The Eagle and the Dove

by Vita Sackville-West

  How different was the mild life and amusement of these little girls from that of the Spanish children running away to Africa to get themselves beheaded by the Moors, or trying to build caves for anchorites within the walls of their father’s palace! How different their reading—the Liturgical Year at Les Buis-sonnets, the preposterous romances of mediaeval chivalry at Avila!

  It seems, however, from her own telling, that the young life of Thérèse Martin was not altogether so mild and normal as it might appear on the surface, for her mother’s death had affected her profoundly. She had not cried much, nor had she told anyone of the sorrow in her heart. But, “you know,” she writes, addressing her self to her sister, “that my happy nature changed completely after maman’s death. I, so lively, so expansive, became timid and gentle, and exaggeratedly sensitive; a book often sufficed for me to dissolve into tears; nobody must take any notice of me : I could not endure the company of strangers…. Ah, if God had not lavished His beneficent rays on His little flower, she would never have been able to acclimatise herself on this earth.” It is hard to believe that a child of four could be so affected, but Thérèse was no ordinary child in spite of her gaiety, her mischief, her stubbornness, and her pretty ways, and her unusual quality was beginning to reveal itself.

  We do not know what M. Martin made of it all, when, for example, Thérèse informed him that her name was written in heaven. She had discovered, as she thought, a T in the constellation of Orion, very comprehensibly, for it stands out plain on a bright winter night. We do not know either what he thought when she prevailed upon her sister Pauline to present her to the Mother Prioress at the Carmel, and besought her to accept her as a postulant. The Prioress listened, only to reply gravely that one could not accept postulants of nine years old, and that Thérèse must wait until she was sixteen. Perhaps M. Martin, hearing this story, remembered his own thwarted attempt on the Grand St. Bernard. Least of all do we know what he thought of an extraordinary occurrence which took place at about this time and which seemed to indicate that his Thérèse, unlike himself, might really be intended for the devotional life. It was shortly after his second daughter, Pauline, had herself taken the veil at Carmel. The loss of her sister came as such a bewildering blow to Thérèse that she was seized with strange and violent tremblings all over her body and finally fell so ill that her life was in danger. Prayers and masses, as was natural to that pious household, were offered up for the recovery of the beloved child, but neither prayers, tears, nor medical aid seemed to produce the slightest amelioration. Thérèse lay small and moaning in her bed; terrifying visions assailed her, accompanied by shrieks of fear; some nails driven into the walls of her room appeared to her as the stumps of charred fingers; her sisters dared not leave her alone for a moment. A day came when, crying out for Marie, Thérèse failed to recognise her. Her sisters in alarm threw themselves with supplications before a statue of our Lady; three times did they repeat their prayer and at the third repetition they saw Thérèse fix her eyes on the image for four or five minutes “with a radiant look as though she were in ecstasy,” when she turned towards Marie with a renewed and tender recognition. From that moment onwards all sign of her illness disappeared, and by the next day she was able to resume her normal life.

  Thérèse later wrote her own version of what had happened during those miraculous minutes. “Finding no help on earth and on the point of dying of sorrow, I turned towards my Mother in Heaven, praying with all my heart that she might take pity on me. Suddenly, the statue came to life. The Virgin Mary became beautiful, so beautiful that I shall never find words to render that divine beauty…. The Holy Virgin advanced towards me. She smiled to me—ah, how happy I am! I thought, but I shall tell no one or my happiness will vanish.” fn1

  This reluctance to confide details of her vision—a reluctance which is perhaps the most convincing proof of genuine credence, shared by Thérèse with many other saints—was overcome by Marie who, as a witness of the occurrence, had already formed some idea of what had taken place. “When I found myself alone with her,” writes Thérèse, “I could not resist her tender and pressing questions. In surprise at finding my secret discovered without my having spoken a single word, I confided it entirely to her. Alas, I had not been mistaken, my happiness was to vanish and be changed to bitterness….”

