One hundred and ten years ago, Thérèse Martin, aged 14, accompanied her father and her sister Céline on a pilgrimage to Rome. Her description of the trip can be found in Story of a Soul, that extraordinary spiritual testament which was to take the world by storm a little over a decade later, when its obscure and youthful author had already completed her earthly pilgrimage and was engaged in her true work: sending "showers of roses" to her brethren still in exile upon the earth. Thérèse's description of her two-month peregrination through the holiest sites of Italy gives a vivid impression of the purpose and nature of a pilgrimage.

"Ah! what a trip that was! It taught me more than long years of studies; it showed me the vanity of everything that happens, and that everything is affliction of spirit under the sun (Ec 2:11). However, I saw some very beautiful things; I contemplated all the marvels of art and religion; above all, I trod the same soil as did the holy apostles, the soil bedewed with the blood of martyrs. And my soul grew through contact with holy things."

Ten years later, on September 30, 1897, that same child who had audaciously broken from the ranks of the other pilgrims in order to kiss the soil of the Colosseum, "empurpled by the blood of the first Christians," had completed the martyrdom for which she herself had prayed in that moment. Indeed, after less than 10 years in Carmel, this seemingly insignificant girl, who also broke ranks in a papal audience to beg Leo XIII to permit her an early entry to the religious life, had altogether broken the confines of her 19th century middle-class background. Thérèse Martin, now Soeur Thérèse de L'Enfant Jésus et de La Sainte Face, had covered with seven-league boots the entire distance necessary to make her the most loved and appealed-to saint of the modern era. How she did this can be discovered by reading her writings, and the voluminous literature which she has generated in her wake.

And yet there is something almost comical about the torrent of words which this Saint of the "little way" provokes. After all is said and done, it is perhaps best to do what she herself loved to do: to go and be where she was, to place one's feet in the places where she went, to feast one's eyes on the scenes, however humble and domesticated they may seem, compared to the grandeur she saw on her way to Rome, that provided nourishment for her imagination. We can approach the Thérèsian pilgrimage in the same spirit as she, touching and savoring and imbibing every little detail exactly as a child would do, so as to absorb what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins might have called the "inscape" of the Little Flower and to draw closer to her living presence.

Let us begin at the beginning, then, with a trip to the town where Thérèse (and all her brothers and sisters) were born: Alençon, the lovely regional headquarters of the Pays d'Orne. Here, in a narrow street to the north of the centre, is 50 Rue St. Blaise. The house is of modest proportions, compared to the Louis XIII prefecture (once the Hotel de Guise) opposite. And yet in the tiny parlour, where you can see the desks and personal effects of Thérèse's parents, a family of seven could gather to read and pray together in the evenings. The clockmaker Louis Martin and his hard-working wife Zélie, proprietress of a successful lace-making enterprise, were as devout as they were economically productive. The busy mother gave birth to nine children between the years of 1860 and 1873. Only five of them survived, all of them girls, whilst two other girls and two boys died in infancy or early childhood. Marie Françoise Thérèse, born on the 2nd January 1873, was the last baby. Her mother, afflicted by breast cancer, died four and a half years later.

Here today's visitor, shown around by charming sisters, who are religious oblates of St. Thérèse, can see the garden where the infant Thérèse played (and occasionally squabbled!) with her sister Céline, four years older than she. On a bench in this garden the girls would tell their chapelet de pratiques, a way of counting good deeds and sacrifices made during the course of the day. The family gave the same minutely detailed attention to the growth of the soul as the parents devoted to their respective trades: indeed the piece of lace created by Zélie and her co-workers which is displayed in the parlour reflects the other "task" accomplished in the family, namely the assembling of the "bouquet" of daughters (as Thérèse portrayed herself and her sisters later on), a kind of tiny microcosm of the communion of saints.

