Tintin Forums

Hi everyone.

I was inspired by a map of Duckenburgh a German Barks-fan made in many years. He analysed every (!) panel in Barks' stories.

I thought this must be possible for Marlinspike as well, especially since Hergé was much more precise in his drawings than Barks. (Our Duckenburgh-cartographer was forced to include a lot of Money Bins and houses of Donald into his map, since the Donaldists say what Barks draw IS correct.)

So I want to open a discussion about this. Maybe there already is something similar deep in this forum. And for sure there are comparable works as this one from a fan page quoting old issues of the revue of Amis De Hergé. But here are things which cannot fit.

My first tries suggested that it will be hard to make a proper floor plan. Here are some aspects of the building:

1) The ground floor:
The Castafiore Emerald gives us some insights on the two halls/saloons on ground level. (I just have my German edition color-books, so the page numbers might not fit.)
The green hall is in the right wing (seen from the stairs outside, see p. 29), so the blue one - probably the (former) "Marine Hall". This fits with more detailed observations in The Emerald, when figures change from the two rooms to the entrance hall.

At least the blue hall has three windows on one side (compare the scenes with the TV-team (31ff) and when Tintin catches the pianist out (51ff), the piano helps here). Every exterior view of Marlinspike tells us that the blue hall has to fill the whole length of the wing then.

When Tintin climbs through one window on p. 51 and on the next panel we see another one on the opposite site, we know that the blue hall also fills the whole breadth!

So here comes the first paradox: The blue hall should have three windows also on it's third, the short side of the building. But there are no windows as we see on p. 52 (the first panel here where Tintin and the pianist are shown together), but the yellow couch. On the right side of the couch, there's a striped chair and no door to another room (which had to be very Small considering that all the three windows are in the blue hall). Neither on the left side is a door (see p. 39).

Here are three possibilities:
- The windows outside are just painted on the wall.
- There's a small secret room without any door to the blue hall and the first floor.
- There are also secret doors.

In my German edition the blue hall in The Emerald is once called "Marine Hall", though that has no blue walls in Red Rackham's Treasure, p. 62. In the huge panel there, you'll hardly find any windows, but there's a kind of niche behind the old Hadoque's fetish statue, which fits to the first window as in the Emerald, the next window in Rackham would be right of the panel.
But this panel shows another thing: The 2nd door to the left of the chimney. It has to lead to a room behind the entrance hall (see below).

It's even harder to say something about the green hall, which seems to serve more than a living room. There are less overviews and furniture which could give a mark as the piano does in the blue hall. The armchair which the injured captain sits in e.g. changes it's direction. But when Tintin delivers the wheel chair (p. 20), we locate the armchair (and the window) on the right side of the door to the entrance hall and so on the backside of then building. As we see on p. 29, the green hall has also a window to the front side, which suggests that this room also fills the whole breadth of this wing. The green hall has at least two windows on one side (p. 28).
The corner with the third window might be seen in The Calculus Affair (p. 11) when Haddock and Tintin eat breakfast. (This can be the end of the green room from the Emerald or a new room.) The window seems to be a door here, and again we have no windows on the buildings short side.

All this makes it hard to place other rooms, e.g. a kitchen.

When we look at the entrance hall (e.g. in The Emerald, p. 44)), we can see a door to a room behind the stairs – at least on the left side. This seems to be the only possibility for more rooms or connections to those on the ground floor.


2) The staircase and the upper floors

When Tintin escapes from the cellar in The Secret of the Unicorn he climbs a cellar-like spiral stair which leads him through a side-door to another Marlinspike-like staircase (p. 44). The ground floor doesn't suggest any other staircase than the main one in the buildings middle. (Or is this the reason for the mysterious secret passage behind the blue or green hall? Well, if, it had to be very small.)

The staircase as on p. 44 shows a way down behind the suit of armour. This tells us that we are at least on the 1st floor, the way down probably leading to the well-known entrance hall. This panel shows us so that the spiral stair to the cellar must lead through the ground floor behind the entrance hall on the right side. Corridors on the 1st floor must lead to the left of the staircase or maybe back (the direction in which the knight shows).

In this scene Tintin climbs stairs even higher to the 2nd floor and the Bird brothers' office. When we look at exterior views of the building, it starts to get complicated. Only in the middle, the staircase part the walls are high enough for a room as the office. Neither the office's windows (still on p. 44) fit with the ones in the front of the 2nd floor of the exterior building (which are placed "in" the roof). But we can imagine those high windows in the side of the middle part, 2nd floor.

This fits luckily with the panels which show us the perspective relations of the door, the landing and the stairs (p. 46, 47): The office isn't placed in one of the wings, but in the centre.
The only problem is how this "long" room fits in the breadth of the building. The stairs, the landing and the office have to be placed in a line here. Well, and the chimney would be placed differently from those on the ground floor.

