Fiacre

A new Maigret word, this time from the television version from Gambon and others, rather than from the word of Simenon himself. Set in a place called St. Fiacre something, said to be near Moulins, on what must be near the headwaters of the Loire, quite near Lyon.

Appropriately, in the French, called 'L'Affaire Saint-Fiacre', but rendered in English to 'Maigret on Home Ground'. A story using a similar device to that of Agatha, twenty years later, in 'A Murder is Announced'. So did she pinch the announcement element from Simenon? As a fellow professional, she must have been familiar with his work.

Fiacre was best known to us as a sort of foreign, horse drawn taxi, but a couple of sources turned up by bing reveal it to be an old Irish word, the name of one principal and two secondary saints of the Catholic persuasion. The principal one emigrated from Ireland at the start of the dark ages to found a hospice in the north of France, once an important site of pilgrimage, unusual in that the inner sanctum was closed to women, a prohibition they broke at their peril.

According to reference 1, the patron of gardeners and cab drivers. Saint No.276. One of those very irritating web sites which plays you unsolicited music. Wikipedia is rather less coy, explaining that 'St. Fiacre had a reputation for healing haemorrhoids, which were called 'Saint Fiacre's figs' in the Middle Ages. Cardinal Richelieu visited the saint's relics hoping for relief from this illness ... Saint Fiacre is commonly invoked to help heal people suffering from various ills, based on his reputed skill with medicinal plants. His reputed aversion to women is believed to be the reason he is known as the patron saint of venereal disease sufferers'.

The story is that the first cab office in Paris happened to be near a Hôtel St. Fiacre, giving birth to the slang, rapidly assimilated into the regular language, for what we call a Hackney Carriage, for rather similar reasons.

OED tells us nothing of saints, but claims that rather than being named for a hôtel particulier, the cab was named for a public house, with the name dating back to 1648.

Gmaps turns up quite a lot of places called St. Fiacre in France, but the best it can do near Moulins is a stretch of the D.18, called the Saint Fiacre for some reason. Not a church in sight, at least not on the short stretch that I investigated. But the illustration does remind me of what a big place France is, as noted at reference 2.

Reference 1: http://www.catholic.org/.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/breakfast.html.