The Heist of the Century... in Syldavia!

A tailing, a jump from a plane with no chance to open a parachute, an ambush, a car crash, and… plenty of trouble before reaching, at the end of the chase, the great hall of Kropow. Inside lies the royal sceptre, and with it, the entire fate of a kingdom hanging on a ceremonial object. Three days to prevent the fall of a throne, the countdown has begun. Hurry, Tintin, hurry!

Alas, it’s already gone.

In King Ottokar’s Sceptre, Hergé stages a genuine coup d’État: precise, sharp, almost elegant. Everything unfolds with the rigor of a political heist that looks very much like an affair of state. But who has stolen Syldavia’s most precious possession?

At first, the case looks like a locked-room mystery. A guarded chamber in the Square Tower, barred windows, sentries at every door, not a sign of forced entry. Yet the sceptre has vanished. In Kropow, panic spreads: the royal household is in turmoil, and the culprits have disappeared. There’s no whimsical experiment by Professor Calculus gone wrong here, he doesn’t even exist yet. Tintin, for his part, keeps pulling the thread. The affair goes well beyond a neatly executed theft: without the sceptre, King Muskar XII loses all claim to his crown. In three days, Syldavia could collapse.

Disaster! The famous detectives Thomson and Thompson are on the case, but that doesn’t stop Tintin from thinking. Perhaps he recalls, on the plane that brought him there, the brochure with its miniature of the Battle of Zileheroum and the warning for the sceptre: « Woe to the king who loses thee… » A storied land, this Syldavia. But hold on a second, royal jewels, can they really be stolen?

History, this time real, has already answered. In 1671, Colonel Thomas Blood entered the Tower of London disguised as a clergyman and tried to steal the Crown Jewels. He attacked the keeper, seized the crown, the orb and the sceptre, and was caught while fleeing the Tower. Two centuries later, in 1907, the Irish Crown Jewels disappeared from Dublin Castle and were never seen again. Even the most closely guarded symbols can fall to a clever stratagem.

The plan is disarmingly simple. The false scholar, Alfred Halambique, enters the castle under the identity of his twin brother, a respected sigillography expert. Nothing could seem more legitimate. The trap closes when a photographer, an accomplice, activates his doctored camera: a spring mechanism launches the sceptre out the window, past the bars, into the arms of a man waiting outside. No breaking, no noise. The perfect theft.

Everything fits the textbook heist: an assumed identity to pass security, a gadget hidden in plain sight, an instant transfer, a getaway toward the Bordurian border. The political thriller takes over from the detective story. The sceptre is no longer an ornament, it’s a constitutional weapon. Lost, it dissolves authority. Recovered, it restores continuity. Between the two, three days of suspense ticking like clockwork.

Hergé isn’t just drawing an adventure; he’s showing a system of power. Syldavia, with its uniforms, ceremonies, and symbolic laws, stands as a miniature Europe of 1938: a kingdom under threat from an expansionist neighbor, extremist factions at work, officers compromised. The fiction is anything but innocent, it distills the atmosphere of its time into the precision of a plot. And this Müsstler, the head of the Iron Guard party and ally of Borduria, is up to no good. His name leaves no doubt.

Fortunately, the old saying « Ill-gotten gains never prosper » proves true once again. The sceptre is brought back not by Tintin, but by good old Snowy. Tintin returns it to the king, the ceremony takes place, and he’s made Knight of the Order of the Golden Pelican. Order is restored, barely. The Syldavian state has wavered for a moment, shaken by a fleeting yet resounding act of larceny. But between us, shouldn’t our canine hero be rewarded too? Perhaps not with a medal, but at least with a fine bone to chew. One can never say it enough: thank you, Snowy!