When Tintin climbs from the 1st floor to the 2nd on p. 44, we see another stair. We don't know whether the 2nd floor is reached already on the landing with the next stairs leading to an even higher floor – or if there's a U-turn-stair between the 1st and the 2nd floor. This makes it hard to define in which direction the Bird brothers' office is showing.

Anyways a 3rd floor is possible and even necessary as exterior views show. The garret from The Emerald might be placed there.

Another scene showing the upper floors is found in The Seven Crystal Balls (p. 50f.). When Tintin arrives, Nestor leads him up to at least the 1st floor, where Haddock is sitting in a room. When Haddock leaves the room, he's running straight ahead up the stairs. This suggests that the room he sat in is showing to the building's backside, the chimney fits with the one in the office. (Again, how wide is the building? Just 3 windows?)
When he got up to the 2nd floor (straight stair or U-turn?) he vanishes through a door to the right (straight ahead should the Bird brothers' old office be). Then he comes out again in his Captain's outfit, suggesting that this is his own room. Then he would live in the buildings roof-part with inclined walls. (The high window in his back doesn't fit with exterior views.)

There are more depictions of rooms on the upper floors (Calculus, p. 10f., and Picaros, p. 4f.) but without evidences to locate them.

Only the Castafiore's room (Emerald, p. 14f.) – rather the corridor – gives us a hint. The room is placed to the right of the corridor's end (somewhere, probably leads the corridor through the length of a wing). In the corridor is one window. If you compare these panels with the one on p. 11, there's maximum one window in Castafiore's room (behind the bed). As I said, maximum one. So either there aren't all three real windows in the short side of the 1st floor, or there are also rooms on the left side of the corridor (with the third window).

Castafiore's room has minimum one window to what probably is the long side of the building (opposite of the corridor). So each wing could have 2 to 6 rooms like that. A problem would be what the corridors on the 1st floor exactly look like, when they shall fit with the staircase as in The Unicorn.

Well, this is what I roughly can say about the architecture of Marlinspike Hall. There's more about the grounds and the area. But this has to wait for another time.

So, what do you think?

This is fantastic research - well done for such painstaking work!

I’ve always been stumped by the spiral staircase from the crypts, and how it works its way into the main part of the house; it’s made even more awkward by the apparent lack of servant’s quarters and kitchens, which really by rights should be under the house, in a basement which Marlinspike just doesn’t seem to have.

Cheverney has basement windows in the façade, needed not just for light, but so that the staff could see visitors and householders approaching the door and prepare for them; but no matter where the view is taken from, I don’t think they ever appear on any side of Marlinspike, so no wonder Nestor always looks flustered. Unless, in the inverse of the painted on windows theory above, they have been camouflaged to look like brick-work?

Ja, painstaking. We'll solve this, wont we?

Servant's quarters... basement. Do you make a difference between basement and crypts? Crypts is what I called "cellar", right?
Well, these crypts give us quite logical hints, and now it's evil that I can't put some drawings in here, but have to work with my dictionary-based English...

Unicorn, p. 38ff. The crypts are build up by columns and the cupolas in between. Now look at the first two panels showing us the ring in the ceiling. We see two different kinds of wall. One with huge grey stone-bricks and one with red bricks. In the first of these two panels it's two cupolas from the grey wall to the ring-cupola. In the second it's just one. We can say that the two panels are seen from opposite angels, and that this red wall must be 4 cupolas long.

When we see the hall behind the red wall for the first time, we see that it is much longer (p.41). At least five cupolas to the left (instead of two). To the right, there's just one more cupola (p.44, when Tintin leaves the storage) as in the hall where Tintin was before. So the storage is (minimum) 7 cupolas long and two wide.

When the Bird brothers arrive at the crypts, it seems that the door with the inter phone is quite opposite the red wall. This suggests that three walls of that hall are of stone and one of bricks.
The two halls are probably not parts of a big one, just pared by the (younger) brick-wall.

Draw it. We don't know how wide the two halls are (the storage at least two cupolas, the prison at least three), so don't care. Just the prison with it's 4 cupolas, the hole in the 2nd and the longer storage behind.
Then the door to the stairs. It should be quite opposite the hole (the black Bird showing on p. 41), probably right from it. (The the direction Bird runs from the door to the hole, probably on the shortest way. If you draw the same picture as I did, he seems to be running out of the wall which should be directly in the right side of the panel. Anyways, maybe the prison-hall isn't a perfect rectangle.)

