Tintin Forums

Yes, the name's Snowball in the English translation too.

I like your theory, jcjlf! She does look quite similar (even if, as mct says, Hergé may not have been intended her to be the same person).


Given her mysterious trip to Borduria though, and the fact that she seems to be stalking Tintin generally, I don't think she's necessarily settled into a law-abiding life since The Cigars of the Pharaoh. I agree with mct that maybe she's become spy. Or Is her new husband another criminal, with whom she bumped off Mr Snowball? Maybe her new husband/lover is actually the Fakir (who, as someone pointed out recently in another thread escapes at the start of The Blue Lotus and is never reported as being recaptured) who's undergone drastic cosmetic surgery.


To make that interesting observation fit my bonkers theory, I'd suggest that the disguised Fakir is controlling her, and insists on her addressing him with vous.

To get back to what Hergé probably intended, though, maybe this use of vous was a deliberate satirical jibe at the cold, respectable formality of the bourgeois married couple he was portraying. Maybe they represented his fear of what he and his first wife, Germaine, were becoming!


That's very interesting. Possibly worth its own separate thread if we're going to unravel possible reasons for that.

Anyway, if Mrs Snowball is the red dress woman, she must age even better than Tintin does, as I think she actually looks younger in 1950s Europe than she does in 1930s India. Maybe she takes the same reverse-ageing pills as General Alcazar seems to take between his appearances in the books!

(Though of course the chronology of Cigars of the Pharaoh is quite odd anyway, what with Explorers on the Moon appearing in the sheikh's tent.)

Tintin's enemies have a habit of changing their names: Boris becomes Jorgen, Muller becomes Smith, Rastapopoulos becomes di Gorgonzola. Now you're suggesting the Fakir changed his nose, height and race!

I'd have hated being the surgeon who would had to have performed such an operation.

Of course there are more theories on this site than intentions from the artists in Tintin. Maybe they were a little lazy, maybe just giving a wink-of-the-eye to true followers. But let's go on:

1) The fakir never showed up again. Hergé could not use him anywhere, so he was transformed into a similar villain who lived in the Naja Valley.

2) Jock123 almost convinced me about the spying couple, saying:
"I think the husband of your couple may also be looking warily over Haddock’s shoulder in frame 3 on the same page." Indeed it look if he is eavesdropping.
But why, after failing in Borduria, they just spend their evenings in B-Western movies (Red Sea Sharks, p.1)? No more duties? Not interested anymore in Tintin and Haddock? Not willing to work for Rastapopoulos?

Ah, but are they simply spending an innocent evening at the cinema? Perhaps they shadowed Tintin and Haddock to the cinema, as part of their general duties of keeping them under surveillance. Or maybe they were lurking in the cinema ready to in intercept and follow General Alcazar.