At that instant, the queen entered. The six ordinary ladies-in-waiting and the two intimate ones threw themselves facedown on the floor, while the six legation councilors (cats) looked around for an open window so that they might gain the rooftops.
The poor mother’s despair was dreadful. She fainted, and they carried her into the royal chamber.
But it was the miserable father whose torment was seen above all—dreary and profound as it was. They had to padlock his casement windows to keep him from leaping out. They padded his apartment to prevent him from smashing against the walls. Needless to say, they removed his sword, and they didn’t overlook any knife or fork lying around—or any other pointed or cutting implement. This was all the easier, given that he ate nothing during the first two or three days. Instead, he continued reiterating nonstop: “Oh! What a monarch I am! Oh, destiny! How cruel you are!”
Perhaps, instead of accusing destiny, the king should have figured that, like all men, he was the artisan of his own suffering. He might have eaten his blood pudding with a bit less bacon than usual. Furthermore, renouncing all vengeance, he might have left Lady Mouserink and her family under the hearth. The misfortune he would have then bewailed would have never come to pass. However, the king’s reflections did not follow that philosophical route.
On the contrary: Powerful men always believe they need to blame smaller men for any calamities they endure, and so the king shifted responsibility to the skillful technician Christian-Elias Drosselmayer. Quite convinced that, if he returned to court, he would be hanged or beheaded, the technician would ignore any invitation. Instead, he was urged to come and receive a new category that His Majesty had created purely for artists, technicians, and literati.
Master Drosselmayer was not free of pride. He felt that the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor would look good against his yellow frock coat. So he instantly started out. But his joy soon changed into terror. For at the border of the kingdom, sentries were waiting for his arrival. They grabbed hold of the technician and conducted him, brigade by brigade, to the capital.
The king, who, no doubt, feared that Drosselmayer might be moved, didn’t even welcome him in the palace. He was taken straight to Pirlipat’s cradle and told that if, within a month from today, the princess wasn’t restored to her natural state, the technician would pitifully have his head chopped off.
Master Drosselmayer laid no claim to heroism, nor had he ever expected to die anything but a natural death, as the idiom goes. So that threat horrified him. Nonetheless, he soon relied on his knowledge, whereby his personal modesty never prevented him from appreciating the vast scope of his learning. A bit reassured, the technician instantly focused on the first and now the most useful operation. He had to determine whether Pirlipat’s illness could be treated with a remedy or whether it was actually incurable, as he had ascertained from the very beginning.
To this end, he very adroitly disassembled the princess: first the head; then all the limbs one after another. He detached her feet and her hands in order to more comfortably examine not only the joints and the springs, but also the inner construction. Alas! The deeper he delved into the mystery of the Pirlipatian organization, the further he perceived that the more the princess grew, the more hideous and malformed she would become.
The technician therefore cautiously reattached the limbs of the princess. Not knowing what to do or what to become, he lapsed into a profound melancholy. He remained near the cradle, which he was not allowed to leave until the princess had regained her initial form.
Now the fourth week arrived, and it reached Wednesday. As was his habit, the king came by to see if there was any change in the appearance of the princess. Seeing that her exterior was still the same, the king, shaking his scepter at the technician, cried out:
“Christian-Elias Drosselmayer, be warned! You’ve got only three days left to render my daughter as she was before. And if you stubbornly fail to cure her, you’ll be decapitated this Sunday!”
Master Drosselmayer, whose failure was due not so much to obstinacy as to incapacity, started weeping bitterly. With his eyes full of tears, he watched Princess Pirlipat cracking a hazelnut as merrily as if she were the prettiest girl in the world. Now, at that poignant scene, the technician was first struck by a particular delight that the princess had enjoyed since birth—a taste for hazelnuts, which was coupled with the remarkable circumstance that she had been born with teeth. Indeed, with her transformation, she started shouting, and she continued to do so, until, finding a filbert within easy reach, she cracked it, ate the almond, and tranquilly fell asleep. Ever since that time, the two intimate ladies made sure to stuff their pockets with nuts, and to give the princess one or more nuts as soon as she made a face.
“Oh! Instinct of nature! Eternal and impenetrable sympathy with all created beings!” exclaimed the technician. “You show me the door that leads to the solutions of your mysteries. I will knock, and the door will open!”
With these words, which astonished the king, the technician asked His Majesty for permission to consult the court astrologer. The king consented, but only under a heavy escort. Master Drosselmayer would, no doubt, have preferred to go alone. However, since he wasn’t the least bit free to make his own choice, he had to suffer the inevitable and walk along the streets of the capital, escorted like a common criminal.
When the technician reached the astrologer, the two men embraced each other in a torrent of tears, for they had been deeply loving friends for a very long time. They withdrew to an isolated study, and together they leafed through countless tomes about instincts, sympathies, antipathies, and a host of other topics that were no less mysterious.
