After completing his cycle of novels about the Rougon-Macquart family, Emile Zola (1840-1902) wrote another cycle, Three Cities, consisting of the extensive novels Rome, Paris, and Lourdes. In "Lourdes," published in 1894, Zola describes the deep longing and hopes, rising to the point of madness, of the people who have flocked to the rapidly growing pilgrimage site at the foot of the Pyrenees since the Marian apparitions of the ailing peasant girl Bernadette Soubirous in 1858.