4 rue Vauborel is the tall, many-storied LeBlanc house in Saint-Malo where Marie-Laure LeBlanc and Etienne LeBlanc live amid accumulated family objects, old machinery, and the sounds of the harbor. Its cramped vertical rooms make the house at once a home, a storehouse of memory, and a place where radio equipment can be concealed. During the occupation and bombardment, that private architecture becomes consequential: the attic offers a means of transmitting, while the house’s survival makes it a destination for Reinhold von Rumpel.

A House Built Upward

The house’s floors hold sharply different worlds. Madame Manec’s first floor is clean and navigable, with visitors coming through the kitchen; the dining room, foyer, antique dishes, and her small bedroom establish a working domestic center. Eleven winding steps lead to a second floor marked by faded grandeur, including old sewing and maid’s rooms. The landing also preserves a family anecdote: Etienne LeBlanc’s great-aunt’s coffin once flipped over there, sending her down the stairs while she appeared entirely unaffected.

Above, order gives way to an accumulation of tools and remnants. The third floor contains jars, metal disks, rusty jigsaws, possible electrical components, and engineering manuals piled around a toilet. On the fourth, baskets of machine parts, boxes of screws, and antique dollhouses made by Marie-Laure’s great-grandfather crowd the rooms and corridors. Etienne’s study occupies the entire fifth floor, sometimes quiet, sometimes filled with voices, music, or static. The sixth floor contains her grandfather’s tidy bedroom and the small room where Marie-Laure sleeps with her father. In the near-constant wind, groaning walls and banging shutters make the overloaded, tightly wound house seem to embody Etienne’s apprehensive isolation, even as its clutter holds unexpected wonders.

The Attic and Its Hidden Machinery

Seven rungs lead Marie-Laure into the attic, where cables snake between boxes and a chimney stands before a table crowded with tubes, coils, switches, meters, and at least one gramophone. Etienne places a headset over her ears and starts the machine: a simple piano melody sounds inside the headphones, followed by a staticky recorded voice describing the ancient plant origins of coal. The attic’s equipment belongs to a history of shared work between Etienne and his brother Henri LeBlanc. As boys, they had planned to make recordings for children; Henri supplied the voice, Etienne wrote science scripts, and Marie-Laure’s father, Daniel LeBlanc, had come to listen.

The attic’s machinery later acquires a more dangerous use. When an order requires residents to surrender their radio receivers to 27 rue de Chartres by the following noon, under threat of arrest as saboteurs, Marie-Laure anxiously asks after the equipment hidden in her grandfather’s room. Etienne recognizes that the transmitter could reach England. In darkness, he and Marie-Laure use an automobile jack and folded rags to lift and shift a massive wardrobe until it blocks the small door leading to the attic. Their concealment depends on the house’s physical complexity: a hidden room, a heavy piece of furniture, and the effort of moving it inch by inch.

Later, with the transmitter on the table beside the chimney and twin marine batteries beneath it, Marie-Laure climbs to the piano bench and raises the antenna using a lever installed in the chimney. She hopes someone might hear her: a fire brigade, the Resistance, the Americans, German forces in their underground forts, or Etienne himself. The transmission is an attempt to reach beyond the house, not a confirmed reply. The attic’s concealed apparatus thus makes the home a potential link across the besieged city even as its operation risks revealing its location.

Occupation, Ruin, and the Search

The house is also defined by those forced away from it. Daniel LeBlanc is seized outside Vitré while traveling toward Paris. French and then German interrogators question him about his notebook, architectural measurements, tool case, and seven skeleton keys; later, the German authorities continue questioning him and deny him access to paper, linens, and a telephone. His imagined return to ordinary family life sharpens the distance between the house and the places where he is held.

During the destruction of Saint-Malo, Reinhold von Rumpel searches from a position above the city. When smoke briefly parts, he identifies the upper section of a tall house by its broad chimney, two visible windows, and damaged shutters: 4 rue Vauborel. Later, walking through streets strewn with slate and burned paper, he finds the house nearly unscathed. Eleven windows mark its facade; most have lost their glass, but four of its six flower boxes remain. A mandated list on the front door names Etienne LeBlanc, aged sixty-three, and Marie-Laure LeBlanc, aged sixteen. Von Rumpel is looking for the Sea of Flames, and the survival of the house directs his search toward the model he believes the locksmith would have repeated.

Domestic Refuge and Wartime Exposure

The address gathers together the house’s contrasts: the meticulous grandfather’s bedroom and the attic’s improvised machinery; family heirlooms and electrical components; shelter and exposure. Its floors preserve ordinary household life, from kitchen visitors to the rooms where Marie-Laure sleeps, but occupation turns radio possession into a punishable matter and makes concealment necessary. The house’s chimney, wardrobe, attic door, and front-door list are not incidental details: each shapes what can be hidden, transmitted, or discovered.

As Saint-Malo’s streets come under siege, the neighborhood remains momentarily quiet around rue Vauborel even while evacuation orders detain men aged sixteen to sixty and direct them to assemble at the château tower before being marched to Fort National at low tide. Against that expanding coercion, the house offers no uncomplicated safety. It is a shelter that can be targeted, a private world that can be penetrated, and a platform from which Marie-Laure tries to send hope outward. Its persistence amid the ruined city gives the address its particular narrative force: survival preserves both a refuge and the secrets that make the refuge dangerous.