The details of Alençon lace-making, as you can learn from a visit to one of the two museums in the town where it is recorded and displayed, are awe-inspiring in their delicacy and detail. And yet every lace-maker follows a carefully established pattern for the tiny section she slowly creates, and once the whole is assembled, you would never know where one person's contribution ends and another person's begins. All of it together makes a seamless whole, a lovely display of skill patiently applied according to the strictest of rules, tiny pieces of perfection performed by a myriad of anonymous workers. Curiously, the facade of the church of Notre Dame, where Thérèse was baptised, created by Jean Lemoine at the end of the 15th century, resembles nothing so much as a massive piece of Alençon lace. There is a story about Thérèse and this church: at the age where she was considered to be too young to be taken to Mass, she succeeded in running all the way down the street to the church by herself, much to the horror of her family. The child already showed the audacity that was to mark her race towards heaven in later life.

In the hall of the Alençon house is something else which reminds us of this race: the winding wooden staircase which the little child used to climb, one step at a time, calling (as Zélie recorded in a letter to her second daughter Pauline) for her mother at each step. Only upon hearing the reassuring voice answer "Yes, little one!" would Thérèse continue her journey upward. Later she was to use this early experience to speak of the relationship between nature and grace: we must endeavour to mount the steps to heaven as best we can, but being so weak, we constantly need to call upon Our Lord to encourage us, even to come down and lift us up in his arms and carry us heavenward. She compared her little way of abandonment to this grace to an elevator (a modern convenience only recently invented at the time she was writing), which speeds our ascent upwards most conveniently, if only we know how to use it! The relationship between Thérèse's early experiences of maternal love and her later spiritual development is made even plainer when we see the room at the top of those stairs, which has now been turned into a chapel. Here is the barque-like bed in which she was born, and behind whose curtains she used to hide in order to "think": her earliest experience of prayer. The chapel adjoining the original room is quite lovely, full of light, with a statue of St. Thérèse offering herself (and maybe us too!) to Our Lord over the tabernacle.

Thérèse's bond with her mother was only formed during her second year, for in her early months she succumbed to the same enteritis that killed several of her siblings, and had to be sent to a wet-nurse outside the town in order to be given the milk her mother could no longer provide. From this experience was born the child's love of rural life and appreciation of nature. Indeed the countryside around Alençon is still in many places quite glorious. Twenty minutes drive from the city, in the Alpes Mancelles, lies one of the most beautiful villages in France, St. Céneri le Gérai, long-time haunt of painters, its old houses clustered about the river Sarthe, winding through the gorse and tree-covered hillsides. The best view of the village can be had from the Romanesque church, which is well worth a visit, as is the tiny chapel of the hermit St. Céneri in its riverside meadow. Here one can savour again the description that Thérèse gave of family walks in the countryside: "I still feel the profound and poetic impressions which were born in my soul at the sight of fields enamelled with corn-flowers and all types of wild flowers. Already I was in love with the wide-open spaces. Space and the gigantic fir trees, the branches sweeping down to the ground, left in my heart an impression similar to the one I experience still today at the sight of nature."

It is time to move away from the earliest, happiest days of Thérèse's childhood to the town where her family moved after her mother's death. One stop is worth making on the way to Lisieux from Alençon: the great medieval cathedral at Sées. Both Martin parents walked here on foot at various times, to beg Our Lady's intercession for their daughters, particularly Léonie, whose poor health in childhood dogged her for the rest of her life (she is the only one of the Martin sisters not to enter Carmel, but became a Visitandine instead). The cathedral with its cool interior, soaring stonework and stained glass makes a good rest-stop on the way to Lisieux. The lovely Madonna in the right transept, holding out her smiling Child to us, is in itself a reminder of the deeply Marian dimension of the Thérèsian spirituality.

