Prioress tells St. Thérèse, nine, to wait until sixteen to enter convent

LISIEUX, Normandy, October 2, 1882 AD — Pauline Martin, twenty-one, entered the Carmel, the convent of Carmelite nuns at Lisieux, on October 2, 1882 AD. That afternoon her youngest sister, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, who was nine, saw her from the visitors’ side of a grating in the convent parlour. The child had already asked the convent’s prioress to take her too, and had been told to wait until she was sixteen. From that day Pauline no longer lived at home but inside the convent, and the parlour was where her family saw her.

St. Thérèse was four and a half when her mother, Saint Zélie Martin, died in August 1877 AD. On the day of the funeral her sister Céline chose their eldest sister, Marie, for a mother, and St. Thérèse hid her face against Pauline and said: “And Pauline will be my Mother.”

In the years after that, at Lisieux, Pauline gave St. Thérèse her reading lessons. The first word the child read alone was “Heaven.” St. Thérèse told Pauline everything. Once St. Thérèse said she would like the two of them to go away to “a far-off desert.” Pauline answered that she wanted the same and was waiting until St. Thérèse was big enough to set out. The child took that as a promise.

Then St. Thérèse overheard Pauline telling Marie that she would soon enter the Carmel. The child understood only that Pauline was leaving for a convent and would not wait for her, and she cried bitterly.

Pauline comforted her and explained what a nun’s life was. One evening the child was thinking over what Pauline had told her. “I felt that the Carmel was the desert where God wished me also to hide,” St. Thérèse wrote. The next day she told Pauline that she wanted to enter the Carmel too. Pauline took it as a sign of God’s will and promised to take her there to tell the prioress, Mother Marie de Gonzague, who governed the convent.

The visit was fixed for a Sunday before Pauline entered. A cousin of St. Thérèse’s was to come too; the Carmelites let only close relatives and very young children see them, and the cousin was still young enough. St. Thérèse needed to speak to the prioress with no one else in the room. She told her cousin that the two of them must be very good and polite and tell the prioress their little secrets, one waiting outside the room while the other spoke. Her cousin had no secrets and did not much like the plan, but she went out.

St. Thérèse then told Mother Marie de Gonzague that she wanted to be a Carmelite. The prioress listened and believed that the child had a vocation. But she told her that the Carmel did not admit anyone at the age of nine, and that she must wait until she was sixteen. St. Thérèse had hoped to enter with Pauline and to make her First Communion on the day Pauline received the Carmelite habit, and she had to give that up.

On the morning of October 2 St. Thérèse’s father, Saint Louis Martin, went to the Carmel with her uncle and her eldest sister, Marie, for Pauline’s entry. St. Thérèse’s aunt took her to Mass, along with her other sisters and her cousins. They were in tears when they walked into the church, people stared at them, and they went on crying. St. Thérèse wrote: “I even wondered how the sun could go on shining.”

That afternoon St. Thérèse was in the Carmel parlour, and behind the grating she saw Pauline, now Sister Agnes of Jesus. St. Thérèse wrote: “Oh, how much I suffered in that parlour!”

On a later day St. Thérèse went back to the Carmel, her first visit since Pauline entered. That morning she wondered what name she would be given as a nun. She thought of the Child Jesus, decided she would like his name joined to hers, and was careful not to tell the prioress. In the middle of their conversation Mother Marie de Gonzague said to her: “When you come to us, little one, you will be called ‘Teresa of the Child Jesus.’”

On the family’s visits after that, St. Thérèse’s father and Marie had most of the time in the parlour. St. Thérèse was left two or three minutes with Pauline at the end, and she spent them crying. She did not understand that each of them could not have half an hour. St. Thérèse thought: “Pauline is lost to me.”