INTERIORS (5)

BASEMENT 

On the basement, there were right under the kitchen, a dining room for guest’s servants and drivers, where it was served local cuisine and table wine according to the Michelin Guide.
There were also service rooms such as a boiler room, a laundry room, storage room and a dozen bedrooms reserved for hotel staff. They could use common showers and toilets, an improvement quite unusual for hotel staff at that time.

The basement is a place for memorabilia of Dinard’s history. Happy memories of the 1930’s, when hotel staff covered the walls of the corridors with many graffiti relating their working lives.

Graffiti made by the hotel staff in the basement,
between 1927 and 1939
(photo P Viger) 

More painful memories of the Occupation period : one can still see chalk inscriptions in German Gothic characters on many doors. The basement was transformed and used as a bomb shelter formed by filling the rotunda pillars and soil excavation. This shelter was divided into three silos, and was intended to secure hospitalized soldiers. In fact, the hotel was turned into a hospital in September 1939 by the French army and later used for the same purpose by the German Army. According to some testimonies and for practical reason, the operation room of the hospital, had been installed on the dance floor under the bar canopy which received daylight in case of power shortage during operations. The ceiling of the bar canopy was painted with a red cross to prevent it from being a bomb target.

Graffiti and inscriptions realized between 1939 and 1944 
 (photo P Viger) 

In this shelter, Mr. Doury, acting as mayor, installed in Aug. 8, 1944, the temporary city hall and a single secretary continued to hold without interruption, civil registry on a simple school notebook. It is also at this place that around 200 inhabitants of Dinard still present when the city was liberated, waited for the happy ending of the ordeal.