Hi, rodney. For discussion of the lay of the land around Marlinspike, you might like to read through
this thread, in which we got to the bottom of the location of the real life model for Moulinsart/ Marlinspike,
the hamlet of Sart-Moulin, near the town of Braine-l'Alleud just to the south of Brussels.
Given that the general layout of the station and the surrounding countryside is shown to be much like
the real-life counterpart, if we then assume that Moulinsart is the same, there isn’t
actually a village there; it’s really nothing more than a few buildings, a cross-roads, level-crossing and the halt itself. The track is a (now dis-used) branch line from Braine-l’Alleud, and one assumes that those living locally would pop along to there to do the shopping.
It’s not too far to walk, either; Tintin is shown to alight at “Moulinsart l’Egliseâ€, which I speculate in the other thread might be
Sacré-Cœur à Braine-l'Alleud; this amongst other steeples would be seen from Moulinsart (although there are several, and it depends in which direction you would look), but it would be the
parish church for Sart-Moulin so it seems a good contender; to the question of the steeple being that of a Catholic church, the answer is almost certainly yes, and it’s nothing to do with Hergé’s faith - the Brabant is a predominantly Catholic region, and church steeples dot the countryside at very regular intervals. Anyone depicting the area would include at least one, I imagine!
As for the domestic arrangements, yes it does seem a little under-staffed; I’m on a train at the moment, so can’t check, but I’m sure that there’s a mention of a gardener (over and above the mistaken identification of Calculus as the gardener by the
Paris Flash reporters), but that is about it. I suppose they just put dust-sheets over the furniture in the unused rooms.
Not sure on what basis you are judging the size of the kitchen - I’m not certain we ever see it, do we? There is the
cut scene of Nestor reading, but that could be in his own quarters, or at least in a butler’s pantry (basically the office for his job).
Frustratingly Hergé was surprisingly cavalier about the layout of the house, so we end up with often incompatible renderings from book to book, and even scene to scene. Thus we sometimes see basement windows suggesting an expansive lower floor, which in large houses would be the kitchens (multiple kitchens were needed for different tasks, such as general cooking, baking, pâtisserie and puddings, etc.), plus laundries, work-rooms and sculleries.
However, these disappear, and are mostly not shown at all, so perhaps the Captain had them blocked off; you also have to allow for the fact that during construction of the house a large stone spiral stair-case was incorporated into the design, running from the vaults and cellars up to the ground floor, presumably passing through the basement/ kitchen level. It still leaves the question as to where Nestor does the cooking and washing up.
You might also want to look at:
Marlinspike: Can we map the Hall, the ground and village properly?