"He was always my comfort (counsellor) and support."

The last words Zélie wrote to her husband were: "I am entirely yours."

                                                          St Zélie

"I feel that our family, modest though it is,

is honoured in that our wonderful Creator has numbered it among his favoured ones."

                                                          St Louis

The Martin family lived their lives following the liturgical feasts. On working days the parents began with Holy Mass at half past five in the morning. Mr Martin's influence extended to a whole circle of friends. Many of them, without Louis, would probably have given themselves over only to worldly amusements. He drew them to frequent Catholic circles, kindled their enthusiasm for the feast-day customs of the parish and for visiting the sick. They were not turned in upon themselves, but were, instead, attentive to what was happening around them.

Louis was the leader of nocturnal Eucharistic adoration. They regularly read the Catholic newspaper La Croix, keeping themselves informed of local and national political events, since the anticlericalism of the time placed Catholics in danger. Both of them wore the scapular, the one item of clothing found intact after the exhumation. They also asked each of their children to wear it, since they wished them to be protected under the mantle of the Blessed Virgin. Every evening after work they would all gather around the statue of Our Lady for prayer. That statue, known as Our Lady of the Smile, is today kept in the shrine at Lisieux.

After the war of 1870, Louis joined the great pilgrimage of 20,000 pilgrims to Chartres to pray for the nation. He had to sleep in the underground chapel, where Masses were celebrated all through the night. He returned there again in 1873 and wrote to his daughter Pauline: "Pray hard, little one, for the success of the pilgrimage to Chartres in which I wish to take part; it will bring numerous pilgrims from our beautiful France to the feet of the Blessed Virgin, so that we may obtain the graces our country so greatly needs, that we may be worthy of our past." We know how greatly Louis loved pilgrimages. At the age of sixty-two, although he did not manage to reach the Holy Land, over the course of a month and a half he visited Munich, Vienna, Constantinople, Athens, Naples and Rome, accompanied by a priest friend. His soul was overwhelmed with grace at the wonders he encountered. He wrote to his daughters: "If only I could make you feel all that I have experienced, marvelling at the great and beautiful things unfolding before me! O my God! Your works are so wonderful! … I could cry out: 'It is too much, Lord! You are too good to me!'" Louis wanted his daughters, too, to come to know the world. He took them, in turn, to Paris, to the seaside at Deauville and Trouville, where they spent lovely holidays with the Guérin family, to the Great Exhibition at Le Havre, and so on.

There is a text by Félicité Robert de Lamennais, which Zélie knew by heart and often recited to her daughters: "Oh! Speak to me of the mysteries of this world which my desires foreshadow, into which my soul, weary of earthly shadows, longs to plunge. Tell me of Him who created it and fills it with himself, and who alone can fill the immense void he has created within me." Thérèse would later confirm this herself: "Heaven was the goal towards which all their actions and desires tended." The aim of Louis and Zélie, the dream of their youth and what they strove for their whole life long, was holiness. "I want to be a saint," she used to say, while he confided to his daughters: "Yes, I have a goal, and that is to love God with all my heart."

They spoke openly with one another and often knew what the other was thinking: "He did not need to say it; I knew perfectly well what he was thinking." He did not hesitate to tell his wife of his own past temptations in Paris, so that his account might be of help to her brother Isidore when he went to Paris to study. They spoke, too, of a thousand and one things concerning everyday life and the doings of their children. Their favourite subject of conversation was the faith, and they loved to read the lives of the saints together and discuss them, sharing their impressions and teaching one another. They also knew how to respect quiet times and to give each other room to indulge their differences: Louis would regularly go off to the family property, "Le Pavillon", or on pilgrimage. Zélie, for her part, would set aside time to write letters to her brother and sister, or to attend devotional gatherings.

Beginning in 1863, Louis began helping his wife, who was becoming ever more burdened by her lacemaking business. In 1870 he closed his watchmaker's shop in order to devote himself entirely to helping his wife with her work. He took charge of sales and dealings with clients, a task Zélie had previously entrusted to another firm. He would go regularly to Paris to do business with other shops, take orders, buy materials and make deliveries: "I am with you in spirit the whole day, and I say to myself: 'He is surely doing this or that just now.' I long to be near you, my dear Louis. I love you with all my heart, and I feel that I love you even more when you are not beside me. I could not live far from you. I love you with all my heart. How I would love to be home already today! My dear Louis, I am happy only when I am with you. I have just spent, with you in spirit, the loveliest moments of the whole day, for I have already grown a little tired of constantly paying and receiving visits, but even that will not last much longer.

My dear Louis, this morning your letter arrived, which I had been eagerly awaiting. By the time you receive this letter, I shall be busy tidying your desk. Do not worry, I shall lose nothing, not an old scrap of paper, not a nib, nothing at all. And it will be spotless, through and through! I feel the need to withdraw into silence to reflect on my salvation. I want to become a saint, but that will not be easy. There is still a great deal of wood to be hewn…, I wanted to have many children whom I would raise for Heaven. I love you with all my heart. I am so happy at the very thought of seeing you again soon that I cannot work at all. Your wife, who loves you more than her own life.

