Geppetto returns home, makes the puppet new feet, and gives him the breakfast that the poor man had brought for himself.
POOR Pinocchio, whose eyes were still half shut from sleep, had not as yet discovered that his feet were burnt off. The moment, therefore, that he heard his father’s voice he slipped off his stool to run and open the door; but after stumbling two or three times he fell his whole length on the floor.
And the noise he made in falling was as if a sack of wooden ladles had been thrown from a fifth story.
“Open the door!” shouted Geppetto from the street.
“Dear papa, I cannot,” answered the puppet, crying and rolling about on the ground.
“Why cannot you?”
“Because my feet have been eaten.”
“And who has eaten your feet?”
“The cat,” said Pinocchio, seeing the cat, who was amusing herself by making some shavings dance with her forepaws.
“Open the door, I tell you!” repeated Geppetto. “If you don’t, when I get into the house you shall have the cat from me!”
“I cannot stand up, believe me. Oh, poor me! poor me! I shall have to walk on my knees for the rest of my life!...”
Geppetto, believing that all this lamentation was only another of the puppet’s tricks, thought of a means of putting an end to it, and climbing up the wall he got in at the window.
He was very angry, and at first he did nothing but scold; but when he saw his Pinocchio lying on the ground and really without feet he was quite overcome. He took him in his arms and began to kiss and caress him and to say a thousand endearing things to him, and as the big tears ran down his cheeks, he said, sobbing: “My little Pinocchio! how did you manage to burn your feet?”
“I don’t know, papa, but believe me it has been an infernal night that I shall remember as long as I live. It thundered and lightened, and I was very hungry,” and then the Talking-cricket said to me: “It serves you right; you have been wicked and you deserve it,” and I said to him: “Take care, Cricket!”... and he said: “You are a puppet and you have a wooden head,” and I threw the handle of a hammer at him, and he died, but the fault was his, for I didn’t wish to kill him, and the proof of it is that I put an earthenware saucer on a brazier of burning embers, but a chicken flew out and said “Adieu until we meet again, and many compliments to all at home”: and I got still more hungry, for which reason that little old man in a nightcap opening the window said to me: “Come underneath and hold out your hat, and poured a basinful of water on my head, because asking for a little bread isn’t a disgrace, is it? and I returned home at once, and because I was always very hungry I put my feet on the brazier to dry them, and then you returned, and I found they were burnt off, and I am always hungry, but I have no longer any feet! Ih! Ih! Ih! Ih!...” And poor Pinocchio began to cry and to roar so loudly that he was heard five miles off.