Prison de Montluc

Every week, my wife and I run by what appears to be an unfinished mural along Rue du Dauphiné in the 3e. On the far left of this wall there is a painting of World War II resistance hero Jean Moulin, at the other end, some 200 metres down the road, there are two carefree children in modern clothes, happily racing one another. In between,  names are crudely scrawled - almost scratched - on a somewhat bland blue-and-brown background. 

We had always assumed that these were the names of people whom the artist would one day paint at that location on the wall. But another part of the fresco suggests otherwise: a series of painted tally marks which topple over and eventually turn into birds and fly away. 

One day, curiosity got the better of me, and I followed the wall around to the other side. And there I discovered what the mural meant. Because this was the scene of possibly the darkest chapter in the history of Lyon: the Prison de Montluc. 

Soixante-neuf

Ask a schoolboy what the number 69 means, and you're likely to be met with a splutter and a muffled guffaw. Because, as any teenager knows, "69" and its French equivalent, soixante-neuf, stand for mutual oral sex.

Serge Gainsburg and his breathy-voiced English girlfriend, Jane Birkin, famously sang the song "69, Année Erotique". However contrary to common belief, the number sixty-nine came to represent this sexual position not because of the way the participants' bodies line up (the circular part of each constituent digit signifying the heads and the trailing ends their legs), but because of Lyon – or rather the early Lyonnais themselves.