On 17 May 1906, the same day in which Brother Charles, alone, could no longer celebrate Mass, he wrote of his promise “to let the heart of Jesus live in me, so that it is no longer I who live, but the heart of Jesus that lives in me, as he lived in Nazareth”. 128ID., Diary, 17 May 1906. His friendship with Jesus, heart to heart, was anything but a privatized piety. It inspired the austere life he led in Nazareth, born of a desire to imitate Christ and to be conformed to him. His loving devotion to the heart of Jesus had a concrete effect on his style of life, and his Nazareth was nourished by his personal relationship with the heart of Christ.
Like Saint Charles de Foucauld, Saint Therese of the Child Jesus was influenced by the great renewal of devotion that swept nineteenth-century France. Father Almire Pichon, the spiritual director of her family, was seen as a devoted apostle of the Sacred Heart. One of her sisters took as her name in religion “Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart”, and the monastery that Therese entered was dedicated to the Sacred Heart. Her devotion nonetheless took on certain distinctive traits with regard to the customary piety of that age.
When Therese was fifteen, she could speak of Jesus as the one “whose heart beats in unison with my own”. 129Letter 67 to Mme. Guérin, 18 November 1888. Two years later, speaking of the image of Christ’s heart crowned with thorns, she wrote in a letter: “You know that I myself do not see the Sacred Heart as everyone else. I think that the Heart of my Spouse is mine alone, just as mine is his alone, and I speak to him then in the solitude of this delightful heart to heart, while waiting to contemplate him one day face to face”. 130Letter 122 to Céline, 14 October 1890.
In one of her poems, Therese voiced the meaning of her devotion, which had to do more with friendship and assurance than with trust in her sacrifices: “I need a heart burning with tenderness,