on the upper storey by three nicely bowed French-windows opening on to an iron balcony. When too freshly painted the house looks like a new toy. A modern chapel, reminiscent in its false elegance of the one at Lisieux, fails to spoil the whole. It was here that Teresa was born.

Visitors are courteously welcomed by a charming old lady who lives in the house and looks after it with the greatest care. She is the widow of a Scots clergyman who received an inward intimation from the saint that he was to enter the Roman Church. At the end of a flagged passage is the narrow steep staircase, with polished mahogany handrails, where the little girl used to count each step and stop every time to call to her mother till she answered. There is a marvellously fresh atmosphere about the big downstairs room where Mme. Martin used to sit by the window, designing patterns for the precious lace which was made for her by outside workers. That same spotless white curtain filtered the light on to her work and guarded the recollection of her prayers: she would have tempted the brush of Vermeer of Delft. At the back a movable glazed partition still cuts off the dining-room, and at celebrations this partition would be opened to make room for the extra leaves of the oak table, which were necessary when the whole family was to sit down together. There may be a few alterations in detail, but nothing has grown older; Teresa's times are still our times, for in this quiet corner of France things move very slowly. All the furniture and appointments are ordinary, solid, and simply designed; everything keeps its spirit: it is held there by a prayer. Passers-by are few, and there is a great weight of silence, the unalterable quietness of the provinces; they say that it hides plenty of wickedness, but it certainly collaborates with God in the making of saints.

I suppose it is necessary for me to mention the room in which Teresa was born, sacred to a wedded love which ever sought to be nothing but a duty. It is upstairs, behind the elder sisters' bedroom, and somebody has had the pious idea to connect it with the adjoining chapel. It is a shock, as one goes towards the flickering lamp that burns before the altar, suddenly to discover on the other side of a grating a sort of furniture-exhibit, in the style of the Tottenham Court Road before the emergence of the so-called modern style (which is not much better). In a dazzling light and against a blinding background is upreared one of those great old-fashioned beds which, comfortable and dignified no doubt, are yet neither beautiful nor ugly and emphatically demand a decent dimness. This one has no respect for tradition. It shows off, preens itself, flaunts its new clothes: the counterpane, canopy, and curtains are of currant-red silk plush, decked out with pompons. A window with a lace blind and more currant-red curtains backs it up, and two chairs (one a child's) and an Empire table are disposed around.

In the presence of such an outpouring the imagination collapses. The relentless decoration kills the smiling Madonna whose haloed picture hangs under the canopy above the bed. The walls are freshly repainted, and so tell us nothing; the parquet floor, scraped or relaid, does nothing but shine with polish—it looks as if it had never been trodden by a human foot. We are a long way from M. Vianney's room as it is kept at Ars. And, I may add, we are a long way from the room in which Teresa Martin first cried aloud before Heaven. The piety of that date was capable of results less scandalous than this; here its aberrations have reached their limit, and I shall not refer to them again. But it must not be forgotten that the germ of these things was in the Martins themselves and affected their daughter from her cradle.

Nevertheless, M. and Mme. Martin were not in all respects like their neighbours. They shared the tastes, prejudices, and habits of their class on many points, but as Christians they were rather different. I do not mean that religion was a matter of complete indifference to their fellow-townsmen. Thanks to centuries of experience, to their natural earnestness, and to constant contact between town and country, the people of the western provinces of France have long been fortified against the propaganda of "new ideas." Under the July Monarchy and the Second Empire the Church took her bearings and regained almost all the ground that the Revolution had taken from her and which the Empire and the Restoration had tried to recover by politics rather than by conviction. In spite of the crimes of official dechristianization there can still be found in the French countryside not only isolated rocks of religious enthusiasm but also, as it were, great alluvial deposits, scarcely covered with sand, wherein the convictions of their forbears endure and only need a turn of the plowshare to bring them to light. The middle-class people of Alencon were practicing Catholics. At Corpus Christi they hung flags outside their houses, and officials regarded it as an honour to carry the canopy at the procession; the men went to the high Mass every Sunday and most of them fulfilled their obligations at Easter; there were few "freethinkers" among them. But Christians of the quality of the Martins were certainly rarer, and they were a cause of inverted scandal. The refrain is always the same: "They exaggerate"—there is nothing less bourgeois than exaggeration.

M. Martin's father came from Athis in the department of the Orne. He fought in Napoleon's wars and stopped on in the army after Waterloo, often changing his station. That is how the third of his children, Louis, came to be born at Bordeaux in 1824. When Captain Martin retired he settled down at Alencon, not far from his birthplace, because it was convenient for his children's education. He was as good a Christian as he was a soldier and never trifled about duty; everything had to be exact, and he would allow no deviation from rules. This piety which he passed on to Louis may well be called military, and with it went a soldierly bearing which his son never lost. Louis was a tall upstanding fellow, always looking straight before him; at twenty he was the handsomest young man in the place. But he was never a soldier. He went to some cousins at Rennes, and there he adopted Breton dress and became a clock-maker, perfecting himself under a friend of his father at Strasburg. This quiet and precise trade suited him well: it encouraged him to meditate on the shortness of life. He had a poetical turn of mind, and his childhood's habit of looking at everything from the angle of eternity led to a liking for high places, where he could feel nearer to God and worship him in his creation (he was especially fond of watching sunsets). Accordingly, when he was twenty, he set out for the Alps, travelling partly on foot and partly by stagecoach, half tourist and half pilgrim, till he came to the snow-clad solitude of the Austin Canons in their monastery on the Great St. Bernard. He did not know enough Latin to be accepted there; so, with his father's approval, he decided to take up serious studies. They were stopped by sickness. Then, disappointed but resigned to disappointment, he went back to clock-making, and after a short residence in Paris opened a small shop at Alencon. It was in the rue du Pont Neuf, a few yards from the river. The name Martin can still be seen on the signboard, surrounded by watches and clocks and rings and necklaces, for later he added a jewelry business to his trade. Here he lived a bachelor's life till he was thirty-five.

People did not know what to make of this monkish watchmaker. He was good-looking, with a full well-kept beard, reticent in manner, educated; he never went outside his shop without putting on a frock coat and bowler hat. As he went about the streets he did not look at women, even out of the comer of his eye, and seemed to think as little about getting married as he did about recreation. When he found a man drunk in the gutter he would help him up and lead him home. He was at Mass every morning, and his house was a meeting-place for several devout old men, who discussed with him the best way of helping the needy and sinners and of forwarding the work of missionaries on behalf of the kingdom of God. This haunter of churches was so well thought of by everybody that he quite upset the accepted opinion that a man "given to good works" must necessarily be sour in disposition or a hypocrite. It must be added, to place him exactly, that he was a keen angler.

At this same time there lived in the house in the rue Saint-Blaise already described a certain Mademoiselle Zelie Guerin, together with her old father (a retired police officer), her brother Isidore, and a sister. She was a local girl and had been to school at the Adoration convent. An irresistible sympathy for human sufferings had prompted her to seek admission among the Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, but the superioress of the Hotel-Dieu had refused her, without reason given. Where Louis Martin had failed, so Zelie Guerin failed too. This rather remarkable coincidence has not been invented afterwards as a frill to a pious legend: those are the facts, solidly established. M. Guerin had very little money, so Zelie became a lacemaker. Thenceforward she could be seen at her window, putting together squares of point d'Alencon or making charming designs on paper for the discharge of the orders which came in such marvellous numbers. She wrapped herself in contemplation, and God was always with her. She mused on the possibility of serving him more fully by marrying a husband who would be no less concerned for His glory, and bringing many children into the world who should be consecrated to His service.

These two craftsmen, the clock-maker and the lacemaker, lived in different parishes and their families were not acquainted. The two did not know one another. They waited. How they met one fine day on St. Leonard's bridge, like Joachim and Anne at the Golden Gate; how he made way for her, and she passed him; how they looked at one another; how Zelie recognized unerringly that this was the companion intended for her by &oaf: all this is a secret which Heaven has kept well. We only know that there was mutual understanding and delight, that the families met, and that the two were married. Louis Martin was careful for his own maidenhood and believed that it was his wife's wish too to shelter hers under the fine veil of a purely spiritual union; and there is documentary evidence that they lived together for a year as brother and sister, like St. Valerian with St. Cecily. This awesome and superhuman paradox might have subsisted their whole lifetime, but Teresa would not have been born, and it would seem that in the plan of divine providence this marriage had no other object. Zelie told her husband that she wanted children, that he and she should found a family of saints in accordance with his own desire. Her wishes were fulfilled: of her nine children, four went to God between the ages of six months and six years; the other five all became nuns.

For their first christening-name all were called after our Lady, and there were successively Mary Louisa, Mary Pauline, Mary Leonie, Mary Helen, Mary Joseph Louis and Mary Joseph John Baptist, Mary Celine, Mary Melania Teresa, and lastly she who was to be Saint Teresa of Lisieux. Helen, Melania, and those longed-for sons the two Josephs, who they had hoped would be missionaries, died in childhood. Of the surviving daughters, Mary Louisa, who by privilege of the firstborn was called simply Mary, was not quite fourteen when the youngest, Teresa, was born.

Zelie Guerin's practical aptitude was as keen as her faith, and her lacemaking business, which she had continued to carry on, became so prosperous that in 1870 her husband gave up his own shop in order to help her with the increasing work; as his father was dead there was nothing to keep him in the rue Pont Neuf. Meanwhile war had broken out and they underwent the miseries of the German invasion; had it not been checked, his age would not have prevented Louis from serving with the volunteers. His father-in-law also being dead, he inherited the house in the rue Saint-Blaise, and the family settled down there, where they lived for seven years. So we come back to the birthplace of the saint. I am reminded of the traditional account of the birth of our Lady from Joachim and Anne.

After the death of Mary Helen, when she was five and a half, Mme. Martin's sister, a Visitation nun at Le Mans, wrote to her with innocent simplicity: "I can't help thinking that you're privileged to give these chosen ones to Heaven, where they will be your joy and your crown. And one day your unfailing trust and faith will have a tremendous reward.... You may be sure that God will bless you, and the consolations that are now withheld will be the measure of your bliss. For if our good Lord is so pleased with you that he sends you the great saint that you have wanted so much to honour him with, won't you be well repaid?" Mgr. Laveille, one of the best writers about Teresa, compares these words with those that Mme. Martin herself wrote to her sister-in-law at Lisieux when she had suffered a similar bereavement: "When I have to close the eyes of my dear little children and follow their bodies to the grave of course I am utterly miserable, but my sorrow has always been resigned. And I don't regret the trouble and care that they have been to me. Everybody says, 'It would be much better if you'd never had them.' I can't bear much talk. It doesn't seem to me that pain and difficulties can be put into the balance against my children's eternal happiness."