When Tintin leaves the crypts (p. 44) we see that the spiral stair is located directly right to the door. And here it getting troubled.
Make another combined sketch of the ground and 1st floor. If we place the spiral staircase there as I suggested (and as the panel with the knight on p. 44 does!) directly behind the main staircase on it's right side... this sketch doesn't fit with the one we draw of the crypts.

So I see two possibilities:
Marlinspike has a totally different ground plan under ground level than above. This is fine. It's possible and gives us a lot of space under ground level for servant's quarters, the kitchen and so on.
Not really logic is that a servant has to go from the cellar/basement/crypts' level up through the spiral stair to the 1st floor and down to the ground floor, e.g. the green hall of The Emerald. If we accept that the ground floor plan as reconstructed doesn't give us space for more staircases.

If we want to put the crypts' floor into the ground plan of the Marlinspike building, the spiral staircase can not be where I suggested it to be.
That's not impossible. We just see Tintin climbing the spiral and then appearing through that door on the landing of the 1st floor. Nobody says that the spiral is directly behind that door.

But if I am right and the blue and green hall take both the whole wings of the ground floor, there's no space for the spiral there.

So there's still something in the breadth of the building.
Even if we can not say in which direction the Bird brothers' office is showing, the room where Haddock meets Tintin late in the Crystal Balls (p. 50) has to show to the backyard.
So behind the main staircase, there has to be enough space for the landing and another room.
Well, it's not possible to combine that with the breadth of the Marine Hall as we can measure it in the Emerald, when Tintin waits for the pianist (and we see windows on two opposite sides, p. 51). That breadth would fit with the Marine hall on the great panel on the last page of Rackham.

I wrote about the two doors there. The chimney in the middle and the door to the right could make the length of the entrance hall (if we want to accept that), leaving the left door's length to the room behind the entrance hall. Not enough space for the room on the 1st floor in the Crystal Balls.

So either we have to accept, that the dimensions of Hergés drawings aren't correct. We can assume that the halls on the ground floor are much wider as they seem, so that there is space for rooms on the upper floors both on the front- and on the backside.
Or we can assume fake windows on the back walls of the halls (we know the ones in the front are real). This gives us more space for unknown rooms on the ground floor, too.

I was trying to make a difference between the basement, which although we never see it, I suggest should be located directly beneath the main ground floor, in the area which has low-set windows in Cheverney (which in a large country house usually accommodated the kitchen, butler’s pantry and such things as laundry rooms and storage of food), and a deeper, windowless, vaulted area - which I think of as a crypt such as often found beneath churches and castles.

The vaulted area could just be a wine cellar, but to me the presence of the religious statues suggests that at one time it was intended as a private chapel, or even a mausoleum for family burials.

It could also be that the house has been built on the site of a former church or convent, perhaps, and that what we see is the crypt of the former building, which could explain why it’s ground plan is not the same as the house above.

However, although I have to assume an unseen intermediate floor for the kitchen etc., I don’t feel that it can be the same as the crypt area, which to me at least appears deeper, older and not n the same period as the main house.

If the stories really did take place in Marlinshire in England, I would think that the Reformation probably explained the situation: Henry VIII disolved a church or religious community, and turned the land over to the aristocracy; however Belgium is an area about the history of which I know little. Did something similar happen in Europe at the time of the Reformation?

Impressing work, Tim...and Struppi :-)

Personally, I've never bothered to make these comparisons, but I've always had the feeling that the Marlinspike/Moulinsart depicted in Unicorn is very different from the one in Castafiore. And if we follow the internal timeline, it's worth noting that the castle indeed was repaired (and maybe substantially rebuilt?) after the explosions that occurred in Black Gold - unseen except for the picture on p.62 - when Calculus was analyzing the N.14-pills. Similar experiments may also explain why Calculus later (by the time of The Calculus Affair) had a separate laboratory elsewhere on the grounds, a building which originally must have belonged to servants of some kind, maybe gardiners.

And about windows in the basement, there actually seem to be a couple in Unicorn (p. 48). And the kitchen appears in Red Sea Sharks (p.29).

Jock, as far as I know there never was a reformation in the area that today is Belgium. For a long time, most of it was part of the Spanish empire (as the Spanish Netherlands), and then it was gradually absorbed by France. Sir Francis Haddock (chevalier Francois de Hadoque) actually served under the French king Louis XIV, so by then (around the year 1700) the area where Moulinsart is built, were a part of France.
The kingdom of Belgium gained indepedence in 1830.

This is an interesting note. It doesn't explain everything. We don't need the comparison Unicorn-Castafiore, to see the problems appearing just in Unicorn: The office on minimum 2nd floor while the exterior shape doesn't show much space there. And the main staircase and the spiral one indicating that the underground level doesn't fit with the level above. But it is possible to assume a 2nd staircase in Unicorn which makes the underground part fitting to the building's ground plan and doesn't exist in Castafiore.

