The Story of the Nutcracker by E. T. A. Hoffmann

Author:E. T. A. Hoffmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780486110417
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2012-10-18T16:00:00+00:00

One night, just after midnight, one of the chief nurses woke suddenly from a deep sleep. Everything lay buried in slumber. Not a purr was to be heard. What were the feelings of this nurse when she saw, close beside her, a great, hideous mouse, standing on its hind legs, with its horrid head laid on the princess’s face. She sprang up with a scream of terror. Everybody awoke; but then Dame Mouserink (for she was the great big mouse in Pirlipat’s cradle) ran quickly away into the corner of the room. The king’s councillors dashed after her, but too late! She was off and away through a chink in the floor. The noise awoke Pirlipat, who cried terribly. “Heaven be thanked she is still alive!” shouted all the nurses; but what was their horror when they looked at Pirlipat, and saw what the beautiful, fine little thing had turned into. A great big swollen head (instead of the pretty little golden-haired one) at the top of a tiny, crumpled-up body, and green, wooden-looking eyes staring where the lovely blue pair had been, while her mouth had stretched across from the one ear to the other.

Of course the queen nearly died of weeping, and the walls of the king’s study all had to be padded, because he kept banging his head against them, crying:

“Oh, what a miserable king am I! Oh, what a miserable king am I!”

He might have seen then, that it would have been much better to eat his puddings with no fat in them at all, and let Dame Mouserink and her folk stay on under the hearthstone. But Pirlipat’s royal father did not think of that. What he did was to lay all the blame on the court clockmaker and inventor, Christian Elias Drosselmeier, of Nuremberg. So he ordered that Drosselmeier should within the space of four weeks restore Princess Pirlipat to her former, beautiful condition or else be put to death.

Drosselmeier was quite alarmed. He saw that the bigger she grew the more deformed she would be, and so he didn’t know what was to be done at all. He scratched his head and sank down beside the cradle—which he wasn’t allowed to go away from.

It was Wednesday of the fourth week when the king came in with eyes gleaming with anger, made threatening gestures with his sceptre, and said:

“Christian Elias Drosselmeier, restore the princess, or prepare to die!”

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