In his preface to Marcelle Auclair's biography , " St. Teresa of Avila," Andre Maurois tells us that, as a child, the writer kept the selected works of St. Teresa at her bedside. When Paris was evacuated in 1940, the only books Auclair took with her were those of the saint, and in those tragic times, she made a vow to translate the Fundaciones from Spanish to French.

Since Auclair's father, a French architect, went to work in Chile when she was a child, she was reared in an atmosphere much like sixteenth century Spain, when the great colonial families were living in much the same way as Teresa de Ahumada y Cepeda had lived in her affluent home at Avila.

While in Chile, Marcelle found that the people's lives were permeated by their religion. Enormous crucifixes hung on living room walls, and the entire household gathered for evening prayers.

Maurois says that the biographer began by admiring her heroine and ended by loving her. She visited every Carmel founded by Teresa, and in the process, wrote a biography that presents her as a fellow pilgrim to today's reader.

How appropriate it was, wrote Auclair, that the seven-day old baby girl of Dona Beatrice de Ahumada and Don Alonso Sanchez y Cepa was baptized Dona Teresa de las Cuevas in the parish church of San Juan on the same day as the inauguration of the Convent of the Incarnation in Avila, Spain.

For it would be through those convent doors that Teresa would enter the Carmelite life at the age of 21, and experience within that convent both the deepest joys and the most intense sorrows of her life.

Twenty-seven years later, twenty-four miles northewest of Avila, in the small town of Fontiveros, St. John of the Cross was born in a state of poverty, from which he neither deviated nor desired to deviate.

Marcelle Auclair described a different kind of life for Teresa. Her father was both a pious and learned man, who kept in his library such works as: "Conquest beyond the Seas," on parchment, "The Life of Christ in Pictures," Guzmain's "Treatise on the Mass," and Boethius' "Consolations of Philosophy." He had great respect for learning, and was determined that all his children would be able to read by the time they were seven.

Don Alonso was a man of integrity and high morals, who refused to own a slave, and when a Moorish girl was given into his temporary care, he insisted she be included in the family life.

The poverty of a John of the Cross would have been foreign to him. At the time of the death of his first wife, Don Alonso possessed magnificent estates, great flocks and herds, houses and an abundance of jewels. He liked to dress in splendor with violet damask or crimson satin doublets, shirts embroidered in scarlet and gold, ruffs from Paris, gilt swords with black velvet scabbards and gilded belts, red and yellow saddlecloths from Rouen.

After three years of marriage, his wife died and left him with two children, a boy and a girl, Juan and Maria.. Later, at the age of thirty, he married a beautiful fourteen-year old girl, dona Beatriz de Ahumada, of a noble Castile family in a wedding so magnificent that for years afterward it was still talked about among the people, and of how the bride, "very richly attired in silk and gold," was dazzling in her beauty.

In the year following the marriage, Dona Beatriz's oldest son, Fernando was born, followed by Rodrigo, then Teresa. Thus, Dona Beatriz, was responsible for five children by the time she was twenty. Then, Lorenzo was born, followed by Antonio, Pedro and Jeronoimo.

Although the mother had many servants to get the children up, put them to bed, and tend to the household chores, she provided the maternal nourishment of teaching them their prayers, the lives of the saints, and the fine art of living.

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