Calle Peyre

Calle Peyre, in the Fuente del Berro neighbourhood, bears the surname of a French writer who learned Spain by living it. Joseph Peyré was born on 13 March 1892 in Aydie, in the Gascon Béarn, the son of two schoolteachers, and earned a doctorate in law in Bordeaux. He lived in Madrid during the Second Republic and saw with his own eyes the start of the 1936 uprising. That Spain gave him material for more than forty books on the peninsula and bullfighting, the Sahara and the Pyrenees. His novel Sang et Lumières (1935) follows the decline of the matador Ricardo García and won the Prix Goncourt that same year; the cinema took it up in 1954 and the film reached the Cannes Festival. There is one oddity for whoever strolls here: this street is the only explicit trace the writer left on Madrid’s map, and no source clarifies when the sign went up.