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Intra muros, Saint-MaloThebooksea

Rebuilt 1954, on cellars of about 1680

A granite house inside the walls

Nine rooms over four floors, and beneath all of them a barrel vault that the fire of August 1944 did not reach.

The first-floor salon, looking towards the street windows
The first-floor salon, looking towards the street windows.

The house

Burned in a week, rebuilt in a decade, and the cellar never moved

Eighty per cent of the walled town burned between the sixth and the fourteenth of August 1944. What survived almost everywhere was what was underground. The reconstruction, run to a plan that insisted on granite fronts and slate roofs and the original street lines, took until 1960; this house was finished in 1954 and is therefore an early one, which shows in the window proportions.

The cellar is older than everything above it by roughly two hundred and seventy years. It belonged to a ship-owner, it stored what ship-owners stored, and it is the only part of the property that has never been rebuilt.

The house in detail

The front of the house on the rue de la Pie qui Boit A granite front of four storeys and a dormer attic, five windows wide on the upper floors, with a door to the left of centre and two cellar lights at pavement level. the street door cellar lights at pavement level rue de la Pie qui Boit
The front: four storeys, a dormer attic, and two cellar lights at pavement level.

Rooms

Nine rooms, four of which face the sea

Three on the first floor, three on the second, two on the third and one in the attic under the dormer. Four look over the rampart to the sea and five look into the street, which is four metres wide and consequently very quiet.

All nine, with the figures

The green room on the first floor, with the high bed
The green room on the first floor, whose panelling spent the war in the cellar.

The cellar

The casino room is the vault under the front rooms

It is a room of this house and of no other. On the casino floor there are three tables and a counter. Four evenings a week it is open and the rest of the week the stair is roped off. The vault was cut from the rock and built over in about 1680 for an armateur whose name is on the deeds and nowhere else; it held salt, wine and, on at least two occasions that the parish records complain about, things that had not paid duty. It took no damage in 1944 because it is three metres below the street.

From the desk in the hall you pass behind it and go down twelve steps to the casino: thirty paces altogether and not one of them outdoors, which in a westerly gale is the entire argument. That door is kept by a member of staff for the whole of every open hour, and the rule there is 18 with photographic identification, on every visit.

What the vault is like

Hall and cellar, with the walk between them The street door opens on the hall, with the desk to the right. The cellar stair descends behind the desk. Below, the vault under the front rooms is the gaming room; the back of the cellar holds the plant and the store. Hall level Street door Desk Cellar stair twelve steps Cellar Gaming room three tables, one counter barrel vault, seventeenth century thirty paces and twelve steps, within the house
Hall above, cellar below, and the walk between the two.

The walls

A rampart walk that goes all the way round

Three minutes to the Grande Porte, five to the sea side. The circuit of the walls is about one and three-quarter kilometres and takes half an hour at a reasonable pace, longer if the tide is doing anything interesting, which here it generally is: the range is among the largest in Europe and reaches thirteen metres.

The town and the tide

The walled town and its gates The walled town stands on a rock joined to the mainland by a causeway. The rampart walk runs right round it. The house is near the middle of the grid, three minutes from the Grande Porte and five from the ramparts on the sea side. the rampart walk the house Grande Porte, 3 minutes sea side causeway east
The grid inside the walls, with the house near the middle of it.

Play is confined to a single room of this house and occurs nowhere else in it. The Booksea Room conducts nothing over the internet, opens no account and settles no payment by way of this website.