Jacques Chauviré (1915-2005) was born near Lyon. The same year of his birth his father died on the front, during the First World War, so he did not get to know him. He studied medicine in Lyon and opened his own practice in Neuville-sur-Saône, where he worked and lived the rest of his life. In 1958, after a brief correspondence with him, Albert Camus published in the prestigious Gallimard publishing house his first novel, Partage de la soif, which would be followed by others such as Les passants, La terre et la guerre, Les mouettes sur la Saone ... Good part Chauviré's work was rediscovered almost five decades later, following the successful publication of Élisa in 2003, two years before his death: the "unwanted but not traumatic death" -as he himself would declare in an already elderly interview- a simple and intelligent humanist who did not disdain to refer, when it was convenient, to the "dark passages that contain all life", and who lived his own old age with a lucidity that is undoubtedly very present in his last masterpiece, the autobiographical Élisa