Laurent

Laurent is a saint's name that passed through a Roman town on its way into French. The Latin Laurentius meant a man of Laurentum, a city of Latium set between Ostia and Lavinium, and it carries the sense of laurelled; Laurentum's own name is traced to the groves of Laurus nobilis, the bay tree, that stood there, or in Virgil's telling to a single sacred laurel.

The man who carried it out of Italy was not Italian. Lawrence is thought to have been born on 31 December 225 at Huesca, in the Roman province of Hispania Tarraconensis. He met the future Pope Sixtus II, a teacher born in Greece, at Caesaraugusta, and the two travelled from Hispania to Rome together. Sixtus was made pope in 257 and ordained Lawrence, then thirty-two, as a deacon, then appointed him archdeacon, first among the seven deacons of the cathedral church. The post carried the care of the treasury and riches of the Church and the giving of alms to the poor, and it was that trust that killed him.

At the beginning of August 258 the emperor Valerian ordered that every bishop, priest and deacon be put to death at once. Sixtus was seized on 6 August at the cemetery of St Callixtus, in the middle of the liturgy, and executed the same day. The prefect of Rome then demanded the riches of the Church. Ambrose of Milan records that Lawrence asked for three days, spent them giving away as much Church property to the destitute as he could, and on the third day came back with a delegation of the city's indigent, crippled and blind. These, he said, were the treasures of the Church, which was far richer than the emperor.

The prefect had a great gridiron prepared over hot coals and Lawrence laid on it, which is why the gridiron is his emblem. He was held in the house of the centurion Hippolytus, where he baptised fellow prisoners, died on the Esquiline Hill on 10 August 258, and was buried in the catacomb of Cyriaca on the Via Tiburtina, over which the papal basilica of San Lorenzo fuori le Mura was raised. The manner of it is disputed: the edict ordinarily meant beheading, and one explanation has a copyist drop a letter from passus est, he suffered, to make assus est, he was roasted.

Devotion to him was widespread by the fourth century, the feast of 10 August stands in the oldest Christian calendars, and he is counted the third patron of Rome after Peter and Paul. Six churches in the city mark the sites of his last days. Philip II of Spain won the Battle of St Quentin on the saint's feast day in 1557 and built the Escorial to commemorate it, laying out monastery, palace, college and library in the shape of a gridiron.

A saint venerated on that scale becomes a font name, and French parents took their children's names from the Roman Catholic calendar of saints: Jacques, Jean, Michel, Pierre, Laurent. Such a name records neither what a man did nor where he lived, only which saint his parents put him under. When bynames hardened into inherited surnames the son of a Laurent kept his father's baptismal name as a family name and it stopped changing each generation, which is why Laurent is the tenth most borne surname in France. The saint went onto the land as well as into the register, in estates and seigneuries carrying his dedication, which is how the compound Saint-Laurent enters the record beside the plain form.

Jacques Cartier made the first European voyage into the gulf that anyone documented, in 1534. He came back the following year, and on the feast of Saint Lawrence in 1535 he entered the estuary and named the water for the saint: the Gulf of St Lawrence, and then the river emptying into it, the Saint-Laurent. It was Cartier too who called the shores along it the country of the Canadas, after an indigenous word for a village, and so gave the second largest country on earth its name.

The river became the road into New France, the way almost every French settler of Canada came in, and it carried the saint's name across the map: the Laurentian Mountains north of Montreal, the borough of Saint-Laurent and the boulevard that spans the island, and the Laurentian Plateau, which is the Canadian Shield. Saint Lawrence is one of Canada's patron saints. A family called Laurent in Quebec shares its name with the country's central artery, and the doubled form reached the office of prime minister in Louis St. Laurent (1882-1973), the twelfth to hold it.

Antoine Jean Blaise Laurent was born at Bruyeres in the Vosges in 1737, son of Philippe Laurent, a regent at Bruyeres. He was justice of the peace at Auvillar in 1790, and Lot-et-Garonne sent him to the National Convention. Under the Directory he sat in the Conseil des Anciens until May 1797, then left public life altogether and went back to Auvillar, dying in 1799.

Jean Antoine Laurent was born at Baccarat in 1763 into a family of artists, trained at Nancy and settled in Paris in 1785. He exhibited at the Salon from 1791 to 1831 and took a first-class medal in 1808; his watercolour portrait of Mirabeau on ivory, painted in 1791, is in the Louvre. He refused to work for the House of Bourbon and had the protection of the Empress Josephine and Queen Hortense de Beauharnais instead. He was one of very few French miniaturists to work on large sheets of ivory and parchment, taking on subjects as unlikely for the form as equestrian portraits, and spent his later years teaching drawing at Nancy and Epinal.

Jean-Theodore Laurent was born at Aachen in 1804, one of fourteen children of a Luxembourger, Franz Laurent, in a household of modest means. He read theology at Bonn, moved to the diocese of Liege and was ordained there in 1829. A decade as vicar at Heerlen and parson at Gemmenich followed, during which he wrote against Hermesianism in the Cologne church controversy. That made his name in Rome and ruined it in Berlin: appointed vicar apostolic of the Nordic Missions in September 1839, he was rejected by the Prussian government within the year.

In December 1841 he was named vicar apostolic of Luxembourg, an appointment kept quiet at the wish of Grand Duke William II. He set about founding a seminary, regulating the parishes and pressing the Church's claim on the schools, and collided head on with a liberal government. False accusations were laid against him in the revolutionary year 1848 and he left the country on 1 May. A formal statement rehabilitated him in May 1856, and in June he resigned at the request of Pius IX. He spent his last years at Aachen with his brother Josef, the city archivist, and followed the Sisters of the Poor Child Jesus into exile at Simpelveld in 1879, dying there in 1884.

The name is thick on the rolls of the French state and its wars. Georges Louis Victor Laurent (1873-1953) rose to vice-admiral, General Edouard Laurent (1896-1972) was made a Companion of the Liberation, and Augustin Laurent (1896-1990) was a minister and a member of the Resistance. In the far diaspora it took the highest decoration Britain gives, in Harry Laurent (1895-1987), a New Zealand recipient of the Victoria Cross. It runs through the sciences too: Pierre Alphonse Laurent gave his name to the Laurent series, and Marie Laurent (1826-1910) was the collaborator as well as the wife of Louis Pasteur.

Andre Laurent, born at Firminy in the Loire in 1938, founded his own forged-blanks firm in 1967, then took the presidency of AS Saint-Etienne in 1983, with the club relegated, broke and shaken by a slush-fund scandal. He rebuilt it: promotion back to the first division in 1985-86, a record run of twenty-four matches unbeaten, fourth place in 1987-88, and a stand-down in June 1993. Elsewhere the name went onto the team sheet with the France international Lucien Laurent (1907-2005), onto the playbill with Melanie Laurent, and onto a label known everywhere in the couturier Yves Saint Laurent, in whom the river's form of the name came round again.