Pious Recreations
The Récréations pieuses are eight short plays Thérèse Martin wrote between January 1894 and February 1897 for the enclosed Carmelite community at Lisieux. Carmel permitted extended recreation on major feasts — the prioress's name day, Christmas, the founding feasts — and the sisters filled those hours with homemade entertainments. Thérèse, still in her early twenties and not yet twenty-four when she wrote the last of them, became the community's playwright. She composed the texts, assigned the parts to her sisters and fellow nuns, wrote verses to be sung within the action, and acted herself. Nothing was written for publication or for any audience outside the grille; the plays were performed once, in a room, for perhaps twenty women. Her sister Céline photographed her in costume as Joan of Arc, and those images became among the most widely reproduced pictures of her.
What the plays do is stage the doctrine that the autobiography would later state. Two of them treat Joan of Arc, and Thérèse's interest falls not on the coronation at Reims but on the prison and the fire — the mission fulfilled precisely where it appears to fail, glory relocated from the visible victory to the hidden surrender. A Christmas piece brings the Christ child to the door as a small beggar asking alms of each sister's heart, inverting the direction of gift-giving so that God is the one in need. Another dramatizes an old legend of the Holy Family's flight into Egypt encountering the future good thief as a child, a scene that turns the whole play into an argument about mercy extended to the worst sinner in advance of his crime. A Bethany play sets Martha's service against Mary's audacity and decides for love. One later piece, written while Thérèse was following the sensational anti-Masonic hoax then circulating in French Catholic circles, puts devils on stage plotting against Carmel and defeats them not by argument but by humility. Throughout, she writes parts that voice her own desires — for martyrdom, for hiddenness, for a love that outruns capacity — and hands them to women she lives with, so the theology arrives as something spoken aloud between friends.
The plays were long treated as juvenilia and only came into serious use once critical editions restored her actual texts. They matter now because they show her thought in a register her prose does not reach: playful, communal, occasionally funny, unguarded.
Who should read this: readers who already know Story of a Soul and want to watch the little way being worked out in real time within a real community, and anyone studying Thérèse's sources and imagination. Not for readers seeking accomplished drama, and not for those with no tolerance for nineteenth-century French devotional sentiment — the idiom is unapologetically of its convent and its century.