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.

As for the reason he quit this mortal coil, Goddin posits the notion that the vital blood transfusions he was receiving could have been contaminated with the as yet unrecognisable AIDS virus. This particular notion smacks of an attempt to get folks clicking on that Amazon logo and typing ‘Hergé’ and ‘Goddin‘.

BBC World interviewed a Tintinologist who is a grand total of only 6 years of age. She is a little girl who lives on Jersey and has all the books and more. She informed us that Professor Calculus was deaf and didn’t hear the terrible insults from Captain Haddock (she had a Tintin sixth birthday party and her father dressed up as the Captain .) When told by the interviewer that a Tintin film was going to be made, she replied haughtily, "I have them all!" - the animated features made in Canada. I think "Blistering barnacles!" was on the tip of her tongue. He was of course referring to the Spielberg-Jackson planned live action film. No doubt reams of paper and zillions of bytes will be used up in conjecture as to who will sport the quiffy curl.

A Tintin Museum is to open by 2009 in le jardin de la Source at Louvaine-la-Neuve. An entirely private enterprise, it will be in the shape of a rocket. As we climb up through the 1500 m² exhibition space, we are promised a very modern view of Tintin while still remaining faithful to the icon. Fanny Rodwell, keeper of Hergé’s works, said, "We want the power of his work to be as evident it would be for any contemporary artist." There will be plenty to look at and it will change often as "Hergé never sold his work."

Having promised to reveal "the final secrets", Goddin admits that there is something unfathomable about Tintin, that Hergé created a reflection of the real world that inexplicably works just well as in Calcutta as it does in the Etterbeek of Remi’s birth. One BBC commentator says that Tintin works all over the world because he is plain, that we can all project ourselves onto him and imagine that we, too, could enjoy such lurid adventures. Personally I think it travels well because Tintin travelled and we get to experience exotic places in his company. For a boy in the Punjab or a little girl in Kyoto, Brussels’ Grand Place is a strange and mysterious location. For me, too, sometimes. Those tourists can be scary and you never know, one of them may be concealing in that bag of frites an Amazonian blowpipe containing poisoned darts…

Paul Morris

Editor Expatica Belgium

May 22

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