Tintin Forums

At the risk of having the PC Squad down on me like a ton of bricks, I'm wondering if Tintin is being a bit too naive when he takes it for granted that the gypsies were not responsible for the theft of the emerald. He did not even mention their presence in the area to the Thompsons and was quick to dismiss all suggestions that they might be guilty.

The Thompsons may be jumping the gun when they point-blank accuse the gypsies - as they do the other members of the household - but at the very least they should be questioned as potential witnesses.

Surely gypsies or similar wandering travellers are just like any other class of people: some are honest and some are not.

Mike is particular is such as unpleasant piece of work - like snorting with contempt at being allowed to stay in a wood clearing rather than a rubbish dump and throwing stones at Tintin - that I would not put it past him for being a thief.

"Surely gypsies or similar wandering travellers are just like any other class of people: some are honest and some are not."

Of course. It is also true that while it is dangerous to generalise about any class of people, there are some groups who are more likely to be involved in some forms of criminal activity than others. And you will meet people who will tell you that on the basis of their experience, those who travel are more likely than the average person to take a relaxed view of the law of the land.

So, on the face of it, Tintin was being naive. But then again, perhaps he knew something that I don't know!

The characterisation of the gypsies, and the response to them, in The Castafiore Emerald, is interesting. Most characters are deeply suspicious of them, but Tintin and the Captain are very pro-gypsy, which, I suppose makes the book rather PC by the standards of its day.

The curious thing is that, in one of only a couple of Tintin books without a villain, Hergé chose to make the only unpleasant character in his story a gypsy.

I agree, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why Tintin (or the Captain) are so convinced of the gypsy’s innocence in the theft. Perhaps it was down to trust and goodwill expected because Haddock generously allowed them to camp in the grounds.

However, he doesn’t entirely rule them out of the suspicious events that occur pre-‘theft’ of the jewel. After he saw the footprints outside Castafiore’s window he considered the different possibilities of who it might have been; the strangers he saw sneaking around the grounds (who we later learn are paparazzi), or the gypsies. He even checked footprints down by the stream to see if it might have been one of the gypsies, but didn’t find any evidence. When he later discovered that it was Wagner’s footprints, but he didn’t approach him about it at that point. It shows that Tintin was building a case and wasn’t going to jump to conclusions. Tintin doesn’t have pre-conceptions about people, unlike the police, the Thompsons, and Nestor, and so he didn’t believe the gypsies were guilty of something simply because they were gypsies.

My personal feeling (no evidence for this) is that the naivety on Tintin’s part might have stemmed from Hergé. At that time Hergé probably still felt his reputation somewhat tarnished from books like “Congo”, and his continuing to work for the Nazi-controlled Le Soir newspaper, so he was trying to make amends. He’d tried to do it, rather clumsily, in the book before The Red Sea Sharks where Tintin rescues the Africans on board the Ramona. In The Castafiore Emerald it’s the gypsies who need ‘rescuing’, although it’s much more subtly done. Even if there was a sense of repairing past mistakes and it sometimes makes the characters seem a little naïve, the underlying principles are still, like most of the books, about sticking up for the underdog, kindness to others, and seeing that justice is done.

I think it makes perfect sense for Tintin and Haddock to be friends with the gypsies and not to assume that they were thieves. I believe that most of the bad reputation that gypsies have is because they travel a lot, and so are usually "outsiders." Tintin and Haddock have also spent a lot of their lives traveling and being outsiders, so they know what it's like to be treated with suspicion for no reason.

I agree that while it might not have been fair to blame the gypsies just because they were gypsies, how Tintin and Captain Haddock didn't seem to suspect them at all was weird as well. Harrock n Roll might have a point, that Hergé was desperate to come across as politically correct at this point, and he went too far in the other direction instead. But then again, he had a gypsy girl "steal" Irma's golden scissors and that gypsy guy be hateful towards non-gypsies, so it wasn't all black and white either.

It's not that Tintin thinks it's impossible for any of the gypsies to be the thief. He goes down to the river to check any footprints in the mud. It's just that - unlike the Thom[p]sons and the local police - he doesn't assume they're more likely to be thieves then any non-gypsies in the area, and having actually met them, his personal intuition is that they don't seem like thieves.


No he doesn't. It becomes clear that the girl did indeed simply find them in the woods (as she said) where they'd been dropped by the magpie.



I think it's good the way Hergé makes Mike proud and difficult, rather than smiling and grateful. Firstly, it's more realistic and makes the book less two-dimensional and preachy. Secondly, it makes the point that just because someone is surly and difficult it doesn't mean you should pin a crime on them. And thirdly, I don't actually think Mike is an "unpleasant piece of work" or can be much blamed for a bit of surliness and stone-throwing.

As a gypsy living in the early 1960s, he'd easily be able to remember the years of World War 2, when large numbers of his extended family across Europe would almost certainly have been rounded up to be gassed to death in concentration camps. At the time this book is set, and right up to virtually the present day, many supposedly civilised European countries (such as Czechoslovakia and Switzerland to name a couple) have had official policies of compulsorily sterilising gypsy women or of systematically taking gypsy children away from their families. Plus there's all the day-to-day prejudice shown in this book: being made to camp in rubbish tips, being wrongfully arrested without evidence, etc. Even Haddock, until he's put straight by Mike, is so unwaware of how badly his own country's authorities treat gypsies that he believes they'd camp on an rubbish tip by choice and lectures them rather patronisingly about it not being healthy.

And, in retrospect, Mike turns out to have been quite right to be uneasy about taking up Haddock's offer to camp in the meadow. It leads to them being arrested for something they had nothing to do with, and if Tintin hadn't happened to get lucky with his brainwave, and in finding the right magpie's nest (surely quite a long shot!), the gypsy adults would have been kept in custody, and probably had a false confession beaten out of them by the police, whilst their children would probably have been taken into care (in the little girl's case maybe being banged up in an institution for delinquent girls, what with her being a "scissor thief"!)

I think we can assume the police don't bother to give any sort of official apology to the gypsies. Indeed the Thom[p]sons seem pretty annoyed with the gypies for not being the thieves.

So, all things considered, whilst it would be nice if Mike was able to rise above a lifetime of experiencing prejudice by remaining undamaged by it, I think if I'd been through the sort of life he must have been through, I might be prone to a bit of surliness and stone-throwing too!

And in other scenes, Hergé does show that when not confronting non-gypsy strangers, such as when he's talking to his niece or playing the guitar, Mike is kind and soulful.

I'd also like to point out, in Mike's defense, that he didn't try to hit Tintin with the rock. He merely splashed water on him.

I think Tintin does not suspect the Gypsies simply for the reason that it was very unlikely they would have been able to get into Marlinspike without being noticed. There was no sign someone climb the wine by the windows, and they probably would have heard the door being opened and closed.

Yeah, that would probably be it.


My bad! I thought she had found the scissors where Irma had left them, without knowing to whom they belonged. But my last reading of this album (which was the first one in many years) wasn't a thorough one, so I missed that detail about the magpie stealing them before the girl found them, which totally makes sense.


I agree that Mike is the way he is because he has encountered, or at least heard of, how badly gypsies could be treated, so he becomes suspicious towards "gadjos", even when they really just want to help them, like Tintin and Captain Haddock. And I too find it a really good touch of Hergé to invent this character.