Élisabeth Leseur married a doctor, Félix Leseur, who was a militant atheist and a leader of the French anti-clerical movement, and who set out in good faith to argue her out of her religion. He very nearly succeeded: she lost her faith for a while in her twenties, and then, reading a book he had given her to finish the job, got it back with interest. She was about thirty-two.
From then until her death she lived two lives. In the first she was the charming hostess of an unbelieving household, who never argued, never reproached, and let her husband's friends say what they liked at her table. In the second, recorded in a journal he knew nothing about, she was praying and offering her long illness for one intention: his conversion. She wrote that she would rather die and see him believe than live and see him not.
She died of cancer on 3 May 1914. Félix found the journal, and among the papers a note telling him that he would be converted and would become a religious. He published the journal — <em>Journal et pensées de chaque jour</em> — because he thought it would refute itself, went to Lourdes intending to expose it, and came back a Catholic. He entered the Dominicans and was ordained a priest in 1923, and spent the rest of his life giving retreats on his wife's writing. Her cause was introduced in the twentieth century and she remains a Servant of God.