French Paradox – Frank McNally on France’s fondness for St Fiacre (except as a baby name)

The name of St Fiachra, a seventh-century holy man whose feast-day is August 30th, can still be found all over his adopted country of France, especially in the northern part of it.

Spelt locally as Fiacre, it is attached to countless streets, towns, and villages, including a few in Belgium. But what it is rarely attached to, by telling contrast, is new-born children.

In the top 100 French boys’ names of 2022, Fiacre was nowhere to be seen. (Compare this with Liam, a once-Irish phenomenon whose rise to mystifying global popularity made it France’s 11th most popular name last year, despite a variant spelling (Lyam) splitting the vote and finishing 35th).

And yet even back in the days when France was more religious and less multicultural than now, Fiacre’s popularity as a saint was not reflected at the baptismal font.

Hard Border – Frank McNally on a visit to the Korean Demilitarised Zone

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Transmigration of Seoul – Frank McNally on a long-awaited trip to South Korea

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Son of the soil – Colm Keena on the occasional delights of getting our hands dirty

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The ‘Bots’ marks the seasons in our busy city

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The problem, perhaps, was his fame for curing certain kinds of illness. As the medieval equivalent of modern hospital consultants, saints too used to specialise in different parts of the anatomy. Fiacre’s expertise, it seems, was in the genito-urinary and proctology departments.

His greatest repute was for the treatment of hemorrhoids, a condition of which – in the ultimate test of a physician – he had cured himself.

Other saints left footprints behind them. According to tradition, Fiacre left prints of his buttocks on a stone where he was cured. In the centuries afterwards, many similarly afflicted pilgrims came to the monastery in Meaux to sit on them.

A thousand years after Fiacre’s death, his reputation was still so strong that Cardinal Richelieu, a martyr to hemorrhoids, not only made the pilgrimage but tried to bring some of the saint’s relics home for private treatment.

Fiacre’s medical miracle practice also dealt with a wide range of other disorders in the same anatomical neighbourhood, including fistulas, kidney stones, and worms. In time it extended to sexually transmitted diseases, especially syphilis.

One way in which the saints of old departed from modern consultants, of course, was that they could inflict conditions as well as cure them. In St Fiacre’s case, reputed victims of this reverse medicine included England’s Henry V.

The hero of Agincourt is said by most history books to have died from dysentery. Even so, his demise happened 601 years ago tomorrow (August 31st).

The proximity to the feast-day, the general locus of Henry’s medical problems, and the fact that he had recently besieged Meaux, threatening the shrine, were enough for folklore to implicate the saint.

Away from medicine, Fiacre was and is also the patron saint of gardeners, having been noted for his skill in coaxing herbs and vegetables out of the ground.

He is usually portrayed with a spade. But when, according to the legend, he was promised as much land for his monastery as he could dig a ditch around in a day, he used a divinely inspired ivory cane to do the work.

So perhaps he should be the patron of farm machinery too. Meanwhile, it is for his horticultural reputation that he is best commemorated in his native country, via St Fiachra’s Garden at the National Stud in Kildare.

Then, back in France, there is his accidental association with taxi-drivers, and the doubly-accidental notoriety this brought. It so happened that in 17th-century Paris, horse-drawn cabs used to gather at the Hotel de Saint-Fiacre, from which they eventually acquired a nickname.

Hence, two centuries later, the celebrated “fiacre scene” in Madame Bovary, where the doomed heroine is persuaded by her lover to take a cab drive around Rouen for purposes other than tourism.

The carriage circles the streets “rocking like a ship at sea” until a languid female hand finally emerges from the window, tossing a torn love letter to the wind.

The saint’s association with this is ironic, given his supposed exclusion of women from his monastery (although there are also many stories of women seeking and receiving cures there).

In any case, Flaubert’s scene is echoed decades later in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises when the impotent narrator, Jake, shares a horse-drawn fiacre with a prostitute called Georgette.

Jake just needs company. But as the fiacre enters the Tuileries Gardens, Georgette assumes he needs something else, until he pushes her hand away. Pressed on the nature of his incapacity, Jake explains that he was “hurt in the war”. For all his great powers over the related body parts, it seems, not even St Fiacre had a cure for that.