undated (#01), HLS to Merton, 'Thanks for your nice letter. I wrote immediately to Dom Gabriel and sended [sic]'

Marina de Berg was a dancer and an actress in Paris. Born in Helsinki, Finland to parents of French and Russian orgin, she was orphaned at a young age. She achieved fame early in life as a ballerina and dancer and then as an actress primarily in the latter half of the 1940's. In the early 1950's and some professional setbacks, she questioned her place in the what she called the "wild frivolities" of life in the arts in Paris at the time. She recounts her decision to try a religious vocation with the Trappistine nuns in an autobiographical work, Trois ans à la Trappe in 1959 (translated into English as Heaven by the Hems: From Stage to Cloister, published by Sheed and Ward in 1961). She entered the Abbaye Notre-Dame de Saint-Joseph d'Ubexy, Charmes, France, in August of 1952. After a period of ill health and struggle with the rigors of the lifestyle, she left the nuns and began writing.