Furienna:
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.
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.
Furienna:
But then again, he had a gypsy girl "steal" Irma's golden scissors
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.
Furienna:
... that gypsy guy be hateful towards non-gypsies, so it wasn't all black and white either.
mct16:
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.
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.