Thérèse is killed by lightning

Thérèse is killed by lightning at Monsieur de Corville’s country estate just as the security and happiness surrounding her seem finally secure. The sudden death ends her long passage through persecution and misfortune, while her sister, Madame de Lorsange, reads the catastrophe as a warning from Providence and resolves to change her life.

Causes and Background

Toward the end of summer, Monsieur de Corville is still living at his country estate. The party has planned an outing, but an approaching storm forces them to postpone their walk. The heat has left the windows open, and the storm grows violent: lightning flashes, hail lashes down, and the wind batters the house. The narration renders the turmoil as if Nature, exhausted by what it has made, were ready to unsettle the elements and wrench new forms from them.

The scene follows a brief interval in which Thérèse has learned of agreeable developments and rejoiced with her guardians. Her joy gives way, however, to an unexplained melancholy: she becomes uneasy, dreams, and sometimes weeps before her friends. She tells Madame de Lorsange that she was not born for happiness and fears that it cannot last. The storm’s sudden violence gives that foreboding its terrible fulfillment.

What Happens

As the storm breaks through the open windows, Madame de Lorsange begs her sister to close the shutters. Thérèse hurries to the windows, already being broken by the weather, and tries to resist the wind. She is driven back; at that instant, a blazing thunderbolt strikes her in the middle of the room. It enters through her right breast, reaches her heart, consumes her chest and face, and bursts out through her belly.

Madame de Lorsange cries out and faints. Monsieur de Corville calls for help, and the women receive attention; Madame de Lorsange is revived, but Thérèse’s injuries are fatal. When Monsieur de Corville orders her body to be carried away, Madame de Lorsange stops him. She insists that the body remain before her eyes, because contemplating it will strengthen the resolve she has just formed.

Consequences and Aftermath

Addressing Monsieur de Corville, Madame de Lorsange says that Thérèse’s extraordinary suffering, endured despite her having respected her duties, has forced her to look at herself. The villains who preyed upon Thérèse had appeared to enjoy a deceptive prosperity, but her death makes that apparent success no reassurance. Madame de Lorsange calls the workings of Heaven enigmatic and warns that they must not seduce people into wrongdoing.

She interprets the lightning as an ordeal through which Providence exposes virtue: its brilliant flash briefly beautifies the atmosphere before hurling the dazzled victim into death. Thérèse’s history of calamities and reversals becomes, in her sister’s eyes, a warning from the Eternal and a reason to cast herself into God’s arms. The death thus prompts the final renunciation that follows, rather than restoring Thérèse or resolving the injustices she suffered.

Narrative Significance

The scene brings Thérèse’s foreboding into grim alignment with the storm. After her temporary joy and her unexplained conviction that happiness could not last, the lightning makes catastrophe literal. Its sudden, spectacular violence also recalls the novel’s comparison between criminal prosperity and a treacherous flash: what appears brilliant may only precede a fall.

That moral interpretation does not undo the central paradox. Thérèse dies despite her virtue, while the wrongdoers who harmed her have seemed to prosper; her death offers no worldly justice or protection. Instead, Madame de Lorsange turns the spectacle into a religious lesson, making Thérèse’s suffering the occasion for her own change. The ending therefore closes the heroine’s life through a disaster that intensifies, rather than explains away, the novel’s question of virtue, evil, and Providence.