On November 20, 1888, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a letter to the Danish historian of literature Georg Brandes: “I have now revealed myself, and I have done it with a cynicism that will have its effects on the course of history. The name of my book is Ecce Homo, and it represents a sort of assassination, without any mercy, for the Crucified one; it ends with thunder and lightning against anything which is Christian or in any way contaminated by Christianity. Now, at last, I have become the first psychologist of Christianity. I am an old artillery man, and I draw up heavy guns of whose existence no enemy of Christianity would ever have dreamed. The whole thing is a prelude to The Revaluation of All Values, a work that I have already finished. I tell you that within two years I’ll have the whole earth in convulsions.”

About the same day on which Nietzsche wrote, an unknown lady of the French provincial middle class, Madame Guérin, received a letter (dated November 18) from her niece, Thérèse Martin, a fifteen-year-old postulant in the Carmelite convent at Lisieux.

Two nineteenth-century contemporaries had very different views on how to live.