In the nineteenth century, Saints experience a new life in the form of a medical case: the clinical discourse takes over the martyrology, seen as a collection of symptoms to analyze. At the end of the century, the Saint becomes both a hysterical and a novelistic character, often serving an anticlerical rhetoric. The sublime however does not disappear, because the Saint's life can be part of a formal renewal (in the case of Decadence) or of an aesthetic shift (in the case of Zola's naturalism).