Céline photographs St. Thérèse under the infirmary cloister at Lisieux

CARMEL OF LISIEUX, Calvados, 30 August 1897 AD — The nuns of this Carmel laid Saint Thérèse of Lisieux on a folding bed today, rolled her out along the cloister walk as far as the door of the choir, and left her there alone for a good while. Before they took her back in, her sister Céline photographed her, propped on her pillows under the cloister of the infirmary.

St. Thérèse is a Carmelite of this house, twenty-four years old, and she is dying of tuberculosis. She entered here on 9 April 1888, at fifteen. She was carried down to the infirmary on 8 July and has not left it. Canon Maupas, the parish priest of Saint-Jacques in the town, anointed her there on 30 July and that same afternoon gave her Communion as Viaticum, the Communion given to the dying. She received Communion for the last time on 19 August and has not been able to receive since. She stopped spitting blood on 5 August; on 17 August the disease reached both lungs and its last stage. Today half the left lung is taken. She has no fever and is breathing more easily than she was, but she is very pale and very weak, and until today she had been coughing for hours at a time and getting bad headaches from it.

The photograph is the forty-fifth image of her in the Carmel’s series. It was made by Sister Geneviève of the Holy Face — Céline Martin, three and a half years older than her sister, who entered here in 1894 and brought a camera in with her. Forty-one of the forty-seven photographs of St. Thérèse that the house keeps are hers, developed in a makeshift laboratory. The exposure runs about nine seconds, which fixes the faces in her plates. In this one the entrance to the infirmary stands to the right of the pillows, behind the pillar.

The cloister walks run round the courtyard here. The sisters use them to cross from one wing of the house to another, to say the rosary, and to read out of the rain; one of them runs along the infirmary. The nuns pushed the bed as far as the door of the choir, their chapel. A grating closes the choir, and the sisters receive Communion through it. Left there by herself, St. Thérèse prayed with her eyes on the grille, then threw rose petals towards it.

She watched the courtyard while the camera was being set up. Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart, who keeps the garden there, was working near her and said she was going to pull out a rhododendron shoot that was dying. St. Thérèse asked her to let it live. Sister Marie had to be asked twice, and the shoot was left where it was.

She had a quiet night, and was happy at the thought that she might be about to die. “I joined my hands very nicely, expecting death,” she told Mother Agnes of Jesus, the sister who writes down what she says.

Mother Agnes asked her today whether she would rather be told she had a few days to live than months or years of worsening pain. St. Thérèse answered: “Oh! no, I wouldn’t be at all happier. What makes me happy is only to do the will of God.”

Two visitors came. Dr Francis La Néele is married to her cousin Jeanne Guérin. The Carmel sent for him by telegram. It reached him too late for a morning train, so he came on the evening train and went straight to the monastery. He had returned on 25 August from the national pilgrimage to Lourdes, which left her thirteen days without a doctor. He told her: “It will be soon, little Sister, I’m sure of it.” She looked at him and smiled.

Father Youf, the chaplain of the Carmel, came as well, and she repeated to Mother Agnes what he had said to her: “You have suffered more than you are suffering now… We are finishing our ministry together, you as a Carmelite nun, I as a priest.”

Her bed was moved on Saturday to the middle of the infirmary, near the window, so that she could see the garden. Looking out of it that day she pointed to the dark under the chestnut trees: “See, down there, at the side of the chestnut trees, do you see that black hole wherein nothing is distinguishable?.. Well, I am in a place like that, as regards both body and soul… Ah! yes, what darkness! But I dwell there in peace.” Her last Communion, on 19 August, she offered for Hyacinthe Loyson, the Carmelite priest who left the Church.

Her last letter went out on 25 August, to Maurice Bellière, one of the two spiritual brothers she was given to pray for. Bellière is a White Father and still a seminarian. Her other spiritual brother is Father Adolphe Roulland of the Paris Foreign Missions. She was given him in May 1896, when he was about to leave for China.

Her mother, St. Zélie Martin, died at Alençon twenty years ago this week, and was buried there the next morning; this paper reported both. St. Thérèse was four.

She is back in the infirmary tonight. Mother Agnes and Céline have been writing down her words since April.