That night, finally, the astrologer climbed his tower, assisted by the technician, who was himself quite skillful in such matters. Despite the encumbrance of endlessly crisscrossing lines, they discovered a remedy for the princess’s condition. In order to break the spell that made her ugly and in order to restore her full beauty, she needed to do only one thing. She had to eat a Krakatuk Nut, which had a shell so hard that a forty-eight–millimeter cannon could have rolled across it without breaking it. Furthermore, the Nut had to be broken in Pirlipat’s presence by the teeth of a young man who had never shaved, and who, so far in his life, had worn only boots. And lastly, he had to present the almond to the princess with his eyes closed; and, with his eyes still shut, he had to take seven steps backward without stumbling. Such was the answer provided by the stars.
Drosselmayer and the astrologer had been working nonstop for three days and three nights, in order to clear up this whole mysterious affair. It was precisely Saturday evening. The king had completed his dinner and he was tackling his dessert, when the technician, doomed to lose his head at the crack of dawn, entered the royal dining hall. Joyful and lively, he announced that he had finally discovered a method for restoring the princess’s lost beauty. Upon hearing this news, the king squeezed the technician in his arms with touching benevolence and he asked what the method was.
The technician reported the outcome of his consultation with the astrologer.
“I knew, Master Drosselmayer,” the king exclaimed, “that you were not being stubborn in everything you were doing! Fine! It’s settled! We’ll get to work right after dinner. Make sure, my very dear technician, that within ten minutes, the unshaven and booted young man will be here with Krakatuk Nut in his hand. See to it, above all, that as of now he drinks no wine, so he won’t stumble when he backs up like a lobster, moving seven paces. But once the procedure is finished, tell him that I’ll put my wine cellar at his complete disposal, and he can get dead drunk to his heart’s content.”
To the king’s great amazement, Master Drosselmayer seemed dismayed when he heard that discourse. Since Drosselmayer was holding his tongue, the king insisted on knowing why he was silent and why he was glued to the spot instead of setting out to implement the sovereign orders.
“Sire,” said the technician, kneeling down, “it’s true tha
t we have tracked down the method for healing the princess. As we have said, this method consists of having her eat Krakatuk Nut while the Nut is cracked by a young man who has never shaved and who has always worn boots since his birth. Alas! We have neither the young man nor the Nut. We don’t know where to find them and, in all likelihood, we will have an awful time locating Nut and Nutcracker.”
The king hit the roof. He brandished his scepter over the technician’s head and shouted:
“Fine! Then death it is!”
However, the queen knelt down next to Drosselmayer. She pointed out to her august consort that if the technician were beheaded, they would forfeit the last glimmer of hope, which would be preserved only if he were allowed to live. In all probability, the man who found the horoscope would also catch Nut and Nutcracker. They had to believe all the more strongly in the astrologer’s new forecast since none of his predictions had ever come true. Sooner or later, his prognoses had to be right, given that the king, who could never be wrong, had made him his Grand Augur. The princess, barely three months old, was hardly prepared for marriage. Indeed, she probably wouldn’t be ready until the age of fifteen. Hence, Master Drosselmayer and his friend the astrologer had fourteen years and nine months ahead of them in their search for Krakatuk Nut and for the young man who was fated to crack it. One could therefore grant Christian-Elias Drosselmayer a delay, at the end of which he would come back and place himself in the king’s hands—whether or not he possessed the twofold remedy for curing the princess. If he didn’t have the remedy, then he would be mercilessly decapitated; and if he did have the remedy, then he would be generously rewarded.
On that special day, the king had dined to perfection on his two favorite dishes: blood pudding and chopped liver. Being a just man, he lent a benevolent ear to the request of his sensitive and magnanimous spouse. He decided that the technician and the astrologer should instantly depart in their search for Nut and Nutcracker. The king granted them fourteen years and nine months, but solely on condition that at the expiration of that period, the two men would come back and place themselves in the monarch’s power. Should they return empty-handed, he could do with them whatever his royal pleasure liked.
If, on the other hand, they brought back Krakatuk Nut, which was supposed to restore the princess’s original beauty, they would be duly rewarded. The astrologer would receive a lifelong pension of a thousand ducats plus the Telescope of Honor, and the technician would receive a diamond-studded sword, the Order of the Golden Spider (the great order of the state), and a new frock coat. As for finding a young man who was to crack the Nut, the king was less nervous about him. He maintained that they would locate him through reiterated advertisements in native and foreign gazettes.
Touched by this magnanimity, which reduced the difficulty of his task by half, Drosselmayer swore that he would either find Krakatuk Nut or, like the Roman general Regulus, put himself in the king’s hands.
That same evening, the technician and the astrologer left the capital of the kingdom and began their search.
How the technician and the astrologer explored
the four corners of the earth and discovered a fifth corner
without finding Krakatuk Nut
The technician and the astrologer had already been wandering fourteen years and five months without encountering even a hint of their quest. They had investigated first Europe, then America, then Africa, and then Asia. They had even determined that the world has a fifth part, which scholars have since named New Holland because it was discovered by two Germans.
Now throughout their peregrination, the technician and the astrologer had viewed countless nuts of different shapes and sizes, but they had never stumbled upon Krakatuk Nut. However, in hopes that, alas, proved useless, they had spent many years at the courts of the King of Dates and the Prince of Almonds. They had also, to no avail, consulted the famous Academy of Green Monkeys and the renowned Naturalist Society of Squirrels. Finally, devastated by fatigue, they collapsed on the edge of the great forest that borders on the foot of the Himalayas, and there, profoundly discouraged, they repeated to one another that they had no more than one hundred twenty-two days left to find what they had been futilely hunting for fourteen years and five months.