That letter shows the quality of Zelie Martin's faith. It is alleged that she often received graces out of the ordinary, so sensitive was her spirit-foreknowledge, supernatural advice and enlightenment. And all the time she nursed her idea of giving a "great saint" to the world.

The two elder girls went to school at their aunt's convent in Le Mans. The third, Leonie, was delicate and a source of worry. Celine began to walk. Little Mary Melania died. There was no sign of the long-desired, perhaps promised, saint. Then in 1872 another pregnancy raised fresh hopes, and again a daughter came to fill the empty cradle. She was born on January 3, 1873, when Mary and Pauline were home for the new-year holiday. Their mother's suffering kept them awake, till at midnight M. Martin tapped at their door and told them that they had a baby sister.

Next day Mary Frances Teresa Martin was christened in the church of our Lady. It is the most beautiful church in Alencon, with a triple gothic porch, strong and delicate, a very garden of carved stone: this was her doorway into the world of grace. The font whereat she received the spirit of God is in the first chapel on the south side, which has been thoroughly "restored" in the modern manner but less badly than any other of the neoteresian sanctuaries. Her eldest sister, Mary, was godmother, but the name Teresa prevailed over the others.

The troubles of life began at once. Her mother could not feed her, so Teresa was put out to nurse with a peasant, Rose Talle, "little Rose," at Semalle, a few miles away. She nearly died twice, and malignant typhoid threatened the life of her sister Mary. Prayers and pilgrimages were undertaken for them, and both recovered. Spring completed the cure, and at four months Teresa weighed fourteen pounds; at ten months she could stand upright and by her first birthday was walking by herself. Her mother thought she could discern destiny written upon the child's bright face, and had her back home. M. Martin was making pilgrimages of thanksgiving to Chartres and Lourdes, and Zelie took more trouble than ever with the new baby.

The Martins worshipped their last-born. Everything she did was right, everything she said was clever, everything that happened to her was miraculous. When she was eighteen months she clambered on to the swing, with no fear at all except lest she should not go high enough. She fell out of that big bed without hurting herself or even waking up—angels must have carried her. The fact was that her stay in the cottage at Semalle had made her a sturdy little peasant, proofed against hard knocks. She was good-tempered, lively, sensitive, and was passionately fond of her mother. She would cry if Mme. Martin could not come into the garden with her; she would run out into the pouring rain to meet her coming back from Mass. The piety in which she was trained became in her equally violent and exacting. She would not leave out a word of her night-prayers; "That's not all," she was wont to say to her father, she had to "pray for grace," too.

"Dear little mother!" she exclaimed, "I wish you would die, because then you'd go to Heaven." That wish was fulfilled. And in her "exuberance of love" she wanted her father to die too. She got on well with her sisters. Mary was the serious one, who hoped to go back to the convent where she had been at school, while Pauline was the more gifted and steady, and was accordingly a little pleased with herself. Teresa was less attached to Leonie, who was always ailing and difficult, though good-hearted and persevering. These were in her eyes the "grown-ups," who were to be imitated and envied and treated with respect. Her bosom-companion was the gentle charming Celine, who was devoted to her little sister. At getting-up time Teresa would slip into Celine's bed and snuggle down to her. When the nurse came to dress them, she was greeted one morning with the remark, "Go away, Louisa. Can't you see we're like two little white hens who can't be pulled apart?" The fowl-run and flowers and singing birds meant a lot to Teresa, and she was able to absorb every sort of interest.

Mme. Martin did her best to restrain the extravagances of Teresa's affection, but she often had to own herself beaten. I have alluded to her habit of going upstairs one step at a time, calling out "Mamma!" at every one. Mme. Martin was expected to reply, "All right, my darling!" each time, and if she failed Teresa's stopped where she was till the answer came. M. Martin called her his "little queen," played ridea-cock-horse with her, showered presents on her. Her collection of toys shows that in this respect she was certainly spoilt, and for a long time she fancied that everything was hers by right: she had only to say "I want it."

Teresa was eager, intelligent, headstrong, and almost unbelievably stubborn: when she had said "No" nothing could move her. Sometimes when her father wanted to hug her or her mother came to kiss her in bed she pretended not to know them: she wanted them to want her. She was a woman. She liked to have her arms bare because she looked prettier that way, and she would pose to herself before the mirror. The story of the penny gives an idea of her amour-propre. Her mother told her that if she would kiss the ground she should be given a penny. "No, thanks, mamma. I'd rather not have the penny," replied Teresa.

The importance of her childhood's exploits must not be exaggerated, although she has confided them to us; there was another side to them. She was not afraid to give trouble to her father and mother and to oppose them; that was in accordance with her high-spiritedness. The second stage was when her guardian angel moved her to self-reproach and shame and to beg pardon. Then she would cry for hours, and it was not easy to comfort her.

But there was one person whom she would on no account grieve when he came to her mind (and already she thought about him a lot): that was the child Jesus, who was very much alive for her. She lived partly in the mysterious world of supernatural reality familiar to her parents. Once when she was in the garden she saw, or thought she saw, near the summer-house, "two horrid little spirits on the rim of a lime barrel, dancing like mad although there were iron chains on their ankles." They looked at her "with blazing eyes" and dived inside the barrel as if they were frightened; then they took refuge in the linen-room. Seeing they were so nervous she looked in at the window to see what they were going to do. "The poor little demons were running about the tables not knowing where to hide from her eyes...." Was she calculating the strength of her innocence and did she suppose she could overcome the Evil One without coming to grips with him? She did not yet know the oppositions within her own nature and the weapons which these could lend to Satan. At four and a half years old this is not surprising.

The most disquieting feature of Teresa's early childhood, referred to above, can hardly be overemphasized; it characterizes her, it sums up her temperament, her possible destiny, her actual destiny. The watchful Satan pounced on it and began to hope.

Celine and she were playing with their dolls, when Leonie came up with hers, "laid in a basket full of dolls' clothes, nice bits of stuff, and other desirable things."

"'Here you are,' she said. 'Choose.’"

"Celine had a look and took a ball of braid. I considered for a minute and then, exclaiming 'I take the lot!' I snatched basket and doll and everything."

Telling this incident fifteen years later Teresa adds a devout reflection: "When the way of perfection was shown to me I learned that to become a saint a person has to suffer a great deal, always to look for that which is more perfect, and to forget self. I learned that there are many degrees in holiness and that each soul is free in its response to our Lord's invitation to do much or little for his love—in other words, to choose from among the sacrifices that he asks for. Thereupon I said as in my childhood's days, 'O my God, I choose them all."'

True enough; but it is not the point here. We have not yet got so far. We are trying to grasp the very human inner weakness of Teresa's nature. Long before she was a saint, the little four-year-old, who seized the whole basket under the nose of her sisters, displayed a rapacity, an egoism, a spirit of conquest, in a word, an "imperialism," of quite remarkable energy; and this would one day have to be given an entirely new direction and transmuted into a tragical stripping away of self. It was a revelation, nay, an explosion, of Teresa's nature, a nature that had to be broken-in like a thoroughbred to bit and saddle, if she was not to run the risk of being carried down to the depths of revolt rather than up to the heights of holiness. That cry of hers was not a Christian cry: Nietzsche would have roared his approval; a limitless "will to power" was written all over it—and over her own authentic characteristics.

Look carefully at a photograph of St. Teresa. Not one that has been touched up and prettified or where she has been made to look soft and "ecstatic," for the least suggestion of pose is deceiving, but one of the snapshots where her face has been caught by surprise among her sisters in the cloister; better still, the most suffering and characteristic of three taken in 1897 in which she is holding against her breast images of the Holy Face and the Child Jesus. The reserved smile, the gentleness, the serenity cast only a thin veil over the face of one who is firm and strong, tough and obstinate, imperative and victorious, who knows what she wants, who will want it till death, and who will not yield an inch from having her own way. Fiat! As she was, so she remained. When she was four her developing natural vitality "chose the lot," good and bad together. At the age of reason this temper would have worked for evil had divine grace and her environment not been in the opposite scale. In the end, her spirit clarified by instruction, by prayer, and by the in-pouring of the Holy Ghost, she chooses the good, all the good, the sovereign Good, the Absolute in all his fullness. We must not be blinded to the ambition which was the dominant note of her character by the means that she uses for overcoming it (they are of a disconcerting humbleness). Bit by little bit she traces her own will on the will of God. That is the drama of her life and the miracle of her destiny. Both are undervalued by the whittling away of the part either of earth or of Heaven in this relentless struggle: her story becomes commonplace and her personal significance shrinks. It must be emphasized over and over again that Teresa was not an obscure, sober little schoolgirl who for small sacrifices deserved the reward of being carried off suddenly amid a profusion of choice blossoms. She was a creature of passion and strong will, marked to be the prey of the pride of life; and Eternal Love subdued her without any lessening of her power and strength, and led her in the ways he willed.

Mary Martin had given to each of her sisters a special sort of rosary that was used by the pupils at the Le Mans convent to keep count of their "good deeds." Each time they voluntarily did without something they wanted, or helped somebody in distress, or kept their temper in trying circumstances, one of the beads could be separated from the rest and added to the string of self-denial. Children are attracted by any devotional practice that is like a game and at the same time smacks of heroism, especially if, as in this example, there is an element of competition. So Teresa, whose pride could not bear to be beaten by Celine, entered on the path of self-denial; she found that on these terms there was a certain pleasure in being good. The asceticism of these two small girls urged them on to own up when they had done something wrong (or thought they had), to bear punishment without complaining, to refrain from justifying themselves at the expense of the real culprit when they were wrongly accused. They found all this exciting and thrilling, and it was not very difficult. The habit of self-sacrifice and going without became second nature, and they surrounded their virtue with a mysterious secrecy that increased its worth in their eyes.

