Stand on the esplanade in front of the main gate, facing the walls, and take in the whole thing. Two archways side by side, perfectly matched. It looks like one grand double gateway, planned as a single piece. It isn't. The first arch opened in seventeen hundred and nine, when the town burst out of its old medieval shell and needed a proper front door. Its twin was added a hundred and eighty-one years later, simply to cope with the traffic between the harbour and the streets. Two arches, nearly two centuries apart, dressed to look like one. Now look above them, at the two carved coats of arms. On the left is the town of Saint-Malo, the ermine walking above a portcullis that you just saw flying from the castle. On the right is the Duchy of Brittany, a field scattered with little ermine tails. Each arch even carries its own motto. One reads, roughly, “rather death than dishonour”. The other, “always faithful”. Faithful to what, a Malouin might ask you with a wink. Conspicuously absent is any symbol of the Kingdom or Republic of France. It is a stark visual statement that for centuries, Malouins declared allegiance to their own city-state first, Brittany second, and France only when convenient. On the town's older seals, by the way, it was not an ermine standing guard but a dog. Hold on to that, because a pack of very real dogs is coming later. Now I have to change the tone, because this gate also saw one of the darkest days in the town's history. In the last summer of the Second World War, American troops were closing in on Saint-Malo. The German commander decided that the men still living inside the walls were a danger to him, and he ordered every man between eighteen and sixty rounded up. They were marched through the streets in a column, and at the bottom of Rue Saint-Vincent, just inside this gate, they found the way out blocked. A German tank sat right here, beneath this arch, its gun turned on them, so that no one would think of running. The men were herded together in front of the Tour Quic-en-Groigne, the tower you have just seen. While they waited there, a bomb hit a café nearby and set it ablaze before their eyes. In the small hours, when the tide was finally low enough, they were marched down onto the sand and out to the fort on its island offshore. Three hundred and eighty civilians. Eighteen of them never came home. I will tell you what happened to them when we reach the sea and can see that fort for ourselves. Behind this gate, in the smart streets you are about to enter, merchants once built tall stone mansions with fortunes made across the ocean, some of it in silver dug from the mines of Peru and shipped home through this very port. That is the town we are here to explore, a town paid for by the sea. Now walk through, and follow the map to the house where a writer was born in a storm.