Nicolas Flamel

Nicolas Flamel made his living around 1330–1418 as an écrivain public in Paris, drawing up letters and agreements for those who couldn't write, running a school with his wife to pass the trade along. He died in March 1418, unremarkable. Then in the 1600s, texts surfaced claiming he'd learned the secrets of the philosopher's stone from a Jewish convert on the road to Santiago de Compostela, that he'd turned base metal to gold and escaped death entirely. None of it happened, but the story moved faster than correction: Flamel the clerk became Flamel the eternal, and fiction made it canon.