A Question of Faith

You

don't see a lot of real saints around these days, but they've been turning up pretty regularly in the media: CBS's surprise hit Joan of Arcadia, David Guterson's Our Lady of the Forest, not to mention Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. You can see the appeal of these stories: there's something a touch American about people who transcend ordinary mortal failings to become saints. They're like the spiritual equivalent of Horatio Alger.

The story Henry Grunwald tells in his novel A Saint, More or Less (Random House; 234 pages) is a bit more complicated. It's based on an actual historical incident. Around 1594, a young woman of mysterious origins named Nicole Tavernier arrived in Paris and rapidly acquired a reputation for extraordinary faith and mystical healing powers. In a matter of weeks she had been taken up by the aristocracy, enjoyed an audience with the archbishop and organized a grand religious procession through the city.

Who was she? She could preach fluently, predict the future and travel, she claimed, from Paris to Tours and back by angel power. But were her gifts from God, the devil or her own vivid imagination? Grunwald, a former editor-in-chief of Time Inc., is less interested in theology and is-she-or-isn't-she games than in the subtle psychology and sociology of faith and its obverse, doubt: what makes people believe, what makes people want to believe and what makes belief fail. To this end he surrounds Nicole with a bestiary of believers who try to come to terms with her gifts in different ways: the oddly named (but historically real) Barbe Acarie, a beautiful, wealthy zealot who takes Nicole into her home; Henry IV, the roguish but humane King of France, for whom faith is a matter of politics; and Rene Monnet, a skeptical doctor puzzled by the would-be wonder worker's hold over him: "There was nothing of carnal seduction about Nicole, but he thought there was something like spiritual seduction."

Grunwald writes with an obvious tenderness toward his heroine — in an introductory note, he discusses his decades-long obsession with her — but that doesn't stop him from treating her roughly, and her tale is in the end bittersweet at best. He delivers it in a bluff, plainspoken style; one flaw in the telling is that the dialogue has a touch of that musty quality that often inhabits historical fiction. Yet Grunwald has a strong sense of his historical period — he genuinely intuits the mirror logic of the Renaissance religious mind — and his story has an emotional power that transcends it. In the present day, Grunwald asks, "Do we not still look for miracles, saints and devils, if, perhaps, by other names?" We do. And more often than not, we still find only human beings.