Therese Is Killed by Lightning is the abrupt death that closes Therese’s long ordeal and precipitates Madame de Lorsange’s conversion. In a room exposed to a violent storm, Therese is struck while trying to protect her sister; the lightning turns the image of a fleeting brilliance into the means of a death that Madame de Lorsange reads as a warning about virtue, crime, and divine judgment.

Causes and Setting

Near the end of summer, Monsieur de Corville is staying at his country estate. A planned outing is postponed as a dreadful storm approaches, and the intense heat has left all the windows open. The scene begins with nature in convulsion: lightning flashes, hail lashes down, and the winds rage. The narration presents the storm as more than background, imagining Nature as exhausted by what it has made and ready to unsettle the elements and wrench new forms from them.

The Fatal Strike

Terrified by the storm, Madame de Lorsange urges her sister to hurry and close the shutters. Therese rushes to the windows, already being battered and broken by the weather. She struggles against the wind for a minute, is forced back, and is struck by a blazing thunderbolt in the middle of the room. It enters her right breast, reaches her heart, consumes her chest and face, and exits through her belly. The detail makes the death bodily and irreversible: the lightning does not merely interrupt a rescue attempt but leaves no possibility of hope for Therese.

Witnesses and Immediate Aftermath

Madame de Lorsange cries out and faints; Monsieur de Corville calls for help. When Madame de Lorsange revives, Monsieur de Corville orders that Therese’s body be carried away. Madame de Lorsange stops him, asking that the body remain before her eyes. She says that she must contemplate it to confirm the decision she has just made, and refuses to let her resolve be swayed. The death thus becomes a scene of witnessing as well as loss: the body that marks the end of Therese’s suffering becomes the immediate focus of her sister’s reckoning with her own life.

Meaning and Consequences

Madame de Lorsange interprets Therese’s calamities as a warning from the Eternal. She contrasts Therese, who respected her duties and had no sin to repent, with the criminals who prospered while feeding on her; their apparent good fortune, she concludes, was only a trial of virtue. She likens crime’s prosperity to lightning: a treacherous brilliance that briefly adorns the atmosphere before plunging the dazzled victim into death. The storm’s literal flash therefore gives physical form to her moral interpretation of the story’s recurring reversal, in which vice appears to flourish while virtue suffers.

The revelation does not resolve the mystery of providence. Madame de Lorsange acknowledges that Heaven’s actions are enigmas beyond human understanding, but insists they must not seduce anyone into imitating the wicked or mistaking temporary prosperity for moral approval. Faced with Therese’s death, she condemns her own libertinage, irreligion, and abandonment of principle, and decides to separate from Monsieur de Corville and undertake penance. She leaves for Paris, takes the Carmelite veil, and becomes an example to her order through her piety, wisdom, and regular conduct. Therese’s death is therefore both the final catastrophe of her own narrative and the turning point in her sister’s life; it gives no worldly compensation to the victim, but becomes the occasion for Madame de Lorsange’s religious renunciation.