“Stay!” he said to the child, who kept on teasing, and demanding his paper, as he called it; “play with the marionettes, and leave me alone.”
Nils, seeing a handful of little men on the table, rushed up to them with delight, and found enough to do in looking at them and touching them, while Christian, taking the chair that the child had just left, and placing the candle by his side, began to decipher the papers before him, consisting, apparently, of a file of old letters. The writing was detestable, and the Italian, style and orthography, all of a piece, but every word which he read, or guessed, seemed to him more and more extraordinary, and caused him the liveliest amazement.
“Where did you get these papers?” he said to the child, while continuing to collect the torn and rumpled fragments.
“Ah, monsieur, how handsome you are with your great moustache!” cried Nils, gazing in ecstasy upon the marionette.
“Answer, will you?” cried Christian; “where did you find these papers? Do they belong to M. Goefle?”
“No, no,” replied Nils, at last, after making him repeat the question several times. “I did not take them from M. Goefle; he threw them away, and the papers he throws away are mine. They are for making boats; M. Goefle said so this morning.”
“You are telling a story! M. Goefle did not throw these papers away. These are letters; people do not throw letters away, they keep them, or they burn them. You took them out of the drawers of this table.”
“No.”
“From the room, then, where he sleeps?”
“No, no!”