54 Rue Centrale

Text in French.

An original idea, unsuspected focal points, picturesque and touching characters, twenty years between war and peace, this is what the pages of this book offer: a story of Lyon seen through the prism of the adventures and the tribulations of several protagonists who, to say the least, are original: Journalists, authors, artists, fantasists, gastronomes, among whom Marcel Grancher, Frédéric Dard and Curnonsky.

This story takes place at the beginning of the 1930s in Lyon with five great daily newspapers, a lot of periodicals and a lot of specialized documentation covering the very varied domains available to the people of Lyon. This story takes place during ten years of uneasy peace, five years of war and five years of renewed freedom afterwards. It ends at the beginning of the 1950s. It was yesterday, it was last century. Behind intensive literary activity we find here the atmosphere of the bistros, the bars and the little restaurants in the Rue Bellecordière or the Rue Confort, just so many places of conviviality, encounters and exchanges. A book of great wealth where each chapter portrays a character, who is often picturesque, or a literary or culinary event.