At the time the Martins moved to Lisieux, it was a fairly small town, like Alençon. Zélie Martin's brother Isidore, a pharmacist, lived there with his wife and two daughters, and the couple helped the newly bereaved Louis Martin with the upbringing of his own daughters. Sadly, Lisieux has changed a great deal since those days a century ago when the Guérins and the Martins could walk peacefully among the parks and the medieval buildings of their home town. The ravages of the Second World War removed a large part of it, and modern buildings abound in the town, which is a regional industrial centre. Approaching the great basilica which was built on a hill above the town at record speed during the 1930s and then finished after the war, it is possible to feel a little dismayed. The edifice appears heavy in comparison with the basilica of the Sacre Coeur at Montmartre, on which it is partially modelled. Its monumental presence with the modern mosaics and stained glass by Pierre Gaudin (whose father Jean created the mosaics depicting the saint's life in the crypt) seem to clash with the delicacy of the other Thérèsian sites. And yet the iconography is apt: over the sanctuary Thérèse is depicted on the left-hand of Our Lord, whilst his Mother is on his right (and appropriately larger). Thérèse's own right arm reposes in a reliquary donated by Pope Pius XI in the south transept. Above it hangs an unusual carving dating from 1995, the Jesus of the Resurrection, extending his right hand down to us whilst his left hand is raised to heaven. A priest I spoke to in the basilica said it represented the great hope of salvation for sinners through the love of Christ, that cause so dear to Thérèse and the central pivot of her mission in Carmel, where on the 9th of June 1895 she offered herself as a victim to the merciful love of God.

Indeed, at Les Buissonnets, the house in which Thérèse lived with her family until she entered Carmel, amidst the display of dolls, stuffed birds, miniature tea sets, games and picture books, there is another significant crucifix: it is the one in front of which the young Thérèse prayed for the conversion of the notorious murderer Pranzini, her first experience of her "mission" to pray for souls, and the power of intercessory prayer, as Pranzini relented at the last minute and kissed the crucifix held out to him before his execution. Another reminder of the grace received through intense faith is the replica of the "Vierge du Sourire," the statue of Our Lady which had stood above the bed in Alençon and through which Thérèse saw the lovely smile of her heavenly mother which cured her of the childhood illness triggered by the entry of her surrogate mother, Pauline, to Carmel in 1881. There is an extraordinary atmosphere in this, once Marie and Pauline's room, as one sits looking at the statue (the original is over Thérèse's chasse in the chapel of the Carmel), thinking of Marie, Léonie and Céline kneeling down in desperation and begging the Blessed Mother's intercession for their little sister, and then obtaining an instant cure.

In the garden at Les Buissonnets, a statue commemorates the famous moment when Thérèse asked her father for permission to enter Carmel. Louis Martin walked over to the wall of the garden and plucked from it a small white flower, roots and all: he knew well who his youngest daughter was, whatever the anguish involved in being parted from his "little queen." Perhaps Les Buissonnets epitomises best of all that atmosphere so well evoked in Story of a Soul, in which the gravity of the mission - the Pranzini crucifix, the painting of the Blessed Virgin consoling the Magdalene in Louis Martin's room - mix so easily with the small symbols of childhood: the toys and the miniature statues and candles with which the young saint made shrines in the garden (a game she preferred to dressing dolls indoors), the garden table on which she would do her homework , also by preference, out of doors.

It was a small leap from this type of devoir (the French term both for homework and for duty), accomplished in the domestic church under the aegis of her elder sisters, and the monasic devoir Thérèse set herself to in Carmel, writing her memoirs at the command, once again, of her elder sister and spiritual mother Pauline, by now the prioress Mother Agnes of Jesus. The portable écritoire she used to write on can be seen in the exhibition next the chapel at the Carmel, along with the honey blond curls that she shed on her entry there in April 1888, the accoutrements of domestic life in the convent, where Thérèse suffered, among other things, from the scorn incurred at the hands of older nuns who discovered all too quickly that this baby of the Martin family had not been trained as an efficient housewife and seamstress. However, she was skilled when it came to the graphic arts. One of the artifacts in this exhibition is the pall she painted for Père Roulland, one of the two young missionary priests entrusted to her as spiritual brothers. It shows the sea, stretching away beneath some cliffs on which a white dove stetches its wings for flight. In the distance is a small ship with white sails. On September 8th 1890, the day of Thérèse's profession, the young Adolphe Roulland discovered his priestly vocation during a pilgrimage to Notre Dame de la Délivrande, a coastal shrine not far from Lisieux, which houses an ancient statue of Our Lady (one of the "black madonnas") associated precisely with the sea and foreign missions.

