Having repaired the Nutcracker, Drosselmeyer comes back to Marie's home. In the morning, Marie tells her parents about the battle between the mice and the dolls but they think that it was just a feverish dream caused by the girl's injury. As she does so, she faints and falls against a cabinet, cutting her arm on its glass door. The mice are about to win the battle and the Nutcracker is about to be taken prisoner but Marie then throws a shoe at the Mouse King. The Nutcracker leads the dolls, proudly displaying the ribbon which Marie gave him. Marie's dolls come to life and start to fight the mice. That night, Marie sees several mice emerge from behind the wall, including the seven-headed Mouse King. Illustration from an edition of the story published in Prague in 1924. Marie uses a ribbon from her dress to bandage the Nutcracker's jaw and tells him that Drosselmeyer will fix him the next day. Marie and Fritz both enjoy opening nuts with the Nutcracker, until Fritz places a nut which is too large and too hard for the Nutcracker to open into the toy's mouth and breaks his jaw. Her father says that the nutcracker belongs to the whole family but, since Marie is so fond of him, she can be his special keeper. Marie then notices a nutcracker in the form of a soldier.

However, since the figures inside the castle keep repeating the same actions over and over again, the two children soon tire of it. Drosselmeyer, a friend of the family who is a clockmaker and inventor, arrives and gives the children a mechanical castle as a present. The novel begins on Christmas Eve in the home of Marie Stahlbaum and her brother Fritz. Many subsequent adaptations of the story have been based more closely on the ballet than on Hoffmann's original novel. It was Dumas' adaptation which formed the basis for the 1892 Russian ballet The Nutcracker with music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. In 1844, the novel was adapted by the French author Alexandre Dumas, best known in the English-speaking world as the writer of The Three Musketeers. Further battles between the Nutcracker and the Mouse King take place before the rodents are defeated and the curse is finally broken. The following day, Marie finds out that the Nutcracker was once a young man who was cursed by the Mouse Queen. That night, Marie witnesses a battle between her dolls, under the leadership of the Nutcracker, and mice whose king has seven heads.

The story concerns a girl named Marie, who is given a nutcracker which looks like a soldier on Christmas Eve. The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (German: Nußknacker und Mausekönig) is a children's fantasy novel of fourteen chapters by the German author E.T.A.

Decorative nutcracker in the shape of a soldier.

Eta hoffmann nutcracker book