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Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code wasn’t the first historical fiction where the history was just as fictional as the story. Émile Zola beat Brown by over a hundred years.Zola was a famous French writer and avowed atheist whose novels and other works had won popular acclaim. In 1892, he decided to write a novel about the amazing cures said to be taking place in the waters of a spring in Lourdes, France, where the Virgin Mary had reportedly appeared to young Bernadette Soubirous eighte …