Showing posts with label Saints. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Saints. Show all posts

Saturday, September 5, 2009

Flowers, Saints, and Taxi Drivers

It's called flowers wilt. It's called apples rot. It's called thieves get rich and saints get shot. It's called God don't answer prayers a lot. Alright, now you know.

Stephen Joshua Sondheim ~Merrily We Roll Along.~ a musical.


One of my recent visits to an exposition at a museum or musée was inside a lovely old church. What a great idea to use a beautiful building to house exhibitions instead of letting them fall into a state of disrepair like many churches today.

A mixture of Old & New


Many of the items within were adorned with flowers. We saw paintings, marriage gifts, tokens for sweethearts, and religious items too. We also enjoyed a special exhibition of kimonos many of which featured flowers and plants. The views out of the back of the building were lovely too, an enclosed garden.


Photographs were forbidden inside the museum, however once outside we clicked away taking shots of the building. The museum is called La Verriere however on many of the doors we had seen initails S F what was the significance?

Saint Fiacre ~ Patron Saint of gardeners & taxi drivers!


Saint Fiacre was born in Ireland and lived in a type of monastery (a hermitage), and had a knack of healing people with plants and therefore people flocked to him. It seems he only wanted a quiet life and fled to France to a place called Meaux near Paris! He was given a place of solitude in the forest by Saint Faro.

So why taxi drivers? The Hôtel de St-Fiacre, in the Rue St-Martin, Paris, in the middle of the seventeenth century first hired out small horse drawn carriages. The sign of the hotel was an image of Saint Fiacre, and the coaches eventually took his name and were called fiacres.

Double crossed


Inside from outside



The word Saint is from old French seint from Latin sanctus "holy"

To read more about the Saint (who I had never heard of) click HERE.

The French word for glass roof is verriere.

The French word for rack and ruin or fall into disrepair is délabrer.