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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 …

A Different Kind of Christmas Story At their feet spread the great Egyptian desert, a shadowy ocean of sand rolling southward into Africa. The woman, a pale redhead with dark rings of sorrow under her eyes, had otherwise the look of ease and city life about her. Her child seemed even more incongruous: a scrawny, big-eyed boy, five, perhaps, six years old, with an ominous, unending cough; a dark, mixed-race runt with a head of kinky yet unmistakably Celtic red hair.Most Roman women would have e …