But one detail is pretty, pretty well explained be the photo of the damaged castle: The french window in Calculus, p.11, which is a normal one in Unicorn, p. 48. And exactly there is a big hole in the wall on the photo in Black Gold!
(Unfortunately the last panel of calculus shows a normal window there again. And Calculus leaves just after we saw the intact french window, so his work can not have destroyed it. Perhaps Jolyon Wagg's family destroyed it...)

Anyways. There are windows on basement level as Mikael points out. (Also they are not to be seen any more on that last panel in Calculus.) When we see a big part of the exterior walls a few pages after in Unicorn there are no more basement windows. And this makes it still possible that the vaulted underground floor is on the same level as a normal basement-like floor with two windows at the date of Unicorn. (As I wrote on facebook, Jock, evidences in Cheverny must not be evidences for Marlinspike for my approach, where just the drawings count.)

Of course it's also possible with a basement level and an even deeper crypt-level. That would make Marlinspike a quite impressive building of 5-6 floors: crypt, basement, ground floor, 1st floor, 2nd floor, garret.

Although Belgium never was touched by the reformation, it sounds pretty possible, that Marlinspike was built on a ruin of an old chapel which really could explain the vaulted cellar, the figure of John and the two different ground plans.

But then... the kitchen! Wonderful! Of course there are much more panels to consider than I mentioned so far. But this one I didn't have in mind. But anyways, when I say there has to be space for a landing and another room on the first floor (late in Crystal Balls), there has to be space for a corridor and this kitchen behind the entrance hall on the ground floor.
This is especially important for me since the kitchen was the mostly missed room. (Earlier) Servant's rooms or "actual" the rooms of Tintin and the others can be assumed in the basement, on 1st floor or in the little building which later rooms the laboratory.

The Castafiore Emerald (& some other stories as well) shows the 1st floor level to be at about shoulder height, so a kitchen & servents could almost be a "lower ground floor" above a fully underground cellar.

The Red Sea Sharks show the Emir's staff camping in the State Rooms which seem to be on the 1st floor.

Well, I don't know whether this is my English's fault, but the level at shoulder height I always called "ground level" here, while I used 1st floor for the level above that.
Anyway there could be a floor under foot level, be it a "basement" or "lower ground floor".

The camp in Red Sea Sharks seems to be located on "my" ground floor. (So we agree here, Richard?) In my German edition, Nestor calls that room "Großer Salon". I'd say, nothing contradicts to see this room as "my" green hall from the Castafiore.

But the next pages (7ff.) are interesting. There's a bath with a door to a room or corridor. There's a window and an armchair.
Next Tintin and Haddock have a breakfast in a pink room, which doesn't match any other known rooms. Then Tintin meets the Thom(p)sons in a green room, although the green hall seems to be used by the Emir's people in that adventure.

I think that you are making a quite reasonable assumption that there had to be work done on the house following the somewhat catastrophic effect that the Professor's experiments had on the place over the years; I'm just not certain that they would have been extensive enough to encompass all the apparent contradictions - and some, such as the placement of the Bird Brother's office pre-date the explosive phase, I'm afraid.


Of course! The windows are seen (at the rear of the house?), as Tintin escapes the manor - I knew I'd seen them. That would allow for the kitchen/ servant's quarters to occupy the lower-ground floor, beneath the main ground floor, and have access to daylight. As Richard1631978 says, the height outside as characters walk past the lower portion of the wall appears to back this up. The windowless crypt is thus at a lower level.

Thanks for the update about the Reformation in the area, Mikael.

Thinking about this whole idea of seeing if the data of the house is consistent brings two further things to mind.

First - I wonder why Hergé never planned it out, or had a model built? He did it for all sorts of inconsequential things - boats, the statue in Flight 714, the moon rocket; he even had topographical maps as part of the detail for the chase in Calculus Affair. Surely life would have been easier for him if he'd done the same for the Hall?

Secondly, I am reminded of the project in Glasgow to build a previously unmade house, from illustrations by celebrated architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
He'd entered a competition to design "A House for an Art Lover" (sadly he sent his entry too late to win, but he was still given a special prize), and, rather than submit plans, he'd painted a series of water colours of various views.

The house wasn't built at the time, but the design was revived in the Eighties with a view to building it, and plans were drawn up. Only then was a major flaw noticed - in order to make his sketches more harmonious, the view drawn from the entrance hall looking into the dining room had a different number of doors to the view of the hall looking out from the dining room...

It's a bit confusing that in America the 1st floor is at ground level, while in the UK it's the ground floor. In Canada they compromise & have a ground floor followed by a 2nd floor.