  Marie rushed to Carmel with the great news of an authentic miracle, and Thérèse was summoned to give her own account. Received by the Mother Superior in person, she was immediately surrounded by nuns who besieged her with questions. There were many things they wanted to know. Had the Holy Virgin been carrying the child Jesus? had she been escorted by angels? Thérèse was deeply troubled by their insistence, and would reply only under pressure that the Holy Virgin had looked very beautiful and had advanced towards her with a smile. Then, observing that the nuns had expected something quite different, and were in fact disappointed, she began to imagine that she herself had invented the whole story. It is a pathetically true touch of a child’s nature. Another child, far from evading the flattery implicit in the cross-examination, might have exaggerated and embroidered as she observed the avid attention of her listeners. The child is a born play-actor after all, when once it has departed from its natural secretiveness, and takes its cue from its audience. Not so Thérèse. Many years went by before she recovered from what she regarded as this betrayal and humiliation; years during which she suffered a darkness of remorse to be understood only by those who have also endured the torment of a super-sensitive and scrupulous conscience. “Ah!” she exclaimed, “if only I had kept my secret to myself I should also have kept my joy.” This extreme delicacy of feeling, this excitability both in sorrow and in enjoyment, characterised her from her earliest age, and persisted throughout her life; she was a mixture between the firmly and the finely poised, never deviating from the main line of her intention yet trembling with sensibility all along the way. Expansive by nature, she retained the fundamental reserve proper to those who live with strings too acutely tautened. “There are some things,” she wrote, “which lose their scent when exposed to the air; there are intimate thoughts which cannot be translated into the language of this earth, without instantly losing their profound and heavenly meaning.” The phrase is applicable also to things other than celestial visions.

  IV

  FOR A PERSON of her age—she was now ten—Thérèse had already lived through some considerable mental experiences. She had lost her mother; she had lost her sister, though in a different way; she had taken her own resolution to embrace the cloistered life, not on any impulse but knowing fully what it meant; she had suffered the disillusion of having her entreaty rejected; she had lain at death’s door; she had seen our Lady appear to her; she had become the centre of a most unwelcome interest in the convent parlour; she had thereafter plunged into a deep and durable grief, a grief which now added itself to the sum of her piling knowledge. Life itself supplied the arduous novitiate she had desired. She was not built to take experiences lightly and, already matured beyond her years, in spite of the skipping-rope, the little oven, and the sailing-boat, she now prepared to face another set of events which, in their different ways, proved no less agitating than the others. She had already been sent to school at the Benedictine convent, where, although she returned to Les Buissonnets every night, she was not too happy. She was bad at games, incongruous as it may seem to associate the importance of games with a convent school for girls at Lisieux in 1881; she shrank from her companions, who were too rampageous for her taste, and who in their turn teased her. Neither her application to her lessons nor her success in class increased her popularity. But all this was as nothing compared with the emotion aroused in her by her first communion. It was a moment to which all else had been a preparation, and with the rapture of first love she received it. “Ah, how sweet was the first kiss of Jesus to my soul! Yes, it was a kiss of love! I felt that I was loved, and I said also, ‘I love you, I give myself to you forever.’ Jesus asked nothing
of me, He required no sacrifice. He and the little Thérèse had long since looked at one another and had understood. That day, our meeting could no longer be called a simple look, but a fusion. We were no longer two.”

  This revealing passage, with sentiments reproduced a hundred times throughout the pages of Thérèse’s autobiography, conveys very exactly and convincingly the absolute abandonment of self into the keeping of another; the absolute submergence in union; the entire surrender, the fusion of Thérèse with her final cry in her search for the right word, calls and italicises it. She may or may not have known that it was the recognised word appropriate to the experience. The language is the language of human love; it is amorous; it is passionate; it is the bride finding herself for the first time in the arms of her lover. The soul knows no other means of expression in words; and although the phraseology so familiar in the relation of human passion may jar and even offend where applied to so transcending a revelation, those who have known both the first ecstasy and the subsequent meticulous loyalties of human devotion will more rightly estimate the exactitude of the metaphor. Thérèse was henceforth truly and mystically wedded to Jesus.fn2

