It will not be amiss to say a brief word here on the brother and
sister of Madame Martin. Her sister--in religion, Sister Marie
Dosithea--led a life so holy at Le Mans that she was cited by Dom
Guéranger, perhaps the most distinguished Benedictine of the
nineteenth century, as the model of a perfect nun. By her own
confession, she had never been guilty from earliest childhood of
the smallest deliberate fault. She died on February 24, 1877. It
was in the convent made fragrant by such holiness that her niece
Pauline Martin, elder sister and "little mother" of Thérèse, and
for five years her Prioress at the Carmel, received her education.
And if the Little Flower may have imbibed the liturgical spirit
from her teachers, the daughters of St. Benedict in Lisieux, so
that she could say before her death: "I do not think it is
possible for anyone to have desired more than I to assist properly
at choir and to recite perfectly the Divine Office"--may it not be
to the influences from Le Mans that may be traced something of the
honey-sweet spirit of St. Francis de Sales which pervades the
pages of the Autobiography?

With the brother of Zélie Guérin the reader will make acquaintance
in the narrative of Thérèse. He was a chemist in Lisieux, and it
was there his daughter Jeanne Guérin married Dr. La Néele and his
younger child Marie entered the Carmel. Our foreign missionaries
had a warm friend in the uncle of Thérèse--for his charities he
was made godfather to an African King; and to the Catholic
Press--that home missionary--he was ever most devoted. Founder, at
Lisieux, of the Nocturnal Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, and
a zealous member of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, he was
called to his abundant reward on September 28, 1909. Verily the
lamp of faith is not extinct in the land of the Norman.