Not always does the stranger to St. Malo hear exactly this offhand, but invariably he is met with a singsong of sailors’ chanteys which at once call up memories of seafarers of other days.
One enters St. Malo, whether by boat or train, through the city walls. The boat lands you directly under the frowning ramparts, and a worthy porter will take your portmanteau and carry it twenty steps to the door of your hotel, just within the gateway of the city—and charge you twenty sous for the job. “A franc, really,” the man with the brass badge tied on his right arm will reply to your query as to whether you have heard aright.
“Twenty cents for twenty steps is a little high,” says the hostess of your hotel, but it is the tariff from outside.
St. Malo is still a walled city, much as it was in the days when Francis I., in 1518, and Charles IX., in 1570, held court here.
Charles IX., his mother Catharine, and his sister Margaret spent a part of the month of May here in this city by the sea. The Malouins gave the court a spectacle of an imitation naval combat, in which a galleon was sunk; too realistically, one thinks, for its occupants were drowned.
At one time, it is said by the chronicles, St. Malo was guarded by fierce mastiffs, the descendants, it is to be presumed, of the Gallic dogs of war. These municipal watch-dogs were suppressed in 1770, because of their having bitten the “calves of gentlemen.” Presumably there was a complaint of some sort, but the only record of the incident is one in verse sung by Désaugiers as follows:
“Bon voyage,
Cher du Mollet,
A Saint-Malo débarquez sans naufrage,
Et revenez si ce pays vous plait.”
The disappearance of the watch-dogs in 1770 made necessary the adoption of a new coat of arms for the town, when the blazoning of argent, a dog gules, gave way to a “portcullis surmounted by an ermine passant.”
One has heard before now the phrase, “I like St. Malo in spite of its smell,” and, in spite of the truth of it,—and there is a very apparent justification of the word,—the old city is one of the most lovable in all Brittany.
The House of Duguay-Trouin at St. Malo is one of its chief romantic shrines before which strangers are wont to linger. It is simply an old wooden-fronted house, sombre and austere in its upper stories, but resplendent in white paint below. A shoe-shop and a coffee-room occupy the lower floor, and if one would conjure up the days of the past, when pirates bold discussed their venturesome plans in the very same room, let him enter and drink his after-dinner coffee by the pale light of a guttering candle in this old abode of romance. There is nothing of luxury about it; in fact, most worshippers are content to bow before the shrine from without; but to awaken the liveliest emotions, one must really enter and see it from the inside.