TODAY is the feast-day of St Fiachra, a seventh-century Irish monk who, by lending his name to the horse-drawn Parisian hackney cab of old, has ensured himself at least literary immortality. Unfortunately, he might have regarded this as a dubious honour.
Here, for example, is the Swiss novelist Blaise Cendrars, describing (in 1927) the revels of one his heroes on a night out in St Petersburg:
To his eyes everything appeared joyful: colours, lights, life; the drunks slumped in the backs of fiacres, the enormous tart escorted by two officers of the guard, the decorated carriage, the grinning limousine. . . ". . .Aaamen!" he intoned.
And here is Ernest Hemingway, in The Sun Also Rises, describing Jake Barnes's pre-dinner drive through Paris with a prostitute called Georgette: Settled back in the slow, smoothly rolling fiacre, we moved up the Avenue de l'Opéra, passed the locked doors of the shops, their windows lighted, the avenue broad and shiny and almost deserted.
It might reassure the original Fiachra - among other things, the patron saint of venereal diseases - that when Georgette propositions Jake, the latter explains his incapacity for that sort of thing, due to a war wound. But then the Hemingway vignette is probably a deliberate reference to an even more notorious fiacre-based scene, one of the most famous passages in literature, from Madame Bovary.
The doomed heroine has just toured Rouen Cathedral with her illicit lover, the law clerk Leon Dupois, when he suggests they hail a fiacre. Emma knows exactly what he has in mind.
"Leon, really. . .I don't know whether I ought." She was coquetting a little. "It's not the proper thing to do. You know it isn't!" "Why not?" answered the clerk. "It's done in Paris, right enough." This was an irresistible argument and it convinced her.
"La scène du fiacre" is used by English teachers to illustrate the literary device of synecdoche, in which a part of something substitutes for the whole (of the heroine's life in this case).
The horse-drawn cab subsequently careers around the streets and roads, going nowhere in particular with the blinds down, "rocking like a ship at sea", puzzling onlookers and the driver - who was discouraged from even slowing down - alike. The scene's climax, in every sense, is when a female hand emerges from the carriage to toss a torn love letter to the wind.
Finally, about six, the carriage pulled up in a side street in the Beauvoisine quarter and a woman got out. She walked with her veil down, glancing neither to the right nor to the left.
Even some of his non-sexual literary connotations might have tried the saint's patience. The Belgian crime writer Georges Simenon paid him the tribute of having Inspector Maigret born in the fictional town of Saint Fiacre. But when Maigret returns home in the 1932 novel L'Affaire Saint Fiacre, it is of course to investigate a murder (set in the local church).
This and the rest of the monk's literary notoriety is a simple accident. His name was originally commemorated by a Paris hotel, outside which the first carriages-for-hire stood in the 1600s, offering respite from the city's muddy streets. The cabs soon became know as fiacres, and it was probably Maigret's affinity with Parisian taxi-drivers, rather than any devotion to the monk, that inspired the choice of Maigret's birthplace.
Fiachra himself was born in Kilkenny, leaving Ireland in 628 AD to preach at Meaux, in Brittany. He was a great herbalist; and, according to legend, the French bishop offered him as much land for his garden as he could plough in a day. Using only a spade, the monk tilled so large a tract that a woman accused him of sorcery, which in turn led him to ban females from his hermitage and acquire a reputation for misogyny.
It was believed that women who flouted the ban would go instantly mad. And as late as 1648, the French queen - a Fiachra devotee - declined to enter his chapel in the cathedral of Meaux when she visited to pray for an heir. Even so, she subsequently credited the saint with her delivery of Louis XIV, the Sun King.
By then, indeed long before it, Fiachra's reputed powers had expanded to include the relief of haemorrhoids. A popular relic was a stone seat on which he was said to have left the shape of his buttocks. This became a shrine for sufferers, who would sit on it in the hope of a cure.
Of course, as well as curing, saints in the middle ages were also crediting with afflicting, when necessary. There is a story that Henry V - he of "Once more into the breach, dear friends" - blamed his own haemorrhoids on an incident in which English troops vandalised Fiachra's shrine during the siege of Meaux in 1422.
It is even claimed that his haemorrhoids turned septic on the saint's day later that year. More usually, Henry's death is attributed to dysentery, contracted during the Meaux siege. At any rate, he died on August 31st, 1422 - so close to the feast-day that Maigret would surely have regarded the saint as a suspect.
As well as having responsibility for piles, venereal diseases, and Parisian taxi-drivers, Fiachra is also the patron saint of gardeners. Among the other things that commemorate his name is a variety of Alpine strawberry.
fmcnally@irish-times.ie