  The need, the desire to consecrate her outward life to the summons she had inwardly answered, naturally grew even stronger. Like genius, it was irresistible; it consumed her, a fire which could not be smothered. The entry of her sister Marie into Carmel was yet another blow to be borne, but her loss had only the effect of making Thérèse turn more and more towards Heaven. It is indeed pitiful to read the struggles of her young soul, torn between the vision of perfection, the galling delay, and the despair of the “dark night” which sometimes assailed her. Of her own disposition at that time she writes with her usual candour that her excessive sensibility rendered her truly unbearable. No doubt she exaggerates, and no doubt the chief sufferer from her temperament was Thérèse herself, so prone to tears and then so ashamed of having shed them that she would start to weep again for having wept. Her heroine Jeanne d’Arc had also much inclined to tears but her predecessor Teresa of Avila had had no patience with them. The cause, Teresa said in her sensible way, might be an accumulation of humour round the heart, which had a great deal more to do with it than the love of God.

  Then occurred an incident which Thérèse refers to as her “complete conversion,” as though conversion were the term to use for one whose eyes from childhood had turned always in the same direction. It happened on Christmas day, at one o’clock in the morning. Thérèse, then aged nearly fourteen, on returning to Les Buissonnets after attending the midnight Mass, knew well that in the chimney-corner would be standing the French child’s equivalent of our Christmas stocking—her own shoes filled with treats and presents. Hitherto, her father had always genially watched her pleasure and had listened with increasing cheerfulness to her cries of delight as she drew first one thing and then the other from the enchanted shoes; but on this occasion, for some reason, he seemed glum and bored, and as Thérèse mounted the staircase she heard him remark, “This is really too babyish a surprise for a big girl like Thérèse; I hope this will be the last year of it.”

  The effect of these words upon Thérèse was startling; they pierced, she says, her heart. Céline who had followed her whispered, knowing her well, “Don’t go downstairs again yet, wait a little; you will cry too much as you look at the surprises in front of Papa.” The brief scene seems small though touching—the two little girls whispering together on the landing, the bearded father standing below, unconscious of what he had done, the shoes waiting on the hearth by the fire—but such things are not small even to a normal child. Thérèse had been stabbed. She behaved however very differently from Céline’s expectation. Running downstairs, she made straight for her shoes and joyfully pulled out everything; Papa was no longer bored; he was laughing now; he had no idea of this victory over self which had moulded Thérèse for ever in the space of five minutes. She had “recovered for always her strength of soul, which she had lost at the age of four-and-a-half.”

  Thérèse describes this Christmas night as the opening of the third and happiest period of her life. It is curious that she should see her life so clearly divided, especially when we consider what immature years she is dealing with, but evidently in her mind there stood up, like mountain passes dividing one valley from another, the three events of her mother’s death, her first communion, and her “complete conversion.” To us, seeing it in perspective, her life appears as a straight line, drawn from point A to point Z with no deviation, no arabesques of pattern. But the soul knows its own history best. Thérèse saw, and saw instantly, that her childhood had ended; that her tremors must end also; that the way which was her own discovery lay clearly before her; she had but to follow it in the minutest scruple; it was the way which would lead her to sainthood. As though looking once over her shoulder into the past, she wrote a retrospective farewell. Thérèse was not a great poet, although she frequently expressed herself in verse; the debt to Chateaubriand here is obvious, but the stanzas have the charm of autobiographical simplicity:

  fn3Oh! que j’aime la souvenance

  Des jours bénis de mon enfance!

  Pour garder la fleur de mon innocence

  Le Seigneur m’entoura toujours D’amour.

  J’aimais les champs de ble, la plaine;

  J’aimais la colline lointaine;

  Dans mon bonheur je respirais a peine,

  En moissonnant avec mes sæurs Les fleurs.

  J’aimais la paquerette blanche,

  Les promenades du dimanche,

  L’oiseau leger gazouillant sur la branche.

  Et le bel azur radieux Des cieux.

  O souvenir, tu me reposes.…

  Tu me rap pelles bien des choses …

  Les repas du soir, le parfum des roses,

  Les Buissonnets pleins de gaieté Lété.