He kept the accounts, and sometimes even took up the needle himself. In truth, the two of them found the workload hard to bear; by day they worked as much as the children allowed, and they often "lengthened the day with the help of a lamp" late into the night. At the busiest times Zélie was awake from 4.30 in the morning until eleven at night. This tireless woman concluded: "I am obliged to work a great deal, too much. I am very unhappy about it, and I would like to rest a little before I die." Yet she also felt that "the worse things are, the better I am!" They never stopped lending money to those around them: to Isidore for his business ventures, to other firms with which they worked, to certain people in need, to shops threatened with closure... all without charging any interest. "Give, always give, and make some people happy," Louis wrote in 1885. This could well have been his life's motto.

Louis and Zélie took on the care of other family members. Until the move in 1871 they lived with her parents. Mr and Mrs Martin lived on the upper floor of the house. In 1867 she invited her father, who was now a widower and had trouble looking after himself, to come and live with them. But she had to resort to a ruse to persuade him: "When I spoke with him about him coming, and there Pierre-François Martin died 1865 to come here, he was very angry, but I told him I could not do without him and that he would be a great help to me, and so I begged him to stay. My husband joined me in this request, so he slipped away and said nothing, and I convinced him." She devotedly cared for her father right up to his death in 1868, with Louis's help. His wife, touched by this, testified: "You could not meet a man as good as he was towards his father-in-law."

A month after her father's death, a new separation occurred: they sent their two eldest daughters to the Visitation convent. All these trials affected Zélie's health: headaches, toothaches, insomnia and loss of appetite. She went through episodes of depression. At that time she looked so unwell that many predicted she would soon be reunited with her beloved dead. The industrious mother's reply was: "I have no time to die; I have far too much to do at the moment!"

Eighteen months later, death again knocked at the door of the Martin family, taking their sweet little Hélène, aged five, on 22 February 1870: "I blame myself for everything," said Zélie. With every serious illness of her children she had the same experience: "I do not know what to do or how to cope with it. I am afraid of not giving the child what she needs; for me that is a constant death. Someone would have to go through this to know what real torment it is. I do not know whether purgatory is worse than this. As for me, I am not confined to bed, but I am not at all well. To be precise, I run a temperature almost every day. I do not suffer so much from that, but I have a constant headache and am generally weak. I have no energy, I cannot work quickly, and I have no strength for any task at all. Sometimes I think of quietly slipping away, like my little Hélène. I assure you I hardly care for my own life. Since I lost that child, I have felt a burning desire to see her again. However, the children who remain need me, and for their sake I pray that God will grant me more years on earth.

Once again the Martin couple had no time to dwell on death, for a new trial soon awaited them: the Franco-Prussian War: "We see nothing but sorrow and destruction; my heart is broken"; thinking of the situation of her family and her country, she added: "We have never been more unhappy. I do not know how to describe our anguish. There are twenty-five thousand of them. Every house was marked with the number of enemy soldiers who had to be billeted there. In the end they saddled us with nine soldiers of their own, and truly we cannot complain. For in our part of the town, the owners of small shops who have only two rooms had to take in as many as fifteen, twenty, even twenty-five soldiers. The ones we have are neither wicked nor thieves, but they love to eat so much that I have never seen anything like it. We had to give up the whole first floor to them, and move ourselves down to the ground floor of the house. My husband is downcast. He can neither eat nor sleep. I think he will fall ill.

After all these trials, the arrival of Thérèse, "the greatest saint of modern times", was announced. At the birth of little Thérèse, her mother wrote: "I am very happy. At first, though, I was surprised. I had been convinced I was carrying a boy. I had imagined this for two months already, because I could feel that this child was stronger than all my other children. While I was carrying her, I noticed something that had not happened with my other children: when I sang, she would sing along with me…" In the Martin household the children played in a room on the upper floor while Zélie made her lace or wrote letters at the table on the ground floor. Trust was the heart of their upbringing. Little Thérèse, at an early age, going down the stairs, would call for her mother at every step with complete trust: "I hear the child calling 'Mama' as she goes down the stairs. On every step she says, 'Mama!', and if I do not answer her every time, she stays on the step without moving forward or back." This trust in her mother was extraordinarily strong in Thérèse: "I shall fly up to you in Heaven. And you will hold me tight in your arms. How could God separate us?" She was convinced that God himself could do nothing to her as long as she was in her mother's arms. Thérèse's mother taught her always to strive to please God in everything. From her earliest years she practised acts of self-denial and was given a rosary with movable beads that marked her many small daily sacrifices, for Thérèse was a very mischievous little girl.

