A closer look
Nicolas Flamel is globally famous in the wizarding world and occult history as the legendary immortal alchemist who successfully created the Philosopher's Stone and turned lead into gold, but the actual historical guy was just a boring, totally mortal French bookseller. The real Flamel was actually just really good at real estate investments and married a wealthy widow, which made him so suspiciously rich that jealous neighbors centuries later started a rumor that he must have used dark magic to get his money. Someone in the seventeenth century even forged a bunch of complex alchemical texts and slapped Flamel's name on them to boost sales, completely rewriting the poor guy's legacy forever. He died a completely normal death in 1418, meaning he completely missed out on the fact that he would eventually become the ultimate mystical poster boy just because he was slightly better at managing rental properties than the rest of medieval Paris
