Here is a photograph of the statue of Our Lady of Mount Carmel which stood in St. Jacques Church in Lisieux when the Martin family lived there.
St. Jacques was the parish in which their home, Les Buissonets, was located. Father Delatroette,1 who was the ecclesiastical superior of the Lisieux Carmel and opposed Therese's entrance, thinking her too young, was a priest of St. Jacques and, for a time, was Leonie's confessor.
But when Louis Martin and his five daughters moved to Lisieux in 1877, it was impossible to "rent" seats for six at St. Jacques. "Pew rents" were one of the forms offerings to the parish church took in France at that time. We can imagine, then, that the church was crowded. So on Sundays the Martins attended the Cathedral of St. Pierre, where Zelie's brother, Isidore Guerin, was one of the churchwardens. But the family often participated in weekday Mass at St. Jacques.
It was before this statue in St. Jacques Church that Pauline Martin, Therese's sister, then twenty years old, was praying during the early morning Mass on February 16, 1882 when she suddenly understood that she was called to become a Carmelite. Before that she had been thinking of the Visitation, where she had been educated. She was the first of the four Martin sisters to understand that she was called to Carmel.
Little Therese was then nine years old. In the bitter years after her dear sister disappeared behind the walls of Carmel, what must she have felt when seeing this statue when she went to Mass at St. Jacques without Pauline?
When Lisieux was bombed in 1944, St. Jacques Church was substantially destroyed. But this statue was recovered. Although the church was restored after the war, it is no longer used as a church, but serves the town of Lisieux as a municipal exhibit hall, where, in the summer, an exhibit about the Martin family has often been held. Today, you can pray before this statue of Our Lady of Mount Carmel at St. Pierre's Cathedral. I thank the photographer, Corrinne May, for permission to display her photograph here.
For the reference, see Therese et Lisieux by Pierre Descouvement and Helmut-Nils Loose. Editions du Cerf, 1991, p. 49.
1 Link to the Web site of the Archives of the Carmel of Lisieux.