If I recounted, my dear children, the miraculous adventures that the two seekers had suffered in the course of their long odyssey, I would have to bring us all together every evening for at least a month, which, in the end, would certainly bore you. I will tell you only that Christian-Elias Drosselmayer was the fiercer searcher because his head depended on that famous Nut. Having endured more exhaustion and risked more danger than his companion, he had lost all his hair because of a sunstroke on the equator, and he had lost his right eye because of an arrow shot by a Caribbean chieftain.
Furthermore, the technician’s yellow frock coat, which had not exactly been new when he had left Germany, was now literally falling to pieces. His situation was therefore utterly deplorable, and yet such is a man’s love of life that, thoroughly injured by his successive damages, he waited, with ever-mounting terror, for the moment that he would go and place himself in the hands of the king.
Still, the technician was a man of honor. There was no bargaining on such a solemn occasion. He therefore resolved, whatever it might cost him, to head back to Germany tomorrow. Indeed, there was no time to lose. Fourteen years and five months had worn by, and the two travelers, as we have said, had no more than one hundred twenty-two days to reach the capital of Princess Pirlipat’s father’s kingdom. Drosselmayer informed his friend the astrologer of his courageous resolution, and they decided to start back the next morning.
And indeed, at the crack of dawn, the two travelers slogged out toward Baghdad, from Baghdad they reached Alexandria, in Alexandria they set sail to Venice, from Venice they reached the Tyrol, and from the Tyrol they descended into Princess Pirlipat’s father’s kingdom. During their trek, they had very faintly hoped, from the bottom of their hearts, that the king would be dead or at least in his dotage.
Alas! Neither was the case. Upon their arrival in the capital, the unhappy technician learned that the worthy monarch not only had lost none of his intellectual faculties, but he was even healthier than ever. So the technician was doomed—unless the princess was healed of her own accord (which was impossible) or the king’s heart had softened (which was improbable). Hence, the technician could not elude his dreadful fate.
Still, he presented himself no less boldly at the palace gates, for he was sustained by the idea that he was performing a heroic action. He then asked to speak to the king.
The king, who was a highly accessible ruler, welcoming anyone who had business with him, ordered his master of ceremonies to bring in the two foreigners. The master of ceremonies pointed out to His Majesty that these two men looked very shady, and that their clothes were incredibly tattered. The king replied that one mustn’t judge the heart by the face, and that the habit did not make the monk.
The master of ceremonies, grasping the validity of both proverbs, bowed respectfully and went to summon the technician and the astrologer.
The king was still the same, so they recognized him on the spot. But the two travelers, especially the poor technician, had changed so thoroughly that they were obliged to state their names.
Upon seeing the two men return of their own free will, the king felt a surge of joy, for he was convinced that they wouldn’t have shown up again if they hadn’t found Krakatuk Nut. But he was soon undeceived. The technician, throwing himself at the king’s feet, confessed to him that, despite the most assiduous and conscientious efforts, the technician and his friend, the astrologer, were returning empty-handed.
The king, as we have said, had a bit of a temper, but at bottom his character was outstanding. He was touched by the fact that Drosselmayer had kept his word punctually. So he commuted the original death sentence to lifelong incarceration. As for the astrologer, the monarch was content to exile him.
However, since there were still three days left until the completed deadline of fifteen years and nine months, Master Drosselmayer, who loved his country to the nth degree, asked the king’s permission to profit from those three days by visiting Nuremberg one last time.
This request struck the king as so just that he granted it with no restrictions. The technician, who had only three days for himself, resolved to make good use of the time. As luck would have it, he got seats on the stagecoach, and the two travelers departed instantly. Since the astrologer was in exile, it was all the same to him whether he went to Nuremberg or elsewhere, and so he joined the technician.
The next morning, they reached Nuremberg around ten A.M. Since Master Drosselmayer had only one relative here, his brother Christophe-Zacharias Drosselmayer, a premier toy dealer in Nuremberg, the two travelers went to his home.
This brother was delighted to see poor Christian, whom he had thought dead. At first, he couldn’t recognize the technician because of his baldness and his eye patch. But the visitor showed him his famous yellow frock coat, which, tattered as it was, had preserved a few traces of its original color. In support of that initial proof, the visitor evoked many secret incidents that could be known only by the two brothers, so that the toy dealer had to yield to the facts.
He now asked his brother why he had stayed away from his native town for such a long time, and in what country he had left his hair, his eye, and the holes in his frock coat.
Christian-Elias Drosselmayer had no reason to hide his experiences from his brother. He therefore began by introducing his fellow sufferer. Next, having implemented this customary formality, he described all his misfortunes from A to Z. He ended by saying he had only a few hours to spend with his brother, since, unable to find Krakatuk Nut, he would be entering eternal imprisonment tomorrow.
Nutcracker and Mouse King and The Tale of the Nutcracker Page 16