One Sunday Teresa came back from a walk with a glorious bunch of wild flowers—and once she had got hold of anything she did not easily let go. And now her mother, quite unconscious of how much she was asking of the child, claimed the bouquet for our Lady's May-shrine. Our Lady cannot be refused, one's mother cannot be refused: Teresa gave it up. She did so with great unwillingness and sickness of heart, but her disappointment and her tears were hidden and only Celine guessed them. In spite of her rather morbid sensitiveness a time was to come when she would not even cry.

A few months after the death of her sister, Mother Mary Dosithea, who had taught the elder girls at Le Mans, Mme. Martin was struck down by a disease that she had kept hidden for sixteen years. Acute and increasing pain made her admit that she was suffering from a tumour in the breast. She was operated on, but it had been left till too late and it only hastened the unavoidable end. Her strength was quite gone, and she had to resign herself to "giving up her lace and living on her investments." Would Heaven deny her the happiness of seeing her younger children grow up? Leaving them at home with their father she joined a pilgrimage from Angers to seek health at Lourdes where, in the overpowering heat of June, 1877, she plunged four times into the icy water. She came back to Alencon worn out and murmuring the words of our Lady to Bernadette: "I promise to make you happy in the next world, but not in this."

As Mme. Martin gradually sank, Celine and Teresa were boarded with a neighbour to spare them the daily sight of their mother's agony. The last time she got up was to "preside" with M. Martin at a make-believe prize distribution, arranged by Mary in her bedroom. Celine and Teresa were dressed in white to receive the books and gilt paper crowns from their mother's hands. Viaticum was brought on August 26, and Teresa was present at this last communion and anointing. Soon it was all over. Teresa was dry-eyed when she kissed the cold forehead; but she stayed a long time by the coffin in the passage. She had not imagined that death could cleave so great a gulf. Nevertheless, she stood up to loss and grief; her small daily sacrifices enabled her to face more cruel ones without betraying her inward desolation. Quite apart from the action of grace and her absolute certainty of her mother's happiness in Heaven—had she not wanted her to be taken there quickly?—there was a vitality and essential joyousness in Teresa that nothing could destroy.

When, after the funeral, their nurse poured out pity on the motherless children, Celine threw herself into Mary's arms, exclaiming, "You will have to be mother now!" But Teresa was not so sure, although Mary was her godmother. She looked at the sad face of Pauline, who perhaps was a little jealous at having no one to look after, and said as she buried her face in her lap, "No! Pauline shall be mother!" Is it too early to see a spiritual significance in this new bond, so spontaneously fashioned? For it was Pauline who was to open the door of Carmel to Sister Teresa of the Child Jesus. They had to leave Alencon, that town of quiet streets hardly touched by commerce, with its humped little bridges over the Sarthe and the Brillante, its pleasant garden-bordered streams and pools, the pale severe walls in the market place, the solemn still churches, the gracious sedate life of the grey countryside. It is impossible not to love Alencon; its sole industry is a fairy game, and while it works its threads it dreams and prays: and it induces others to dream and pray. It was the framework of her own day-dreaming that Teresa minded leaving more than anything else: the house, the square of garden behind with the swing and the fowl-run, the summer-house that M. Martin had hired to muse in undisturbed while the children larked around, the grass paddock where she loved to hide when the moon-daisies and cornflowers were in bloom—this "poetical" aspect of her nature must by no means be ignored. Soon she would be growing and unfolding in a neighbourhood that is more rich and luxurious and therefore more sensual and disturbing to the will; but by that time suffering would have done its work.

Mme. Martin's brother, Isidore Guerin, was a druggist at Lisieux. He had a wife as good as Zelie and several good-natured and well-brought-up children) he himself, after some youthful divagations, had settled down as a worthy man and a "militant" Christian. Mme. Martin on her death-bed had urged her husband to look for help and support from his brother-in-law's family rather than from relatives or friends in Alencon, and when he was asked, M. Guerin at once set himself to find a house for the Martins near Lisieux. It was called Les Buissonnets, and the children moved in before the end of the summer; their father joined them in November. Of all the places connected with Teresa which are open to her devotees, this house is the most eloquent of her, the most intimate, and the least spoiled. Apart from the school hours with the Benedictines and the time spent on a visit to Rome, it may be said that she passed in it the whole time of her childhood and adolescence, from the age of four and a half to fifteen. With its two gardens it was the most important factor in her formation and perfecting before she became a Carmelite. We find her footprints everywhere, hardly touched by our own.

But before the visitor can give himself to recollection without mishap, he has to stomach the sight of two disagreeable objects by which the garden has been dishonoured. Near the gate there is a clumsy cherub flourishing a shabby banner. And on the lawn behind the house there is a quasi-photographic group in staring white marble representing Teresa and her father, bigger than life-size, sitting together in a confidential attitude. This thing, which would be refused by a provincial town hall, is actually supposed to recall the hidden and heartrending moment when M. Martin heard the first avowal of his daughter's vocation.... The house itself has been respected, except that they could not resist turning the child's room into a chapel. This is nearly always done: it is the same with St. Catherine's room in the dyers' quarter at Siena, and with St. Benedict Joseph Labre's near Santa Maria dei Monti in Rome. This is not the way to bring us close to the saints and make them real. Surely it could be managed so that the honours given to them in the very place where they slept and woke, prayed and meditated, should at least safeguard the physical appearance of their private surroundings. In the present case, however, the distraction is lessened because the rest of the house is almost intact.

The road from Lisieux to Trouville is an expensive-looking boulevard. The visitor to Les Buissonnets leaves this road on the right, taking a shady footpath that winds upward among orchards and terraced villas till he reaches a door in a blank wall; it has stone steps and a small grating. This is it. Within, a curving gravelled path leads through the sloping lawn and oval flower-beds to the front of the house. It is a pleasant red and white villa, with an attic and two dormer windows, surrounded by trees that are worthy of a district whose trees are royal. The garden at the back is rather higher and half is given over to kitchen produce: there are cherry trees, currant bushes, and rows of peas, firs and spindle trees, more turf, and thick curtains of laurel and ivy suggesting secret passages and fine hiding-places. Against the wash-house wall somebody has reconstructed one of those tiny cribs that it gave Teresa so much pleasure to build of pebbles and shells and bits of straw and wood; and a small plot near by was "my garden," where she grew crocuses and blue periwinkles and ferns. Here indeed she can be seen and touched, and when you go into the house she goes with you.

It is gloomy compared with the one at Alencon. The only authentic thing in the first room, which was the kitchen, is the red-brick hearth where the children put out their shoes on Christmas Eve. But on the right one looks straight into the past: the dining-room, an unimpeachable piece of evidence. This old-fashioned furniture has kept all its memories, and they agree with ours. Such furniture can be seen anywhere; we had foreseen it here, it had to be here. There is the sideboard with twisted columns, introducing (as is only fitting) two shooting trophies carved in oak, partridges, pheasants, and rabbits. Similar columns adorn both the tall narrow armchairs and the dining-chairs. There is a thick round table supported on a single massive leg that blossoms out into four feet covered with acanthus leaves. The mirror above the fireplace would not be fulfilling its duty did it not reflect two glass chandeliers and a gilded bronze clock under a glass cover. On the walls there are two engravings "of the period," of ecclesiastical or biblical subjects, after David or Girodet. To crown all, impenetrable window curtains wrap everything in a semi-obscurity according to custom. It is a perfect harmony of the proprieties, a museum specimen of genuine nineteenth-century provincial middle-class comfort, in all its plainness and solidity, as it was displayed once for all in the place in which one ate. I am not laughing at it, for I find it rather touching. Granted the aesthetic premises, there is not a fault to be found with that room.

It is the same upstairs, in M. Martin's bedroom. I must admit that I like the mahogany furniture and the material of the bed-canopy and the curtains and the seats of the chairs, which makes one think of thick undergrowth of green, blue, and black leaves undisturbed by a breath of air. The room is dim and thoughtful, but not sad. The panelled one where Teresa lay at the time of her illness, and was given back health of soul and body by a smile from our Lady, is cheerful and lightsome; white muslin curtains frame the recess where an altar now takes the place of a bed. It was the elder sisters' room. Previous to this Teresa and Celine occupied the one at the back, level with the garden, in which statues and medals are now sold. There are displayed (under glass) her bed, her dolls and other toys, and the desk with the ebony and ivory crucifix which she used to question when she was doing her lessons. You can see her skipping rope, her shrimping net, her sailing boat, her dolls' kitchen, her draught-board, her cottage piano, her gift books, her favourite bird's cage. It is a good thing to be reminded that she was once a child like any other and that her soul was, in its measure, nourished on the small things of childhood.

A special permission is required to go up to the attic room. It was M. Martin's study and oratory, and he might only be disturbed there to give an account of the day's doings. It was as it were "an high place," sealed with blue and white panes, whereto the father withdrew to listen to the counsels of the Holy Spirit. It was his substitute for the Great St. Bernard.

That is a sufficient description of the house; the things that happened in it will fall into their right places of their own accord. Teresa explored it with uncontrollable delight. With her thick hair flying and a black satin bow floating like a butterfly on her head she ran about the garden, picked a belated gooseberry-then stopped suddenly, and her face fell. She went back with Celine into their room, fell on her knees, and burst into tears.

Her bravery was of short duration. She had restrained and hidden her sorrow so as not to sadden her father and as a test of the strength of her own will and faith. Then the journey from Alencon, the moving in, and the novelty of the new place had made her forget for a time. When she realized this she did not spare herself: she called herself fickle, unkind, ungrateful to her mother, heartless. Her natural sensitiveness had been held in check for too long and it overflowed; she cried and sobbed and abandoned herself as only an impressionable child can. This crisis passed, but the child who had been so lively and roguish and hard to please gradually became shy, gentle, and nervous, quiet and unobtrusive. She no longer wanted to have notice taken of her and would run away from strangers; simply to be looked at made her cry. That was the first thing that Lisieux did for her.

