The story focuses on a fictional noblewoman, Blanche de la Force, who sympathises with the martyrs of Compiègne—a group of Carmelite nuns—as they are brought to the scaffold by the revolutionaries.
It is a Catholic novella that portrays the loss of Christian ideals as the reason for a society's turn to madness.
The Encyclopedia of Catholic Literature associates its themes with an appeal to call on God in times of fear, the prayer during Catholic mass for Jesus to protect the faithful from anxiety, divine grace as a mystery during adversity, and Psalm 4, verse 1: "thou hast enlarged me when I was in distress".
[3] It was the basis for The Carmelites by Georges Bernanos, originally written as a film screenplay in 1948 but performed as a play.
Bernanos' version was adapted into the 1956 opera Dialogues of the Carmelites by Francis Poulenc and the 1960 film Dialogue of the Carmelites directed by Raymond Léopold Bruckberger and Philippe Agostini.