Abstract
The previous week's exploration of the library of new stars focused on a vignette by Hergé from the comic strip, The Mysterious Star (1942) : Snowy's indifference to the new star contrasts with Tintin's wonder, a sign of a desire for adventure and acceptance of fiction. We can also see the semiotic difference between the new star that Tintin sees and the multicolored stars that appear as a result of Snowy's dizziness after running into a lamppost. In a way, Snowy is a semiotic cripple, since he takes as real the mental stars resulting from a hallucination. But the stars the dog sees are star-signs, stars of convention, part of the comic-book alphabet : Snowy's hermeneutic power therefore functions somewhat chaotically, being sometimes incomplete, sometimes virtuoso. The investigation of the library of new stars continues through Marco Polo(The Devisement of the World, 1298), Luís de Camões (1525-1580) and his epic Les Lusiades (1572), the Spanish poet Bernardo de Balbuena (1562-1627) and his work Mexican Grandeur (1604), and also the Voyage of Saint Brendan, of which Ernest Renan provides an interesting summary in his Essais de morale et de critique (1868). In these texts, the appearance of new stars often corresponds to the disappearance of reference stars. The mention of new stars has a definite aesthetic interest, and can serve in retrospect as a test of historical veracity.