Mary and Pauline looked after the house, Leonie and Celine were day scholars at the Benedictine convent. Teresa had less time for play, and went on with her lessons under the supervision of her "little mother," Pauline. M. Martin had aged a lot, and his hair and beard were already white. As he had retired he could devote his whole time to his children and his hobbies and his religious life, and his day was regulated like a monk's: daily mass at the Cathedral, gardening, reading, rosary, dinner; prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, at Notre Dame or St. James's or the Carmelite chapel or St. Desideratus, often with Teresa, a walk by the river with rod and line, a call on M. Guerin, return home, supper, evening prayers with the family. Teresa's time was divided in the same way between lessons, the garden and fields, and prayers. Religion was always with her: God wanted her to learn for his sake, to be good for his sake, to smile at beggars for his sake. For him she built rustic altars and of him she dreamed on the river bank while her father fished. She would sit on the grass in some hidden spot, letting the multitudinous sounds of nature sink in; then the blare of a bugle from the barracks would recall her to "the world" and, in her own words, sadden her heart. She liked the rain as much as the sun; a thunderstorm right overhead pleased her; she would have bathed in dewy grass had not her sense of modesty held her back. A complete young pagan? Most certainly not. Such a one as poor Anne de Noailles, drunk with nature and earthly love, feels her limitations and can only fall into despair. Teresa Martin can see further. This world contents her and disappoints her too, but for quite another reason—because it speaks of, pre-figures, and at the same time is not, Heaven.

Without morality there can be no true mysticism, where there is no personal virtue there is no prayer. Teresa once hurt a poor man by offering him a penny as though he were a beggar. She thought that the cake she was just going to eat might be more acceptable to him, but did not dare to offer it for fear of another refusal. How could she reconcile sensitiveness with love? Then she recollected that she had heard that no gift is withheld on one's first communion day: she would wait till that day came and then she would pray for him. She remembered her resolution for six years, and when the time came carried it out. To have a brotherly charity that neither grows slack nor dissolves into useless sighs

is a trait among a thousand.

As the fields have their seasons so has the Church. In his Annee liturgique Dom Gueranger, the restorer of Solesmes, has shown how every day they bring a fresh blossom or a new fruit to our daily prayer. On winter evenings M. Martin was wont to listen to the reading aloud of this invaluable book, and so Teresa learned to know the Christian seasons: Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, with their changing hues of green, violet, white, and red, and the never-ending procession of saints across them. On Sunday morning she found again the God of flowers and brooks and tempests in the solemn Mass at the cathedral church of St. Peter, where the family assembled in a chapel on the epistle side quite close to the high altar. It was there that a sermon, the first she could understand, showed her the God-Man nailed to the cross, suffering, dying, and she never forgot it. When at six years old, she found herself inside a confessional for the first time—she was so small that the priest could not see her or she him—she had no difficulty in realizing that her God was there, for she knew that it was to him that she was confessing. By grace and prayer the thought of God hardly left her mind: she was entering step by step into the reality of Christ.

Meanwhile, she was growing up; the woman began to show and to become aware of her own attractiveness. On Sunday evenings at M. Guerin's she received a lot of notice and petting and small flatteries, for she was the living image of her mother. When she went for a short stay at Trouville people used to stop her on the promenade to admire her brilliant eyes and smile and fair ringlets, and her popularity there might well have woken up a dormant coquettishness. But her self-respect and pride were too much for that; they had not weakened in the least, and were playing in quite a different key.

One evening she was walking back with her father from the Guerins, her eyes fixed on the stars in a sky of limitless depth. Presently she noticed "a cluster of golden jewels" forming the letter T—Orion's belt. She found this manifestation of the first letter of her own name an omen and very delightful ("Queues delices!" is how she refers to her feelings when recollecting this occasion), and she stopped, exclaiming, "Look, papa! My name is written in the sky!" This was not a child's joke; she firmly believed it. She could see no disproportion between the honour done her by the heavens and her diminutive person, and doubtless there was none between it and the spiritual ambition of her love. "I didn't want to look at the horrid old world any more," and she asked her father to lead her home by the arm. She went into the house with her head lost in the stars, sanctified, blessed, canonized by her own self—that is, already filled with certainty that she would be one day. M. Martin entered into the game and did not for a minute consider rebuking her lack of humility; his daughter's presentiment agreed exactly with his own, and he was answerable for it. He lent himself with complete simplicity to what seemed to be God's will.

Holiness can be grafted on to pride, just as grace is grafted on to nature. There is a right pride as there is righteous anger. The last end of holiness is not so much a renunciation of the human personality as the possession of God.

Teresa Martin can be left with what may still be called the illusion of future glory. It will soon be clear that it was not an illusion and at what price she gained the authentic reality. Anyone may say "I will be a saint." But holiness must be willed wholeheartedly, with a will stronger than the might of nature and of sin, with a resolution equal to that of the grace which can bring down the "dark night" upon us for our own good. Teresa was to know those long starless nights, but at the moment she smiles at the sky and the sky seems to smile back. Before it opened its gates Heaven was to crush her with all its weight of love.

Of course I shall be accused or exaggerating the part of man and proportionately lessening the part of God in the formation of Teresa. But God is behind all human actions; he suggests them or allows them and makes use even of our mistakes. I am concerned solely to get at the truth, and I put down nothing here that I do not think is true. Now it seems to me that all the evidence points to their having set out in utter good faith to make a great saint at Les Buissonnets. With the connivance of Heaven, M. Martin deliberately tried to form the character and soul of his favourite daughter according to the pattern which seemed to him loveliest and most desirable, and he never missed an opportunity of talking about her glorious namesake, the heart-pierced Maid of Avila. The elder girls backed him up, especially Pauline, Teresa's "little mother," who, as I have said, was in charge of her lessons. She brought as much strictness as gentleness to her task and exacted obedience without appeal; from her Teresa learned to overcome the little weaknesses of everyday life, absent-mindedness, whims, foolish fears. "Sometimes you would send me alone after dark to fetch something from a room at the other end of the house, and would allow no refusal. That was very good for me, otherwise I should have become very timorous. It is not easy to frighten me now."

Once a thing was settled Pauline never altered it; Teresa had got to learn to deserve, which is the a, b, c of the love of God. "Have I been a good girl today? Is dear Jesus pleased with me?" she would ask before going to sleep. And if she had to be told "No" she would sob in her dark room for hours, try as she would not to shed those accusing tears. Every year there was a prize-giving, specially for her, when her father put into her quivering hands rewards exactly proportioned to her progress. It was "like a rehearsal of the Last Judgement."

Pauline listened to her confidences, resolved her doubts, explained the eternal mysteries; she was full of questions and an answer was always forthcoming. "Why doesn't God give the same glory to all his chosen?" Pauline sent her for her silver mug, hardly bigger than a thimble, and for M. Martin's big tumbler; then she filled them both to the brim to illustrate how all the blessed receive full measure according to their capacity. Teresa in her heart of hearts wanted to be a large vessel, but she resigned herself to her littleness and soon made a virtue of this necessity.

From his attic room, whence he could see a great distance over the tops of the trees in all directions, M. Martin arranged and directed the life-work of those committed to his care. Pauline would become a nun, and possibly Mary would follow her, Leonie was more doubtful, but Celine was promising. As for Teresa, he felt her to be such a part of himself, so perfectly at one with him in thoughts and ideas, that he gave her as he gave himself, without suspecting that in ten years' time, when the hour had come, he would find his promise most hard to keep.

He looked forward expectantly to the visit of his "little queen" every evening, and would keep her with him a long time. Up there between heaven and earth they talked lovingly together about the beauties of this world and the glories of that which is to come, and sometimes about the evils of the times, France, her difficulties, her future—M. Martin was not yet out of the flesh. Though he was a bit of a dreamer, after the kind of Chateaubriand or Rousseau, with something of the Promeneur Solitaire about him, he was nevertheless level-headed enough, a sensible solid Frenchman. The politics which he would apply to his country's affairs were drawn from the Bible; he made suggestions and proposed remedies. Teresa was lost in admiration of his lightest word. "If you talk like that to the great men in the government they will take you away and make you king sure enough, papa dear. And then France will be happier than she's ever been before.... But then I shouldn't have you to be my king all to myself. I think I'd like it better that they shouldn't know you." A lover's jealousy. Her father would smile and kiss her.

Teresa would watch her father at prayer—a saint could not pray better—and she tells us that when there was a sermon in church she would look at him more than at the preacher: his beautiful sad face said so much to her. He seemed to be rapt in another world, an angel on earth—and an angel cannot die. Her love for him bordered on worship, till she was recalled to reality by a bitter warning. When she was six she had a vision about her "darling king."

I must say in passing that phenomena of this sort were very rare in her life; there were none while she was a Carmelite and I have found only three altogether. There had been the sprites dancing on the barrel at Alencon, and there was to be the smiling statue that would raise her cured from a sick bed. And in between there was this ominous spectre. Teresa was not a visionary, and did not expect to see Heaven opened to her every other minute. The objective value of her evidence is unusually convincing; when she says what she has seen that is what she has seen, and we must believe her. I will let her tell the story herself, only emphasizing that this occurrence took place in broad daylight and when she was wide awake.

"My father was away from home and not yet expected back. It was about two or three o'clock in the afternoon of a sunny day, when everything was looking lovely. I was alone at a window opening on to the garden, my mind full of pleasant thoughts, when I saw in front of me, against the wash-house, a man dressed exactly like my father, of the same height and with the same walk, but stooping and much aged. I say aged to explain his general appearance, because I did not see his face, for his head was heavily veiled. He was moving slowly, with regular steps, along the edge of my little patch of garden. An unearthly fear came over me and I called out loud in a trembling voice, 'Father! Father!' But the uncanny person did not seem to hear, and went on without making a sign towards the clump of firs that broke the main garden path. I was waiting to see him come out on the other side of these trees, but the prophetic vision had disappeared!"

Mary and Pauline, startled by the distressing cry, came running to ask why she had called their father when she knew he was not at home. Teresa explained what she had seen, and Mary said at once that the nurse had tried to frighten her by hiding her head with her apron. Victoire was called, but she had not been out of the kitchen, and anyway she was not the sort of girl to play tricks of that kind. So they ran out into the garden and looked for the mysterious visitor, under the firs, among the bushes, in the wash-house. There was nobody to be found. Teresa let them run about and talk; for herself, she was certain that she had seen and recognized her father, him and no one else.

The hidden meaning of that premonitory shadow will be seen later on. Meanwhile it had bitten into Teresa, body and soul, and the memory of it remained like an unhealing wound. It was borne in on her that her beloved father was not invulnerable; perhaps harm had already come to him. Must she give up everything and tear even him from her heart? M. Martin came back in safety from Alencon and was welcomed most joyously, but Teresa's too human love had henceforward taken the veil, the thick veil that covered her father's face.