  V

  SOLE AND SINGULAR inconsistency in a life so consistent in the spirit of humility throughout its short span, was her avowed conviction that she would one day achieve recognition as a saint. In secular life, a parallel self-confidence might incur a charge of arrogance : no youthful soldier admits even to himself that he will carry a Field-Marshal’s baton in the fullness of his career. Even Teresa of Avila, who was arrogant enough in some matters, had adopted a more modest attitude, for when Fray Pedro de la Encarnacion told her that her presence had saved the city of Burgos from destruction by flood because she was a saint, she replied gravely, “Father, during my lifetime, I have been told that I was handsome and I believed it; that I was clever and I thought it was true; and that I was a saint, but I always knew that people were mistaken on that score.” Again, in her joking way, she had written that she used sometimes to be annoyed at hearing such foolish remarks as that she was a saint—if so it must be a half-and-half one, with neither feet nor head (Ha de ser sin pies ni cabeza). And again, she was delighted when someone said to her, “Well, Mother, you may be a saint, but you do not seem one to me.” Yet Thérèse Martin, whose career was the epitome of especial abnegation, humility, and self-surrender, could openly aspire to the highest reward in the hierarchy of virtue. Although it is true that in the religious life the expression “to be a saint,” “to become a saint” is used somewhat loosely according to mundane ideas, it seems evident from Thérèse’s emphasis and also from many supporting phrases that she very definitely meant what she said. Doubts sometimes troubled her : “Truly, I am far from being a saint”; but even here the form of expression implies no renunciation of the ambition, only that she is still some way from its accomplishment. And the mood of dubiety, at best, is rare. Her more constant certainty breaks out in unequivocal phrases : “Reflecting then that I was born for glory, and searching for the means to attain it, it was inwardly revealed to me that my own glory would never appear to mortal eyes, but would consist in becoming a saint. This desire might seem full of temerity,” she adds, “but I still feel the same audacious confidence that I shall become a great saint” (une g
rande sainte). The italics are hers. She had no essential doubts about her vocation, and one of the most interesting things about her is perhaps that in spite of her littleness she really made straight for the biggest, since, after all, to a religious person there could be no higher aim.

  Her prophecies display the same temper. She had no doubt at all that her usefulness would not cease with her death but would be continued, and with far greater efficacy, from on high. God, she said, would do her will in Heaven because she had never done her own will on earth. She would give tangible proof of her celestial existence, she would send down showers of roses; she would do more, she would come down in person. Such assurances were frequent on her lips and in her writings. There was no mistrust of her own power, not because of any personal vainglory but because she was convinced that God was working through her.

  The thought of any other profession which at moments crossed her mind, but which she instantly subjected to her determination to become a Carmelite and “the mother of souls,” naturally ran along much the same self-sacrificing lines. To be a doctor, an apostle, a Crusader in defence of the Church, a missionary, a martyr—ah! what allurements she found in the contemplation of martyrdom! The dream of her youth, she calls it; but a single torture would not suffice her; she must undergo them all; she must be flagellated, crucified; like St. John she must be plunged into boiling oil; like St. Agnes and St. Cecilia she must offer her throat to the sword of the executioner; like St. Joan of Arc she must perish on the burning faggots, murmuring the name of Jesus. Such dreams remained hidden, fortunately for M. Martin and her sisters; no need to send the servant Victoire chasing up and down the streets of Lisieux, looking for a Thérèse who was running away to get herself beheaded by the heathen. But, although she had neither the temperament nor the tradition to put her romantic desires into practical execution, they were none the less active in her mind. Not content with looking back into the past, she sent her imagination forward also into the future, trembling at the thought that the incredible torments the faithful would suffer during the reign of the Anti-Christ could not all be reserved exclusively for her. Strange, smoky, bloody pictures to come out of the pleasant domesticity of Les Buissonnets! She knew however at the bottom of her heart that such aspirations were not for her; she must find another way of obtaining the crown of glory. But where to find that way? St. Paul showed it to her as she read chapters xii and xiii of the First Epistle to the Corinthians: