Marie Lemarchand, 18, of Caen in Normandy, arrived at Lourdes in August 1892 in the last stages of pulmonary tuberculosis, with two large tubercular ulcers on her left leg and an advanced lupus vulgaris (facial cutaneous tuberculosis) that had destroyed much of the soft tissue of the right side of her face, including the nose. Pus dripped continuously from the lesions; the doctors of the Lourdes Medical Bureau examined her on arrival and judged her case 'beyond hope.'
She was bathed in the piscines on August 21. The lupus lesions of her face closed and re-epithelialised within minutes; the leg ulcers dried and healed; the pulmonary symptoms vanished. She was examined again the same afternoon by the entire panel of attending physicians.
Émile Zola, the great Naturalist novelist and an avowed agnostic, was at Lourdes that summer gathering material for his novel Lourdes (published 1894). He saw Marie Lemarchand both before and after the cure. In his novel he kept her sick — fictionalising her as 'Elise Rouquet' — because, as he later admitted to a correspondent, the truth of what he had witnessed at the baths would have destroyed his thesis. The cure was formally recognised in 1908.