Another such shrine is Notre Dame de Grâce, on the cliffs above Honfleur. This shrine has been in existence since the 11th century, when the original chapel was built by Richard II, Duke of Normandy, in fulfillment of a vow made to Our Lady who saved him from shipwreck. The present 16th-century chapel was the locus of fervent intercession in 1837 by three sisters from the region, called Gosselin, who wished to found a Carmelite convent at Lisieux. In spite of difficulties, a little over a year later they were installed in the present building. Fifty years later Thérèse came to the shrine of Notre Dame de Grace with her father, Léonie and Céline, to pray for her own intention to enter the Lisieux Carmel. Again the Marian emphasis of Thérèse's intercessory mission, with its emphasis on the spreading of grace, is easy to grasp whilst kneeling in front of the statue in the shrine. The Infant Jesus leans out of his mother's arms to reach out to the world, her right hand holding out his left foot to us in a supremely delicate gesture (the same Marian "eucharistic" motif we see in other depictions of her, such as the Wilton Diptych in London's National Gallery). Once again the missionary and seafaring connection is present, in the painting of Blessed Pierre Berthelot, merchant seaman turned Carmelite and martyred in 1638 by the Muslims.

Hanging from the ceiling of the chapel are little model boats given as ex voto offerings by crews saved through the intercession of Our Lady of Grace. I was reminded as I saw them (unfortunately many of them have been stolen because of their antiquarian value) of the little model ship Céline gave Thérèse on the last Christmas before her entry into Carmel, which can be seen at Les Buissonets. On the sail are inscribed the words: Je dors mais mon coeur veille (Song of Songs 5:2: "I slept but my heart was awake"). This was the waiting period for the young postulant. But by this Christmas she had learned not to expect her shoes to be full of presents: the time of fulfillment would come soon enough.

Nine years later, as she entered her last agonising months in the Carmel before her death (in which the spiritual darkness was far worse than the physical pain), Thérèse had deepened her capacity for generosity to such an extent that, unbeknown to her Carmelite sisters, she was making a kind of extraordinary pact with her Beloved. The girl who as a child had watched the sun setting over the sea at Trouville, so close to the shrine of Notre Dame de Grâce, and envisaged her march towards heaven in terms of this golden path of light across the water, was now forging the same path on behalf of millions of other souls whom she was determined must be enabled to reach the same horizon.

The adventure of this young girl, who never literally sailed on those stormy seas and is yet invoked as the patroness of the missions along with St. Francis Xavier, is one of the great love stories. It is the tale of the passionate, uncompromising love for God by one of His creatures, a love which flows out towards her fellow creatures in an act of cooperation that was so radical as to overturn the laws of space and time. Thérèse's chalice, as she said to Mother Marie de Gonzague as she lay dying, was full to the brim, full of a love tested so ardently in the limited time she gave herself over to the secret designs of God's merciful heart, that He has held her up as a living proof of His response to this kind of love.

The ouragan de gloire (literally, "hurricane of glory") that has followed in her wake in the last hundred years, is a supreme sign of hope for our age. As St. Thérèse lies in her glass coffin in the chapel of the Lisieux Carmel, her effigy looking for all the world like a latter-day sleeping beauty, surrounded by the flowers brought to her in her turn by grateful recipients of her heavenly roses, it is easy to imagine the joy of awakening in eternity, out of the "shadows and imaginings" (J.H. Newman) of this world. For it is the simple and uncompromising science of love which she practised, the transforming exchange she effected between her heart and the Heart of her Saviour, which resulted in her being declared, like her more obviously active forebear, St. Teresa of Avila, a Doctor of the Church. For hers is the medicine, and the teaching, for our complicated times.