Life went on. The impressionable child waited for the threatened misfortune, and none came; there were games, day-dreaming, prayer, headaches, fits of crying, plenty of little trials, but happiness was unbroken. Les Buissonnets was a garden of Eden, where they loved one another and loved God. The Benedictine nuns were preparing Celine for her first communion. On the evening before, Teresa sat in a corner at home and listened to the further guidance given by her elder sister. From that she learned that from this great day one must "begin a new life," and she resolved to renew hers from Celine's day. When she was eight and a half she began to go to school at the abbey of Notre Dame du Pre, which Leonie had just left. Celine was already in a higher class, and Teresa could only see her from afar. She did not at all like going away from Les Buissonnets, but every evening the maid, or more often M. Martin, fetched her back to her loved ones, her dreams, and her bed.

To reach the school she had to go right across Lisieux; past rows of respectable middle-class houses, through the park, with its trees and terraces, that surrounds the museum (a handsome building in the style of Versailles), and past the cliff-like towers, one romanesque and one gothic, of St. Peter's cathedral in the square where M. Guerin lived; then through the narrow, picturesque, and dirty streets of timber-framed houses, with little square panes to the windows, and lastly through the workingmen's quarter in which the Benedictine convent seems to be lost. Lisieux is like a cow in a meadow, a quiet, gloomy, heavy, sleepy town, without the friendly sociable look of Alencon; it is traversed by inky rivulets and dark sordid alleys on which the factories leave a permanent deposit of thick soot, and the place only comes to life, with a raucous laugh, on market days or when a fair is on. The Teresian pilgrimages will bring about its modernization one day, but they will not spiritualize it or even succeed in making it quite clean; they only increase its commonplaceness: it is a show-place for tourists and a spa for the pious.

I do not think Teresa at all liked having to plunge into the old quarters of the town, although she only went into their churches and convents. The abbey had high grey walls and was a place of bare courtyards, sickly lime trees, and nooks that hardly saw the sun. Did she like it? . . . When she entered there she had to leave flowers and fields as well as home behind her. Did she still have at least the joys of God?

She had a companion, her cousin Mary Guerin, who was fond of her and, it seems, admired her. They were both of an age and shared the same taste for prayer and quiet. But when one is not used to it, it is difficult to be recollected in the middle of a crowd of more or less wild little girls, who in class do the bare minimum that will keep them out of trouble and in play-time go right off their heads. The common life of a school was very distressing to so rare and fastidious a spirit, shy as much from pride as from modesty. Teresa had no idea of human society; she was a hot-house plant, sheltered from all contradiction. Here she found jealousies, rudeness, spite, disputes, in their childish guise, and into that hurry-burly she was thrown.

She was put into the green class, so called because its members wore a green ribbon for badge, and though she was the youngest she was also the most advanced. As she worked hardest as well and was most anxious to get on—to please God and her father and herself—she was top in everything except spelling and arithmetic. "I found it very hard," she says, "to learn things word for word." The nuns who taught never noticed this, but they soon detected the spirit of perseverance and obedience behind her gravity; they recognized a chosen soul, already used to referring all to God, and took her to their hearts. It is possible that they showed an unwise favouritism towards her, but there was no need of that to excite envy and malice against Teresa: her success in class was a sufficient reason. A big girl of fourteen, stupid and probably plain, angry at being beaten in everything and hearing her praises always sung, stirred up the others against Teresa and made her pay for her good looks, her charm, her hard work, and her success. It is easy to imagine the sneaking contempt, the teasing, the sneers, the nasty little lies, with which they tormented their victim; she was powerless to resist and could take refuge only in tears.

She got less fond of play, especially noisy games, and preferred reading, soaking herself in heroic or doleful tales, the Life of Joan of Arc and La Fleur du Prisonnier. Still, she had to take some part in games or she would have been disobedient to the rules. She also turned her attention to the youngsters in the infants' class, gathering them round her to tell them the adventures of Puss-in-Boots; she was a splendid story-teller, but a mistress put a stop to this pleasure. With Mary Guerin or some other faithful friend she would walk quietly round the playground, saying the rosary under her breath, and sometimes she would find a dead bird and give it decent burial in some corner. Not Christian burial—Teresa knew better than to mix up the order of nature with the order of grace in that way—but as one of God's creatures; it had been made by him to live and be happy, and its body deserved honour as a testimony of his handiwork and his goodness.

During play-time the children were at liberty, if they wished, to go and pray before the Blessed Sacrament in the chapel. Teresa never missed this opportunity, and as she went through the nuns' cloister she would kiss the pierced feet of the great crucifix on the wall. One day she took aside one of the older pupils and asked her (much to the girl's embarrassment) to teach her how to "make a meditation." Teresa told her that on holidays she used to hide herself in the corner between the wall and her bed, wrap one of the curtains round herself, and stop like that for a long time.

"What do you do there?" asked the elder girl.

"I think."

One of the mistresses was told the same thing, and asked what she thought about.

"Why, about God, and how quickly the days go by, and eternity; I just think." In spite of the kindly care of the nuns she had to bear the burden of loneliness throughout her school days. It hurt her and she revelled in it. Without seeking it she served her apprenticeship under conditions that were contrary to her expansive nature but favourable to the ambition which was maturing and refining in her heart. She often played at hermits with her cousin Mary: while one tilled the ground, the other tilled her soul by prayer; and to maintain a custody of the eyes suitable to solitaries they would walk to school with their eyes shut, hugging the fronts of the houses—they knocked over a grocer's stall or fruiterer's basket more than once. Teresa longed for the wilderness from the bottom of her heart, and discovered that Pauline had the same ambition. It seemed to her obvious that they should seek it together.

Presently she was promoted to the violet class, and began to prepare for her first communion. At catechism she sat among inattentive companions and drank in the chaplain's words. She asked him questions, and difficult ones, too. She did not agree, for example, that children who die without baptism enjoy only a natural happiness, without the sight of God. Why should this be so, since they have not sinned? She was desperately anxious that everybody should be saved, whether they wanted to be or not. She found free-will a stumbling-block. "I wanted God to force everybody to be good, because he was able to." If not, then she would do the forcing, she, little Teresa. Her will to power and her will to conquest had found their object.

Then one day she heard Pauline tell Mary that she had made up her mind to enter Carmel as soon as possible. That was the wilderness that she had talked about and that Teresa was to share with her. And now she was going to leave her behind! "In a flash I experienced the reality of life," she writes; "I did not yet know the happiness of sacrifice.... I was weak, just weak."

She actually thought she was going to die. Pauline comforted her and explained the cloistered life: Teresa was at once enamoured of it. She stopped crying and felt a new and strange joy filling her heart: she knew quite certainly that God was calling her too to Carmel. She told her sister at once, and Pauline let her carry her news to Mother Mary of Gonzaga, who was the Carmelite prioress. So it came about that Teresa for the first time entered the house which she was so greatly to honour. She was only nine, and a postulant must be sixteen. The prioress pretended to believe in her vocation, and Teresa began to consider what name she should adopt in religion. Her own was already taken by another, and worthily: "Teresa of Jesus." But she was unwilling to give it up. Why not Teresa of the Child Jesus, since she loved him so much? Certainly that should be it. Before she left the prioress said to her, "When you join us, dear child, you shall be called Teresa of the Child Jesus." Such a happy coincidence of thoughts delighted her, but she had scarcely reached the street when her pleasure was dashed: "Pauline is going away. She will be lost to me!"

This devastating thought soon became an obsession. Pauline went into the convent on October 2, 1882, and Teresa was allowed to catch an occasional glimpse of her for a few minutes in the parlour: she hated that room, with its grating and curtains. She did not eat, she did not sleep, and by the end of the year the disconsolate child was suffering from a series of chronic headaches that put a stop to her schooling. It was the beginning of a bad breakdown, whose nature denied medical diagnosis; Teresa, in the Story of a Soul, attributes it to the malevolence of the Evil One.

Was it a nervous disorder or a case of possession? The Devil is fond of making a dead-set at saints, especially when they are in embryo and relatively frail. Being unable to harm the soul directly he wreaks his malice on body and brain; hidden powers control his victims, who break out into physical contortions and terrifying cries, uttering unintelligible nonsense, they have shocking hallucinations, and eventually collapse into a deathlike prostration. That is an exact summary of Teresa's condition. With wild eyes and dishevelled hair she got up in bed, jumped over the rail, and fell heavily to the floor without hurting herself. She was put back, and had to be held down. Her bed was beset with precipices, nails in the wall were "big black burning fingers," her father's hat was some monster—then a hoarse scream and the collapse into stupor. Was it Teresa doing these things, or was it "another"? She assures us that in the worst attack she always remained conscious of what was going on around her and that she kept the use of all her faculties. The doctor confessed that he knew neither how to treat the disorder nor how it was likely to develop.

Pauline's clothing with the Carmelite habit drew near, and this brought a few days' respite to the sufferer. She got rid of her "double," and asked that she might be taken to the ceremony. She went in a cab, and was able to pray and cry and smile, to hide under her "little mother's" veil, and to nurse the hope of one day wearing it herself. But the very next day the mysterious seizures came down on her again and more violently than ever. Her condition seemed desperate, and it was feared that if she did recover her mind would be permanently deranged. A novena of Masses was arranged in the church of our Lady of Victories at Paris, and her father and sisters, her uncle, aunt, and cousins, the Carmelites and the Benedictines, joined in the prayers from afar with the passionate fervour of a forlorn hope. Observe what happened.

Teresa had been moved into her sisters' room in the front of the house, where she could see the sky and the trees and the little statue of our Lady, her feet on the serpent, stars around her head, which she had known since her earliest years; it stood on a bracket near the white curtains of the bed. The day was a Sunday, May 13, 1883, and Teresa seemed to be sleeping. Mary and Leonie were sitting with her, and seeing that she was quiet Mary went out of the room for a moment. Suddenly Leonie, who was reading at the window, heard Teresa call out softly, "Mary!" She took no notice. Then Teresa sat up and called with all her might, "Mary! Mary! Mary!" The elder girl heard her and hurried back in alarm, but when she approached the bed Teresa did not recognize her. Instead, she kept on calling out her name, glancing wildly about as if looking for her. This phenomenon was quite new, and the frightened Mary, after a word of instruction to Leonie, left the room to try a plan. Leonie, soothing the child as best she could, carried her to the window and showed her Mary, who was standing in the garden calling to Teresa with outstretched arms. Teresa could see somebody, though it was not her elder sister but some evil being that had come between them, for again she failed to recognize her. They put her back on the bed. The child was in a frightful state, and aware that something extraordinary was happening. Mary and Leonie were now joined by Celine, and the three, kneeling before the image, called on our Lady with tears to intercede for their sister who, conscious of her unhappy state but unable to explain it, added her weeping and prayers to theirs.

"All of a sudden," Teresa tells us, "that statue came to life. Our Lady became beautiful, so beautiful that I have no words to describe her heavenly loveliness. Her face was unutterably kind and gentle, but what impressed me to my very soul was her winning smile. In a minute all my sufferings were gone, and two big tears rolled down my cheeks." They were tears of unalloyed and heavenly joy.

"Our Lady came towards me, still smiling.... How happy I am, I thought, but I won't say so to anyone, for then my happiness would go away. Then without any effort I turned my eyes and saw my dear Mary; she was looking at me lovingly and seemed very moved, as though she guessed the grace I had received."

Mary had indeed seen the reflection of that divine smile in Teresa's eyes, and had a presentiment that she was healed. She was, completely healed. Within a few seconds her malady —the malicious one, if you prefer—had gone.

Teresa was so closely questioned by her sister that she told Mary what she had determined to tell nobody, and, as she had foreseen, her delight was soon at an end. For Mary saw fit to relate the miracle at the Carmel. Teresa was fetched thither and, unless she was to be rude, she could not do less than try to answer the nuns' questions.

"Was she carrying the holy Child?" "Were there angels with her?" It is easy to imagine it all. The colour of her gown, of her girdle, of her eyes, how she was, or was not, shod—they wanted to know everything. And as they had their own ideas on all these matters they even anticipated the answers. Teresa was fussed and hurt and would not say more than "Our Lady seemed to be very beautiful."

The nuns were dissatisfied. Some began to fancy that she had not looked properly or had seen wrongly, even became suspicious that she was Iying or keeping something important to herself. The next thing was to decide that she was unworthy of the grace she had received; finally, to cast doubt on the vision itself.

"Our Lady allowed me to be thus tormented for my own good," she writes, "otherwise I might have become conceited. Instead of that, I was so humiliated that I could not think of myself without extreme disgust."

She wrote this a long time after, and it may well be that she exaggerates. Nor would it be surprising if she carried away from this visit a not very favourable idea of Carmel from a human point of view. All the more reason for her to enter it.... What is certain is that in the end she paid for her miraculous cure with redoubled suffering, which was now spiritual. The expression, or simply implication, of doubt about the truthfulness of her evidence revived an affliction from which she had already suffered and which was still latent, the affliction of a scrupulous conscience. Clouds closed over our Lady's smiling face, and they opened only twice again during the rest of Teresa's earthly life.

There could be no question of sending Teresa back to school at once after this serious warning. She must have a long rest and plenty of diversion: there was indeed a tendency to overdo it. Several old friends invited M. Martin to stay with them near Alencon. He hated "the world" but was very fond of travelling about, and he would not deny his daughter this opportunity of sharing his pleasure. She went to country houses at Saint-Denis, at Grogny, perhaps at Lanchal, where she entered into society, wore fine clothes, and mixed with fashionably-dressed ladies; she listened to their gossip and flatteries and was much petted and admired. All these luxuries and conveniences, grand rooms, expensive food, well kept-up gardens, crowds of smart servants, were enough to turn the head of a child who was only just enjoying sunlight and peace—and in her beloved native country—after emerging from an atrocious nightmare. If she had been willing to give herself up to it she could in time have become a leader in this elegant and futile world. All these people were serving God, or thought they were (without ever giving up a single one of their pleasures); and yet no one ever seemed to think about death: that was what puzzled Teresa. And probably it was this consideration that kept her from slipping down the path of easy-going enjoyment. "All earthly things are vanity," she declared in after years when she remembered these enchanting days.

She had not forgotten that our Lord was waiting for her, over a year already, at his altar, and on her return took up her preparation with increased fervour, first at home and then at school. Mary now took over the instruction that had formerly been given by Pauline. The last-named sent Teresa an album in which she could keep a record of her "good deeds" in an exclusively "poetical" form: to each act of love or self-denial there was a corresponding floweret, daisy, cornflower, violet, rose, forget-me-not. It is a tradition (quite a hundred years old!) of the Carmelite and some other orders to clothe the most serious ideas and the most vigorous actions with a garment of pretty—prettiness, and the young nun sought to instil this practice into her sister. It was confirmed by much that she saw and heard among the Benedictine nuns (for neither were they averse from flowers), and Teresa received an indelible impress. The fact must be accepted. To these worthy nuns what was not sentimental was not nice, and what was not nice could be neither beautiful nor religious. We have seen beneath this veil, and we know that in Teresa it sheltered solid determination and energy.

Mary was not so keen on this sort of thing. She was less imaginative and "artistic" than Pauline and did not put so much sugar into her guidance and advice. Teresa had rather misunderstood her eldest sister but now became greatly attached to her, for all that some of her inclinations were sharply curbed. Mary was suspicious of "meditation," fearing the child would lose herself in day-dreams, and allowed her to make only vocal, "set," prayers.

The secret of the smiling Madonna had been well kept by the Carmelites, so nothing was known about it at the abbey, where Teresa made her retreat before first communion. She always remembered this as a blessed time. Every night the sister directress came to the dormitory with her little lamp, drew aside the bed curtains, and kissed her.

There is no need to describe the child's feelings when at last, pale and trembling and in a dress like flakes of snow, she walked up the nuns' chapel to the high dark screen dividing the nave from the choir. It was a superb setting for this first embrace with God: austere, very grand siecle, a little jansenistic. "Teresa looked more like an angel than a human being," said the prioress. She was crying at the altar, much to the surprise of her fellows, who supposed that she had some qualm of conscience or was missing her dead mother or the absent Pauline. They knew nothing about weeping for joy. A deep and unutterable happiness had in fact swept across her and overflowed from her eyes.

"O my God, I love you. I am yours for ever."

That was all she could think and all she could say. She asked nothing of her Lord, he asked nothing of her; there was a reciprocal gift, without conditions. It was more than a kiss, she said, it was a making-one. The drop of water was absorbed in the limitless ocean: Teresa surrendered her own will and joined her weakness to the almightiness of her King.

The new communicant went to visit the novice Pauline, and the day ended with a family party at Les Buissonnets. She was given a watch for a present. It did not seem to her the most important thing.

The Bread of Life brings hunger at the same time that it nourishes. Teresa made her second communion, with her father and Mary, on Ascension Day, but afterwards had to wait a long time, till other big feasts came round, and the time went very slowly. Confirmation, on the following Whit Sunday, brought her a new grace, the strength to suffer, and she was soon to be in need of it. Soon after she had an example of human fickleness and unreliability. A friend of whom she was very fond went away for a time, and her return was looked forward to with quivering excitement. When she came back she had forgotten Teresa and hardly looked at her. Teresa tried to work off her abounding affection on this or the other of the nuns at school, but they did not lend themselves to it, and indeed did not seem to understand what she wanted. It is hardly to be expected that they should, for reserve and diffidence paralyzed her tongue before it could give any hint. So she continued to be lonely. This was a good thing on the whole, for it probably saved her from worse disappointments and she already had enough ties to break without adding to them.

She was approaching the anniversary of her first communion when scrupulosity, which had been troubling her imperceptibly, became disturbingly apparent. The attack lasted for nearly two years.

The sinner has no scruples because he has no conscience, or else because he has trained it not to be upset by anything. Scrupulosity always indicates a desire for perfection, even when it bewilders and leads astray. It is a sort of hyper-sensitiveness of the conscience that ferrets out the by-ways of the soul; it probes into actions and motives, analyzes them, isolates them, lays bare what it finds—and then what it does not. It leads to a chronic shortsightedness which makes everything doubtful and suspicious, so that there is no certainty even of a good intention. From being unable to judge, the scrupulous person becomes unable to act, and wears himself out with self-torment and self-reproach. Unless he can get over it—and abandonment of oneself to God will restore sanity—he is done for: despair and suicide lie in wait for him. This form of mental alienation is always a hell for the victim of it in its acute stage; but it may also lead to a complete purification of mind and will and affections, even to the degree where God thinks, wills, and loves through his creature.

Teresa was now nearly twelve, and from the day when she was first able to grasp the idea of cause and effect she had learned to value the least of her thoughts, words, and deeds in terms of worth and worthlessness; by constant practice she had become more and more skilful and sharp in the discernment of the real motives behind her actions. Of course she had a confessor, but children of her age do not have a special director, and she referred her difficulties to Mary, in default of Pauline who might have understood them better. But could Mary be relied on? Teresa reached the stage of doubting others as much as herself. It was useless for grown-up people to try and reassure her, for whenever she examined her conscience—and she was always examining it—her every deed seemed sinful.

During the holidays her aunt took her to the seaside for a fortnight. Wasn't it rather frivolous to amuse herself with donkey-rides and shrimping? She was given a pretty blue ribbon. Ought she to take it? Ought she to tie up her hair with it? Ought she to look in the glass and think that it suited her? But all the girls were wearing blue bows. All the worse, for perhaps they ought not to. She would have refused it, but that would have been unkind to her aunt. Moreover, to refuse it might be a sin of pride, an affectation of simplicity, an arrogation of moral superiority to all the other little girls. But what if it was wrong to wear it, after all? What was the truth about it all?

When she had not scruples of her own they were gratuitously suggested to her. She often had headaches, but as she never complained nobody pitied her. Her cousin Mary had them too, but she made a fuss and was coddled accordingly. "Why don't you do the same?" Teresa asked herself. "No, my child, you're shamming. That won't do." This is harmless enough, but the humiliated and mortified child judged herself to be always wrong and probably ended by believing that she hadn't a headache at all. The result can be guessed.

It was even worse at school, where association with others raised so many delicate problems. Teresa could never get out of her mind the painted pin-box, which she had seen in the hands of a companion, who had given it to her to please her. If she had not shown so much admiration for that little box her friend would not have been deprived of it; she had taken advantage of her kindness. But wouldn't it offend her generosity and make things worse to give it back? . . .

