Saint Zélie Martin dies at Alençon, leaving five daughters

ALENÇON, Normandy, 28 August 1877 AD — The nursing sister went for the two men a little after midnight. Saint Zélie Martin, lace-maker, of 42 Rue Saint-Blaise, had suffered a haemorrhage, and the end came fast. Her husband, Saint Louis Martin, and her brother Isidore Guérin, a chemist at Lisieux, reached the bedroom in time for her last breath. She died at half past midnight on Tuesday. She was forty-five.

The three eldest, Marie, Pauline and Léonie, had left the room at nine the evening before, on the nursing sister’s word. Céline is eight. Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, the youngest, is four and a half.

The older three were told at once. Pauline had gone out to the little room in the garden above the laundry; she came back in tears to the two youngest, found them asleep, and waited for the morning.

The priest had come on Sunday evening. St. Louis Martin walked to the Church of Notre-Dame to fetch him and escorted the Blessed Sacrament back to the house himself. The whole family stood round the bed for the anointing, and St. Thérèse’s account of that room is the exact one: “I can still see the spot where I was by Céline’s side. All five of us were lined up according to age, and Papa was there, too, sobbing.”

After the sacrament the pain eased and she fell into a kind of coma. Her arms and legs were swollen; she could not move or make herself heard, and the household read her by her lips. Marie had written to Lisieux, and the Guérins came on Monday. They got a smile, then a long look at her sister-in-law, and no words.

Louise Marais, the maid in that house for twelve years, nursed her to the end. She had been dismissed during the illness over her treatment of Léonie, and asked to stay because no one else could nurse her as well.

The lump in her right breast was found in 1865 AD; she put it down to a knock on the corner of a table years before. Nothing was prescribed, and for eleven years nothing happened. Last December she saw a doctor and wrote out for her sister-in-law what he said. He examined her, was quiet a minute, then asked: “Do you know that what you have is really serious? It is a fibrous tumor. Would you shrink back from an operation?” She was sure an operation would shorten her life rather than save it, and he agreed he could not advise one. He wrote a prescription; she asked what good it would do. “Nothing. It’s just to make the sick person feel a little better.”

In June she went to Lourdes with the three eldest girls, went into the baths, and came home unchanged. Before the journey she told her brother the Mass he offered to have said there was not needed: “My little girls will pray so well for me that it is impossible for the Blessed Virgin not to allow herself to be touched.” In the same letter: “This night especially, I suffered a lot for two hours. It is no longer possible for me to touch the sick spot, it is too sensitive.” She hoped no haemorrhage would come. Her life had been hard, she wrote, and her work was not finished, because the children were not yet raised.

The last thing she wrote, twelve days ago: “If the Blessed Virgin does not cure me, it is because my time is done and the good God wants me to rest somewhere other than on earth.”

Her husband gave up the jeweller’s business in 1871 AD and moved the family to the house in the Rue Saint-Blaise. The lace went on: the Point d’Alençon workshop she set up in the same street about 1853 AD was still hers at the end. For the last few weeks a friend has come each morning to take the two little ones for the day. One morning they left without their prayers, and Céline whispered on the way: “Must we tell her that we have not said our prayers?” They were taken to a big room and left there to say them. St. Thérèse said: “This is not like Mamma, she always said our prayers with us.”

In March their mother wrote to Pauline about the four-year-old: “The little one will be good too, she wouldn’t lie for all the money in the world, she has wit like I’ve never seen in any of you.”

The funeral is at nine tomorrow in the parish church; by the custom here the five daughters will not be at it. She will be buried in the cemetery of Notre-Dame. The parish priest of Montsort has said there is one more saint in heaven.

Of these days St. Thérèse says: “I do not remember having cried much, and I did not talk to anyone of all that filled my heart; I looked and listened in silence, and I saw many things they would have hidden from me.” And: “Once I found myself close to the coffin in the passage. I stood looking at it for a long time; I had never seen one before, but I knew what it was. I was so small that I had to lift up my head to see its whole length, and it seemed to me very big and very sad.”