jcjlf:
it could be Snowball, as in the Dutch version.
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).
jcjlf:
I suppose that after a conviction and doing time in India, she divorced and remarried a much more law-abiding and more conventional husband.
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.
mct16:
the man addresses the woman with the formal "vous", which is the way you would normally address a stranger rather than someone to whom you are married.
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?!
mct16:
Tintin and Haddock do address each other as "vous" all the time
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.)