These apparent trifles wrung Teresa's soul. Ordinarily they ended in tears, but soon she would be reproaching herself for them: to whatever sin she had committed she was now adding that of weakness, she must be more brave. In the end she was crying for having cried. Her work suffered by all this, so did her health, and even her prayers. M. Martin took her away from school, but being at home did not effect a cure; she pestered Mary with childish and insoluble "cases of conscience." As she grew up she became more and more pretty; people were not slow to tell her so and she was annoyed with herself at knowing it. But she saw herself already sunk in profligacy—if she knew what the word meant. "What should I have become," she asks later on, "if the world had smiled on me from my birth . . . if my heart had not been so soon turned towards God?" Mary did her best to comfort her, but the next minute Teresa would fall back into an agony of uncertainty.

She used to go to her former school to take part in the meetings of the Children of Mary sodality. "I would work away quietly at my allotted task, and then, when I had finished and nobody was taking any notice, I would slip into the gallery of the chapel and stop there till my father came to fetch me. It was there that I found my only consolation; wasn't Jesus my best friend? I could talk happily only to him: my spirit was oppressed by conversation with people, even about religious things." To talk alone with God was her saving refuge.

At this period of her life she seems, whether out of shy respect or for fear of troubling him, to have been reticent with M. Martin about her interior trials. When therefore Mary also went into Carmel and Teresa accordingly lost her only confidante she turned towards the innocent souls of the little brothers and sisters who died before her birth. Surely, she thought, those who are living in peace and happiness before the throne of God, who never came even within the shadow of the wings of the Prince of this world, must pity her distress and be able to enlighten and relieve her. An answer came on the night of Christmas, 1886: the newly-born Babe of babes, without utterance or showing of himself, changed her darkness into "torrents of brightest light"; he who was made weak that she might be made strong gave her back her weapons of love. As usual, she had put out her shoes in the hearth (doubtless she had no illusions about this proceeding, but it was very nice to have presents and surprises, whether they were brought by little Jesus or by her father and sisters). When she came back from midnight Mass she overheard her father say, "This is much too childish for a big girl like Teresa. This will be the last time." The apparent reproach might have upset her grievously, but in fact her heart was changed. She kept back her tears, and was unaffectedly pleased with the presents that she found in her shoes; her simplicity of outlook had come back and henceforward she was able to get the better of her sensitiveness and scruples. "The source of my tears dried up and afterwards flowed only occasionally and with difficulty." She had learned from the Child in the manger that all her troubles arose from self-sufficiency and self-esteem, from a vainglorious concern about her own reactions and the inordinate value that she put on herself. What God actually asked from her was simply good will. She had got to forget herself and carry his care and love to others. "Charity came into my heart . . . and from then on I was happy." We shall see for how long.

One day a card slipped partly from her missal, disclosing a single nail-pierced hand of the crucified Saviour. That precious blood runs down to the earth and nobody comes forward to gather it up; who will stand by the cross to receive the life-giving stream and pour it out upon the multitudes? "I will," said Teresa; "that is my vocation." Her Well-beloved thirsted, and the more he emptied himself the greater was his thirst; he shed his blood only that we might thirst and be filled, till our souls are running over and he too may drink thereat. A longing to drink at this fountain had taken hold of Teresa, to drink and to enable others to, a longing to wind all round the world that river of grace that flows from the divine side and must return to it. It is impossible to think of oneself when one is drowning in the blood of God.

At fourteen Teresa had left the frontier state of childhood and reached a balanced condition of reason stayed by faith. She knew that work is an indefeasible duty, but she never cared for household jobs and was always dispensed from them, being looked upon as something special, marked for a very high destiny. She would not refuse to help her sisters, but was eaten up with a greed for learning that absorbed all the time she did not give to prayer. She was given formal lessons by a lady in the town, and added to them "special branches of knowledge" that she studied by herself. She had "poetical" sensibility and appreciation of beautiful things but did not cultivate any "accomplishments"; this was as well, for when people of her social class adventure among the arts they rarely escape the accepted "idealism" of the bourgeoisie. In a spirit of self-denial Teresa had refused to learn drawing. She only took it up in the cloister, "taught by the Holy Ghost," as some biographers assert. In my opinion, it is better not thus to commit the Spirit of God, and I shall confine myself to a consideration of the intention of her later pictures (as of Pauline's and Celine's). Her religious understanding developed and deepened. Her bedside book was the "Imitation," probably the only one that was any good to her, and she knew it almost by heart. She tells us that modern work about "the end of this world and the mysteries of the future life" enabled her "to add plenty of honey and oil to the pure flour."

When Celine left school she again became Teresa's constant companion, her confidante and the "sister of her soul." They would go up into the attic room in the evening and together try to learn the secrets of the kingdom behind the stars. "It seems to me that we were given great graces." There is no doubt that the chief one was the regular practice of charity and renouncement. And the more she gave the more she had, according with the word of the gospel, "For he that hash, to him shall be given, and he shall abound." She did not even ask her confessor to allow her to make more frequent communions. But God prompted him to suggest it himself, even to the extent of several times a week, and her cup of happiness was filled. But the call of the wilderness, of Carmel, was every day clearer and more insistent. The only person who gave her any encouragement in this connection was Pauline. She had now been a nun for five years and had exchanged the white veil of the novice for the black of the professed; she had tasted the hardships and the solaces of the religious life, and was clear-sighted enough to be reasonably sure of the reality of her sister's vocation. Mary would not hear of it, and Celine knew nothing about it—she would have been jealous at the suggestion of a younger sister preceding her into a convent. As for M. Martin, Teresa realized what a blow it would be for him and put off indefinitely the bad moment when she would have to tell him. Moreover, he had just recovered from a first stroke of paralysis and had to be carefully looked after. Meanwhile time was getting on. Teresa had fixed on the following Christmas as the latest date for her entry into religion, ten days before the fifteenth anniversary of her birth. She had said "I wish it," and it must be.

On Whit-Sunday she was given some of that flaming courage that came down upon the apostles in the upper room. She besought God to impart it also to her father, and after Vespers she went to look for him. He was sitting in the garden behind the house, at the spot now spoiled by that frightful commemorative monument. It was a lovely day, promising a long mild evening; the cycle of the liturgical year was once more accomplished and the promise kept: I will ask the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, the Spirit of truth. There was now nought to do but to worship and to join oneself to the fulness of the Spirit. Teresa approached, her eyes full of tears and her heart of resolution, and sat down on the seat beside her father. He looked at her, drew her head tenderly down on to his shoulder, and asked her gently, "What is it, my little queen?"

As he got no answer he rose to his feet and with his arm still about her led her slowly among the trees. Then Teresa told him everything, simply and in detail: the fruit of grace was ripe. M. Martin burst into tears, but he did not protest and the only objection he put forward was that she was still very young to make so serious a decision. This was not difficult to overcome, for he had himself waited and wished for this consummation. He pulled himself together and spoke to her like the good man he was. Picking a tiny lily-like flower from the wall he gazed at it considering the care with which God had made it take root and thrive there; yet it could go on growing, perhaps even better, in another soil, for its roots were not severed. That flower was a figure of his daughter, whom he must uproot from his heart and replant in the garden of God.

M. Martin having acquiesced, so did the prioress of the Carmel. When Uncle Guerin was consulted he took his stand on human prudence; he was listened to with respect and the cogency of his arguments admitted. From being at the gate of paradise, Teresa found herself in the garden of affliction. Her agonized uncertainty lasted for three days and then M. Guerin, quite spontaneously, changed his mind and agreed with his brother-in-law; he too was a good man. It only remained to approach the authorities. But the ecclesiastical superior of the Carmelites, Canon Delatroette, declared at once and most definitely that no girl could join them till she had completed her twenty-first year unless she had a dispensation from the bishop. This was the biggest blow as yet, and a difficulty that nobody had foreseen.

A Teresa Martin is not easily discouraged; her stubborn nature was positively immovable when she had God on her side. She would go and see the bishop; if he gave her no satisfaction she would go to the Pope; if he was not acquiescent, then God would make him yield: that was her attitude. God wanted what she wanted, and he would have the last word.

Meanwhile she doubled her prayers, her self-deprivations, and her alms-deeds: the time when she would take refuge in tears had gone by, and the picture of her as a little weeping flower was never more false than it was now. She went to church and she visited the needy. When a poor mother was taken ill she looked after her small children and taught them their catechism; she took an endless delight in imprinting her spirit on their docile souls and her mark was ineffaceable. And then there were the souls of sinners—but how could she reach them and had she any power over them? Would they be lost in that pit from which no act of love ever rises? She wanted God to be loved even in Hell, and for that end she would go down into it. When someone asked her, "What is a soul?" she answered without the slightest hesitation that it is "a spiritual being created solely to love God."

Newspapers were hardly ever read at Les Buissonnets, for they are full of nasty things that should be of no interest to Christian girls. But M. Martin took in La Croix, from which he kept his daughters informed of passing events. During that summer of 1887 "The crime in the rue Montaigne" was agitating public opinion. A low adventurer called Pranzini, receiver, thief, and pimp, had murdered a well-known courtesan, together with her maid and the maid's little girl, and had been arrested at Marseilles when trying to dispose of the woman's jewelry. There was no redeeming feature about this man or his life: he was a barefaced and bestial ruffian, but a handsome ruffian, with an infinite capacity for seduction—hence the interest taken in him by the world in general and women in particular. He protested his innocence but was found guilty and condemned to death, a penalty that he deserved even had he killed nobody. His callousness suggested that he was certainly a lost soul. That soul Teresa coveted. How and why, God alone knows. She knew nothing about him except his crime, his stubborn impenitence, and his threatened fate, but among so many sinful souls she chose the one that seemed the worst and most hideous to implore God's mercy for it. This was the first that she reclaimed, using every spiritual means imaginable; herself, all the resources of the Church, the boundless merits of Jesus Christ, were offered for Pranzini's ransom.

"I felt certain within myself that I should be heard, but to get courage to go on with my attempted conquest of souls I made this prayer: 'O my God, I am sure you will forgive this unhappy Pranzini, and I have such trust in your infinite mercy that I shall still be sure even if he does not ask for a priest or show any sign of repentance. But this is my first sinner, and because of that I ask you for a sign of his salvation to encourage me!’"