In the summer of 1876, Zélie was diagnosed with a tumour of the breast: "I do not suffer much. There is swelling all along one side, right down under the arm, and a dull pain where the tumour is. I can bear this condition a good while longer, so let us return ourselves into God's hands. He knows better than we do what we need. He wounds, but he binds up; he smites, but his hands heal" (Job 5:18). I shall go to Lourdes on the first pilgrimage, and I hope that the Blessed Mother will heal me, if that is needed. While we wait, let us be at peace. I look forward to seeing you all again. The time seems so long! I am happy only when I am with you, my dear Louis. God, in fact, gives me the grace not to be afraid. I am very calm, and I consider myself almost happy. I would not change my lot for anything. If God wishes to heal me, I would be very happy, for deep down I wish to live. But on the other hand, I say to myself: "If I am not healed, it is because it may be more useful for them that I go…" While I wait, I shall do everything I can for a miracle to happen; I am counting on the pilgrimage to Lourdes. But if I am not healed, I shall still try to sing on the way home. Now I shall hurry to settle everything I still have to settle, so as not to leave my family in a difficult position.

I could not restrain myself from telling my family the whole truth. I carried on working as usual, and in that way I managed to reassure them all. And yet I am not deceiving myself in the least, and at night I find it hard to fall asleep when I think of my future. But I am trying to accept it as best I can, although I confess I never expected a trial like this one. I am therefore trying to behave like someone who is going to die. Above all, what matters most now is not to lose this little time I have left, for these are days of salvation that will not come again, and so I must make the best possible use of them. From this I shall have a double merit. I shall suffer less by resigning myself to my lot, and I shall also work off part of Purgatory here on earth. Pray for my acceptance and patience. You yourself know that I have trouble with patience. If the Blessed Virgin Mary does not heal me, then that surely means that my end has come, and that God now wants me to be somewhere else, no longer on this earth. I have nothing to reproach myself with, for the good God sees that I have done my best… I worked for four people, who themselves, without me, would have had plenty of work to do. My life was hard. And then, just as I finally managed to catch my breath, I heard the signal for my departure, as though it were telling me: "You have given all you had, come and rest." But no, I have not yet given all I had; these children are not yet grown up. Ah, but on the other hand, I am not afraid of death.

Towards the end of her life she wrote of her husband: "He was always my comfort (counsellor) and support." Zélie, for her part, was also a support to him – for instance, when he grew anxious about her health: "I saw how my husband often distressed himself over me, while I remained quite calm. I would tell him: 'Do not be afraid, God is with us.'" The last words Zélie wrote to her husband were: "I am entirely yours." Her daughter Thérèse later wrote: "To love is to give everything and to give oneself entirely," and that is how Zélie loved her husband, her children, her clients, her workers, and all who knocked at her door.

After their mother's death, the whole task of raising the children fell to their father. At the urging of Zélie's younger brother, Isidore, father and children moved to Lisieux, where their uncle worked as a pharmacist. Because of the shock of her mother's death, Thérèse changed. She became withdrawn and excessively sensitive. Her father made enormous efforts, despite his many obligations, to keep the family a place of warmth, joy, communion and trust. Thérèse would later write: "Dear Papa's heart, so tender, and already so full of love, became filled with a truly maternal love." In raising and educating the younger girls at home, Louis was helped by his elder daughters, Marie and Pauline: "My children, I ask your advice because it is for your sake alone that I am ready to make this sacrifice, and I do not want you to suffer on my account. I press you all lovingly to my heart and entrust you to your holy mother. I want to share with you, my dear children, my deep desire to thank God, and that you, too, should thank him in the same way, for I feel that our family, modest though it is, is honoured in that our wonderful Creator has numbered it among his favoured ones. My dear daughters, be my joy and comfort on this earth, and continue to serve the Lord zealously. He is so great and so wonderful in all his works! Soon we shall have the joy of seeing one another again and of feeling once more our family closeness; that is the beauty which draws us all nearer to Him."

Taking all this into account, it is hardly surprising that the daughters, one after another, decided to become nuns. Second to last in line was Thérèse, for whom, once he understood that her desire to enter Carmel was in fact God's own desire, he had to make an additional effort, since she was only fifteen. Humanly speaking, it certainly cannot have been easy for him. He knew that if Thérèse went to Carmel, as her two elder sisters had, he would never again be able to visit her in his own home, not even in his final illness, nor at the hour of his death, for such was the rule of that religious community. Thérèse entered the Carmelite monastery on 9 April 1888. When, finally, Céline too confided to him that she felt a religious vocation, he wept for joy and went with her to the church "to thank God, who had done him the honour of taking all his children."

Three months after Thérèse's entry into the convent, this good father's own way of the cross, of illness and humiliation, began. He suffered a severe stroke. Days of improvement alternated with days of deterioration. In the end the illness took hold to such a degree that it brought on psychological exhaustion, depression and mental disturbance. After a further stroke, because of his dementia-like behaviour, he had to be placed in a hospital in Caen. Céline settled near the hospital in order to be as close as possible to her father. Those three years of her father's illness were years of martyrdom and utter humiliation for the family. During his illness, in his lucid moments, Louis showed that he was fully aware of his condition. Yet his fortitude was such that he did not wish to pray for his own recovery, considering that God knew why he had sent him precisely this kind of illness, and that he therefore wished to accept it as God's will. He died, with a clear mind, on 29 July 1894.