Saint-Malo’s “Time of the Ostriches”

Saint-Malo’s “Time of the Ostriches” names a climate of public silence and uncertain complicity under occupation: people try to endure restrictions by turning their attention to private routines, while the mechanisms of control remain visible all around them. The phrase does not describe a settled peace. It captures a community negotiating what can be said, what can be done, and how much responsibility belongs to those who look away.

A City Trained into Silence

In Saint-Malo, everyday conduct is hemmed in by rules both explicit and unwritten. Residents can be fined for locking their doors, keeping doves, or hoarding meat; meanwhile, social life contracts under prohibitions on eye contact, conversation in doorways, sunbathing, singing, and evening walks along the ramparts. The absence of a written rule does not make a practice safe. The restrictions are understood as real because the occupying power can enforce them.

The city’s subdued atmosphere is set against ordinary physical and domestic activity. Military boats move outside the walls; flax is gathered and shipped to be made into rope, cables, and parachute cord. Gulls drop shellfish onto roofs, and the resulting clatter startles Marie-Laure LeBlanc awake. Inside the house, she passes the hours in Etienne LeBlanc’s study, sorting his seashells by size, species, and morphology, then checking their order again. The careful arrangement gives her a task with clear boundaries while the public world grows harder to read.

Looking Away and Disagreeing

The name for this period emerges from a question about whether people are burying their heads in the sand, and whether the accusation applies to the occupiers or to the residents themselves. Madame Manec answers that perhaps everyone is doing so. The exchange leaves the metaphor unsettled: avoidance is not simply a fault assigned to one group, but a condition shared across a society in which speaking or acting may carry risks.

That uncertainty also surfaces in arguments over local authority. When the mayor announces a new tax, some of Madame Manec’s friends accuse him of selling the residents out and call for a forceful leader; others ask what he can realistically do. Their disagreement shows how occupation makes ordinary political judgment difficult. Residents may resent their own officials while recognizing that those officials operate within constraints imposed by a stronger power.

Rules, Communication, and Small Defiance

The occupation reaches into private homes through direct orders as well as social pressure. When Marie-Laure LeBlanc asks repeatedly, Daniel LeBlanc reads aloud a notice requiring residents to surrender all radio receivers at 27 rue de Chartres by noon the next day. It threatens arrest for anyone who fails to comply. Radio ownership is therefore not merely a private matter: the order makes possession itself a potential basis for punishment and restricts access to information.

Against that pressure, Madame Ruelle and Madame Guiboux undertake a small, practical act of resistance. At dusk, Madame Ruelle straps a stepladder to her husband’s car, drives the Route de Carentan with Madame Guiboux, and uses a ratchet set to rearrange road signs. They return to Number 4 rue Vauborel laughing. The episode does not undo the restrictions, but it shows that the apparent quiet of the “Time of the Ostriches” is not universal obedience. Resistance can take the form of covert interference with the systems that direct movement.

From Managed Quiet to Direct Coercion

The wider wartime narrative places this atmosphere of constrained daily life beside arrests and interrogations. Daniel LeBlanc is seized outside Vitré while travelling toward Paris. French and then German interrogators question him about his notebook, architectural measurements, tools, and seven skeleton keys; he is denied access to paper, linens, and a telephone. His detention is not an event in the streets of Saint-Malo, but it shows how suspicion and state power can reach into apparently ordinary work and possessions.

Later, the danger becomes more openly collective. Residents are told that every man between sixteen and sixty must assemble at the château tower and then be marched to Fort National at low tide. The order marks a sharp contrast with the earlier pattern of tacit restrictions: the city’s inhabitants are no longer merely expected to regulate their public behavior but are directly compelled to gather. Against that escalation, the ostrich metaphor acquires its force. It describes a period when people try to live within a narrowing field of choices, even as the consequences of occupation make continued avoidance increasingly difficult.