La légende by Philippe Vasset (review)

The narrator of this confession is a defrocked priest who used to work in Rome for the Confraternity Promoting Saints. He was a minor administrator gathering information for portfolios about candidates for sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church. His story of a proposed saint's life was then given to another committee that would determine the candidate's worthiness to be a saint. He was also involved in the traffic of saints' relics that, he claims, were and continue to be more profitable than the traffic of artists' paintings. During his advocacy work the narrator fell in love with Laure who, he suspects, was probably a journalist intent on debunking the narrator's work but has now become his assistant. She did help him do research in the infamous Papal Reserve, an anti-library where dossiers are kept by the Curia on special holy people. Research about Adèle Chevalier and the cleric J.-A. Boullan, nineteenth-century writers of hagiography, revealed pornographic personal writings that the narrator and Laure reinterpreted to be about themselves. Somewhere during the narrator's work on dossiers for proposed saints, he ran afoul of authority and had to exile himself to Paris. Presently, he is not an advocate of ordinary saints. He has changed his name from the one given to him as an ordained priest although he still wears a cross beneath his civilian garments. Since learning that popularity is an indispensable factor in the advocacy for sainthood, the narrator now proposes famous people, such as popular singers and professional athletes, as candidates for sainthood. As he narrates his backstory, he promotes stories about Azyle—a graffiti artist who tags his name on subway cars only—, Pie—a gay roamer who leaves encounter messages for homosexuals who seek sexual encounters on the fringes of Paris—, and Darie—a contemporary woman whose reclusion was so celebrated that many highway travelers came to see her and thus drove her into self-exile to some unknown land. Father Boullan and his assistant, Adèle, fascinate the narrator and Laure for their heroism in promoting an anti-morality for the cleric and for being precursors in the arena of saint-promotion. Meanwhile the narrator admits his sins against his vows of chastity and celibacy by his liaison with Laura, pursuant to the pornography they were reading and copying from the Reserve where the actual writings of Boullan and Chevalier are stored and were consulted for research by the author Vasset. The audacity of the narrator becomes obvious as his confession promotes the causes of alternate models for believers not agreeing with the Church's sexual guidelines. His Laure reminds us of Georges Bataille's fictional lover in her incarnation of Bataille's laïque view of the sacred. In fact, Vasset's narrator goes beyond such a view of the sacred in advocating alternatives to sainthood. A Bataille-inspired mysticism is still possible, in this view, that incorporates human sexuality into a sacredness that includes community and popularity without the mediation of the Curia.