Javier Albisu |
Watermael-Boitsfort (Belgium) (EFE) Crystal”, published in 1948.
The villa is a bourgeois building measuring 425 square meters and a 1,000 m² wooded garden that the architect Alban Chambon built in 1905 on behalf of the family that founded the multinational chemical company Solvay. And it is for sale for 1,480,000 euros (1.62 million dollars).
The exterior of the house, which is located at number 6, Avenue Delleur in the commune of Watermael-Boitsfort, bordering Brussels, was accurately captured on pages 27 and 28 of the album with the cover in which Professor Tornasol he levitates on a table wrapped in a luminous spiral before the astonished gaze of Tintin, Captain Haddock and Professor Bergamotte, while Snowy the dog runs away in terror.
the shadow of the nazis
Hergé (1907-1983) lived at that time at number 17 of the same street, in a much more humble house, and one day, while walking with his collaborator Edgar P. Jacobs, who would later create the comic book series “Blake and Mortimer,” he thought the mansion could serve as the comic’s central setting.
They drew the building on the outside, but did not reproduce the interior to avoid misunderstandings with the Nazis, since they thought that the house was occupied by Gestapo officers.
“Hergé never entered (…). He started making comics in World War II, during the German occupation, and it was difficult for a cartoonist to make sketches, even dangerous because they could have taken him for a spy or a terrorist”, explains Maxime Blause, manager of the real estate company We Invest in charge of the sale.
The Nazis could also have confused him with a member of the Resistance conspiring against the occupation forces, despite the fact that the cartoonist, whose real name was Georges Remi, was not exactly critical of Nazism and that shadow still casts a shadow over his biography.
So, the creator invented the interior of the villa where Tintin investigates the disappearance of several archaeologists related to the discovery in Peru of the Inca tomb of Rascar Capac and victims of a spell cast by a sect called The Order of the Phoenix.
Real places and characters
The Belgian creator often nourished his imagination from real places, such as the Moulinsart Castle where Captain Haddock lives, inspired by the French castle of Cheverny or the house of Professor Topolino, recreated from a house in the Swiss town of Nyon.
He was also inspired by flesh and blood characters, such as Professor Hipólito Bergamotte himself, former classmate of the fictitious Professor Silvestre Tornasol, who Hergé created in the image and likeness of the Belgian Egyptologist Jean Capartm, chief curator of the Royal Museum of Art and History in Brussels. at the beginning of the last century.
In addition to the plaque at the entrance, the current owners of the house, a couple related to the institutions of the European Union who exchanged Brussels for Venice, keep another nod to the famous comic in the house: a sheet of the cover of “Tintin and the seven crystal balls” framed in the lobby.
And a little more. The rest is a pleasant manor house with no further reference to the connection to the Hergé universe, a circumstance that in any case does not raise the price of the property.
“The value is estimated on the square meters, on the value of the land and the construction, but not really on the added value of Tintin and Professor Bergamotte,” adds the seller, who points out that it may be attractive to a buyer with intention to inhabit the villa or for a “local or international investor”.