On the day after the execution she could not refrain from opening her father's newspaper, hoping to find in it the sign she had asked. She read that at the very moment when the wretched man, unrepentant, unshriven, unabsolved, was led beneath the guillotine, he had pushed the executioners aside, seized the crucifix from the chaplain's hands, and kissed the sacred wounds several times. Teresa slipped away to hide her tears; she had a right to cry. When we consider the filthy lips of her "first child" (that is what she called the criminal) we can feel no surprise at the numberless conversions that she has obtained and still obtains; but in this crusade for souls her first victory remains unsurpassed.

In spite of her apparent excitement when the time came, it was a mere nothing for the saver of Pranzini's soul to present herself before a bishop to ask for a dispensation. She went to Bayeux for this purpose on October 31. So that she should look less young she put up her hair for the first time and wore a saucy little hat with two white feathers: it was not easy to recognize the schoolgirl with dainty features framed in a cloud of gold. Now her hair was drawn back en chignon her face was seen to be clear-cut and strongly marked, her expression determined, almost brutally frank, and of a baffling guilelessness: a face such as painters give to Joan of Arc and the great Teresa. She wept before the bishop, but spoke up plainly and fearlessly, keeping back nothing of what she had meant to say. She made so strong an impression that instead of discouraging her he counselled patience; her father had made up his mind to take her to Rome and that visit would strengthen her vocation. The bishop furthermore promised that he would himself take the matter up with the chaplain of the Carmelites at Lisieux, and would let her father know the result of his efforts. M. Martin showed himself as anxious to give his daughter as she was to give herself.

Three days later she set out for Rome, together with her father and Celine and a party of rather aristocratic pilgrims. Her piercing insight soon detected the spiritual insufficiency which lurked behind some of these high titles and great names and certain of the cassocks. This last discovery perplexed her; she had not as yet realized why the reformed Carmelites had been appointed, as their first duty, to pray for the clergy. It was a sad disillusionment. If the best among them were so ineffectual, what could be said of the rest? There could not be a more noble work than to bring back enthusiasm to the lukewarm and to lead on the ardent to yet greater efforts, to be a custodian of the savour of the salt of the earth.

They visited Paris, and at our Lady of Victories Teresa received strong interior confirmation of the smile whereby she had been healed four years before; on Montmartre she consecrated herself to the Sacred Heart. As might be expected, she admired the monuments in the cemetery at Milan, realistic lachrymose sculptures of the most disagreeable kind set up by the wealthy in memory of their dead. At Venice she was struck by the melancholy of the place; at Padua she venerated the Franciscan Antony, at Bologna the Franciscan Catherine, at Loreto the Holy House; Loreto pleased her especially and she received holy communion there. At Rome she risked her neck to kiss the blood-soaked earth of the Colosseum (it was not so accessible then as it is now); she lay down beside Celine in the empty resting-place of St. Cecily in the catacomb of Callistus, visited her house under the church in the Trastevere, and acquired a deep devotion to her; from the basilica of St. Agnes she brought away a tessera of mosaic for Pauline (now Sister Agnes of Jesus). Eventually she found herself at the feet of Pope Leo XIII.

The vicar general of Bayeux, M. Reverony, who had accompanied the pilgrims and had his eye on Teresa from the start, was standing beside the Pope, having warned the people that they must not speak to him. Teresa spoke.

"Most holy father," she said, raising tear-filled eyes to his, "I have a great favour to ask you."

Getting no reply, she went on: "In honour of your jubilee, let me go into Carmel when I'm fifteen."

"The superiors have the matter in hand, your holiness," interposed the vicar general.

"Very well," said Leo; "do as the superiors decide."

But Teresa tried again. "If only you say yes, holy father, nobody will raise any difficulty."

Surprised and moved, the Pope looked searchingly at her and answered impressively, "You will enter if it is God's will."

Then two attendants raised her from her knees and Leo stretched out his hand to her lips. Teresa went out sick with grief, but deep in her heart there was the peace that comes from a good conscience.

She tells us that before leaving Rome she offered herself to the Child Jesus to be his "little toy." There was still much of the child in her and her ingenuous offering was surely accepted.

From Rome they went to Naples, then to Assisi, and back home by Florence, Pisa, and Genoa, staying all the time at the best hotels. Teresa was enchanted by all that she saw, and was continually trying to free herself from the delight of the eyes. She was suffering, but with superb obstinacy refused to give in and went on willing her consolation, namely, the certitude that she would go into the convent at Christmas. As a distraction or to gain time M. Martin suggested a pilgrimage to the Holy Places. But that would have been only a poor makeshift: the door she wanted to open, and at once, led to a Jerusalem "which is above."

When they got back to Lisieux Teresa, on the advice of Pauline, wrote to the bishop. The superior of the Carmelites was still against her, and the prioress for her. Better still, she had succeeded in winning over the vicar general during the pilgrimage, and he now supported her with all the means at his command.

Decidedly, she thought, God is on my side; the thing is as good as settled; and she anxiously watched the post. But God seemed to be in no hurry; he kept her on tenterhooks, doubtless thinking it well to test such assurance to the utmost. Christmas came, and still there was not a word. As usual, Teresa went to the midnight Mass at St. Peter's cathedral; sad, perhaps a bit put-out and reproachful of the holy Child. Three days later, on the feast of the Innocents, she had a letter from Mother Mary of Gonzaga.

The bishop had yielded and left the decision to the discretion of the prioress. She had only to say the word and Teresa might enter Carmel tomorrow.... But the prioress thought, not at once: Lent would soon be here and she feared what might be the effect of its special hardships on a young postulant; no matter if she were mistaken, another three months' patient waiting would do no harm. So Teresa would be received in April, on the day on which the feast of the Annunciation was to be kept that year.

There might have been a certain danger in this further delay. "What is three months now? She will have the whole of her life to practice penance in the convent. Let her have some fun and collect as many happy memories as she can to take in with her." Just so do we hear of some prospective bridegrooms "making hay while the sun shines." Whoever whispered such an idea into Teresa's ear underestimated the strength both of divine grace and of her own spirit. The bride of Christ was not going to lose a minute from preparing herself for service in the austere cell that is the ante-room of the bride-chamber; it was fitting that she should enter it garbed in penitence and charity rather than in human joys and regrets. Day by day and hour by hour she spent her last "holiday" breaking what was left of her own will into little pieces. She thwarted the least slackness and the tiniest whim; she looked away when her eyes fell upon things that were dear; she forbade herself all argument and answering back; she was always at hand unostentatiously to do any little thing for people and acted at once on the least hint of what anyone wanted; in fact, she made herself the perfect servant.

On the evening of April 8, 1888, the family at Les Buissonnets assembled in the dining-room which I have described. The chandeliers lit up the table, and it was spread with plenty of food, as befits a great festival in the house of a well-to-do bourgeois, even if he is a saint. But that food was only nibbled, for they were celebrating Teresa's departure for Carmel. M. Martin was freely willing to give her up; she was experiencing the sweetest moment of her life. That does not mean that she was not deeply moved by human sadness: it would have been monstrous otherwise.

Next morning Teresa looked smilingly upon the furniture in the house and the trees in the garden for the last time, went down the gravelled path in the front, and made her way to the convent chapel, past the old church of St. James, and by the narrow dingy rue de Livarot which crosses the Orbiquet over a little bridge. Her relatives followed her in and they all assisted at Mass together; at the communion Teresa heard sobbing all around her: she was the only one that did not cry. But the pounding of her heart nearly stifled her when she moved towards the enclosure door. She kissed them all, knelt to receive her father's blessing, and walked in without a backward glance. The door was shut upon her, and she was embraced by the prioress, by her two sisters in the flesh and in religion, and by all her new sisters.

The formidable superior, M. Delatroette, was there and, undeterred by any fear of discord, he said sharply and loud enough for M. Martin to hear, "Well, reverend mothers, now you can sing your Te Deum. As delegate of his lordship the bishop, I hand over to you this fifteen-year-old child in accordance with your wish. I hope she will not disappoint your hopes; but I would remind you that if she does the responsibility is yours." His tact was as meagre as his perspicacity. The fifteen-year-old child went quietly and resolutely to her cell; there was as it were a sort of majesty joined to her modesty which at once called forth the respect of her sisters.

The Carmel of Lisieux stands beside a dark rivulet. It is surrounded by high walls, and a cloister runs round the tiny garden; in the middle is a large cross. The house itself is built of gloomy brick, roofed with slate, and has dormer windows and arched doors; it is icily plain and is even more leafless than the school at the abbey. The inside is made up chiefly of straight whitewashed passages and cold cells, bare of ornament except for the reminders in black-painted letters above the doors: "Watch and pray"; "To suffer and to die." From the prioress's table at the top of the refectory the eye-sockets of a skull observe the nuns as they eat. From their choir they get a faraway view of the altar and its tabernacle through the closely-set bars of a double grille, and in the parlour the shadow and the voice of friends are occasionally discerned. Such was the paradise that Sister Teresa had chosen.

"Everything in the convent seemed to me delightful," she writes. Her long dreamed-of wilderness was realized to perfection by the nine-foot square cell with its single window; it was furnished with a straw mattress on a bed of boards, a jug and basin, a stool, a table, and a plain wooden cross. "Now I am here for always," she said over and over to herself. With God; far from the meanness and weakness and temptations of the world; among the perfect. This last was an illusion of which she would be cured. Wherever there is human kind there is the world; a convent is a part of the world. God has arranged it like that.

A postulant's dress is not becoming: a skimpy black gown and bonnet have neither the dignity of a nun's habit nor the pleasant homeliness of a lay-sister's clothes. However, it is not meant to be attractive, but rather to be a test and a discouragement to any romanticism that may be lurking in the vocation. The postulant finds herself the poor relation of a not very large family (a Carmelite community rarely numbers more than twenty), every member of which has her own duties, assigned and supervised by the prioress, who is charged with the maintenance of the Carmelite rule; she has surrendered all liberty of speech, of action, of use of time: she is free only to obey.

The day, from 5 A.M. to 10:.30 P.M., is divided between psalmody in choir (the whole Divine Office, unabridged), Mass, conferences on the rule, study of Latin and the Holy Scriptures, reading in common, manual work, dinner and supper, meditation and private prayer. Everything is done in silence, that is, without a sentence or even word that is not required by the