George Prosper Remi, aka Hergé, was born a hundred years ago today. Creator of Tintin, his works have been read all over the world.

Hergé

His place of birth was Etterbeek. La Farandole, my little girl’s primary school, for many years housed the Hergé library (donated by the man himself) until it moved to brand-new premises on la Chasse.

The Belgian press has naturally gone Tin-tin for the week. Le Soir opened the lid on the official biography by Tintinologist, Philippe Goddin, due to appear in October. Wonder why it wasn’t published this week. Perhaps he was checking his facts as he unveils "Remi’s final secrets". These include proof that he was neither a misogynist nor a collaborator, and that it may have been AIDS that finished him off.

Women make very few appearances in his comic books and those that do are mere caricatures with little to do or say. He reveals that Remi’s last unfinished work l’Alph Art was chock-full of "interesting female characters" and that "in reality he was a passionate man, as prone to temptations of the flesh" as the rest of us. He was married twice, causing in 1957 la scandale with his affair with colourist Fanny Vlamynck, whom he didn’t get round to marrying until 1977. It was to Fanny that he handed in March 1983 the unfinished script and drawings for l’Alph Art.

As for collaboration, he worked in Le Soir volé during the occupation, published under Nazi control by his pre-war friend Raymond Debecker. He has been criticised for producing a happy Tintin in such a dark world. He could have argued that most people under occupation get on with a daily life. Not everyone has it in them to pick up a gun and fight the bad guys, not everyone is Tintin. However, the evidence is fairly damning against him. The first edition of L'Étoile Mystérieuse contained only countries who were part of the Axis powers or neutral, bore a distinctly anti American line and had a Jewish bad guy, Blumenstein, later renamed Bohlwinkel. A drawing with Jewish merchants celebrating how much they would make from a world torn apart was removed from the album.

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