Jewels of Castafiore

the Jewels of Castafiore is an album of cartoon of the series the Adventures of Tintin and Milou .

Synopsis

All goes for best to Moulinsart, except the Escalier whose walk is broken. A letter of the Castafiore announces its arrival. Pressed to leave the places as fast as possible, Haddock slips on broken walk and is made a distorsion, which forces it to remain and face the musical storm. Accompanied by its chambermaid Irma and by sound Pianist Igor Wagner, Bianca Castafiore settles with the castle. Arrival of professional singer, which fears permanently that its jewels are not stolen, puts all Moulinsart upside down…

Soon follows a horde of journalists among whom Jean-Wolf Of Shipping and Walters Rizotto, of the magazine Paris-Flash , which invent a project of Mariage between it and the captain following one of usual the Quiproquo S due to Tryphon Tournesol. Then the flight of a emerald out of price pertaining to the professional singer occurs. The Dupondt inquire and show in turn: Nestor, Irma, the Tziganes that Haddock invited in its pasture… Finally, after grinds adventures and false tracks, the emerald will be found by Tintin, almost by chance… in the Nid of a black and white. The emerald is lost again by Dupondt, then found at once by Milou which treats it “stone”. The direction is clear: the emerald is not that a pretext - to the Cinéma one would say a MacGuffin - to start the adventure.

Comment

This album, published in 1963, is certainly one of the most accomplished works of Hergé. Completely against the remainder of work, we discover there a situation intimist, centered on the banalities of the daily life, far from the great achievements (the challenge will be to obtain the intervention of the monumental mason) and bearing on the observation of the characters of the protagonists vis-a-vis small worries.

Here, the intrigues to be solved do not comprise any more the character of machinations requiring of the presence of large criminal political organizations, soldiers or. One is in the real-world where one has true wounds (and ankle sprains).

It acts like often denouncing prejudices and false beliefs (the gipsies all are of the robbers), to show how our direction of the observation can be taken at fault and lead to false deductions (does the sound of a piano prove the presence of the pianist?), that each one has a garden where it hides small secrecies and which nature (human or vegetable) is in constant interaction. In fact, the topic of the album relates to the human communication and the whole of its supports (which one uses with this intention a flower or an press article). One passes thus from the other with dimensions of the mirror, in the slides of the manufacture of a television program or an article of newspaper.

“We Defy appearances” is thus the lesson that we gives the author to it, as “let us keep the critical spirit”. Because even the media, used usually “to prove” facts, are capable of invention and thus of handling of our behavior. “Can one trust them after having seen their operating process or should not we be wary now as much of them?” we says Hergé. Moreover in a certain way, Hergé will ridicule its own universe there since contrary with use, the heroes do not go to the front of the problems; in fact the problems come to them and submerge them. They do not follow a precise track, but a multitude of tracks which do not lead to nothing.

Contrary to the other albums where Tintin travels in various countries, the history proceeds completely in the same place (the castle of Moulinsart, the same time (one short duration) and the same action (the intrigue relates to the only disappearance of an emerald) thus reconstituting the traditional rule of the tragedy.

It is in this album that the passage of anthology is in which the reader is plunged in subjective vision finding itself with the eyes larmoyant as the heroes following the observation of a fuzzy image (professor Tournesol tries to develop a television set color at one time or reigned yet only the cathode tubes in black and white).

Anecdotes

In this album appears the journalists Jean-Wolf Of Shipping and Walter Rizotto of Paris Flash that Hergé will make reappear in Tintin and Picaros in 1976 but also in the third and last version of the Black Island in 1965.
the collar that Bianca Castafiore makes fall on page 25 is a collar Tristan Bior …

With Tintin in Tibet, it is the only album which does not show a firearm.

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