Pinocchio Fights His Classmates and Is Pursued by the Gendarmes turns a schoolboy prank into a chain of escalating consequences: deception provokes a brawl, a thrown textbook injures the wrong boy, and an attempted escape brings a mastiff after Pinocchio. The episode makes the dangers of bad companions concrete while allowing Pinocchio’s quickness and wooden body to shape both the fight and its flight-filled ending.

Causes and Background

Pinocchio enters this episode wanting to change. He tells the Blue-Haired Fairy that he will study, work, and do whatever she asks because he is tired of being a puppet and wants to become a real boy; she answers that the promise depends on him. The resolve is immediately tested by his schoolmates. On the previous day at the communal school, the boys had greeted the puppet with laughter and practical jokes: they snatched his cap, tugged his jacket, drew moustaches beneath his nose with ink, and tried to tie strings to his limbs to make him dance. The school is therefore not simply a setting for study. It is also where Pinocchio is exposed to ridicule and to the influence of companions whose play can become harmful.

The Blue-Haired Fairy warns him that his school companions may make him lose his love of study and perhaps bring serious trouble upon him. Pinocchio dismisses the warning with a shrug and a gesture to his forehead, as if assuring her that he has plenty of sense. The later disaster gives that boast an ironic answer. The incident begins when he is walking toward school and meets a group of his usual companions. They announce that they have news, then deceive him with a story about the Great Shark. Pinocchio eventually recognizes that they have made him believe something untrue merely to make sport of him. The false tale draws him away from his purpose and puts him in conflict with the boys he had trusted.

From Taunting to Fighting

When Pinocchio realizes that the shark story was a hoax, he objects angrily and asks what amusement they found in misleading him. The boys continue to mock him. One of them strikes him on the head, and Pinocchio immediately answers with a blow of his own. What began as a prank becomes a general, fierce fight. The shift is swift: the boys’ collective joking turns into physical aggression, and Pinocchio, though alone against them, refuses to submit.

His wooden body changes the balance of the struggle. He defends himself with his exceptionally hard wooden feet, keeping the other boys at a distance and leaving bruises wherever he can reach them. Unable to match him in close combat, the boys change tactics and use their schoolbooks as projectiles. They throw primers, grammars, readers, and other volumes at him. Pinocchio dodges with quick, practiced movements, and the books pass over his head into the sea. School learning has become ammunition; the books intended for study are scattered into the water during a fight caused by his departure from school-going discipline.

The boys then seize Pinocchio’s own bundle of books. Among them is a particularly heavy arithmetic treatise, bound in thick board with parchment on its spine and corners. One of the boys aims it at Pinocchio’s head and throws with all his strength. The volume misses its target and strikes Eugenio, one of the companions. The misdirected blow abruptly changes the stakes: the comic exchange of taunts and dodges gives way to the sight of a boy falling onto the sand, pale and unable to say anything beyond an appeal for help and the fear that he is dying.

The Injury and the Carabinieri

Pinocchio’s response is grief and panic rather than triumph. He cries, calls Eugenio by name, and beats his own head as he imagines returning home and facing his mother. He recognizes that he should have gone to school and recalls both the teacher’s warning and his mother’s advice to beware of bad companions. His lament connects this injury to the choice that preceded it: he had ignored counsel, followed the boys, and now fears the consequences. The scene makes his own part in the chain of events plain without making him the person who threw the book that struck Eugenio.

Two Carabinieri arrive while Pinocchio is beside the fallen boy. Asked what he is doing on the ground, he says that he is assisting his school companion. Their questions then turn to the book, and Pinocchio admits that it belongs to him. They order him to stand and accompany them, treating that information as sufficient to take him away. The episode thus gives the scene a sharp reversal: Pinocchio is the boy who stayed with the injured Eugenio, but the object associated with him helps bring the authorities’ attention upon him. The text does not show the Carabinieri investigating the throw before they command him to come along.

Escape and Pursuit

Pinocchio asks whether he may retrieve his cap. The Carabinieri allow him to do so, provided he is quick. He picks it up, but instead of putting it on his head, holds it between his teeth and bolts toward the seashore. His sudden dash converts the episode from an arrest into a pursuit. The Carabinieri judge that they cannot catch him themselves and set a large mastiff after him, a dog that has won first prize in every dog race.

Pinocchio runs, and the mastiff runs faster. The chase draws people to their windows and into the street, where they gather to see how the race will end. Yet the narration withholds that ending at this point: Pinocchio and the dog raise so much dust that, after a few minutes, neither can be seen. The flight therefore closes not with confirmed escape or capture but with visibility itself lost in the cloud raised by the pursuit.

Narrative Significance

The episode links three forms of failed judgment. Pinocchio ignores the Blue-Haired Fairy’s warning about bad companions; the boys use a lie as a prank and then answer his anger with violence; and the authorities’ attention falls on the boy whose book is present beside the injured Eugenio. Each turn narrows Pinocchio’s options, from the school route to the fight, from the shore to the Carabinieri, and from their custody to a dangerous run with a mastiff at his heels.

The books give the episode its central irony. They are first hurled at Pinocchio, then fall into the sea, and finally one of his own volumes becomes the weapon that injures Eugenio. The heavy arithmetic treatise is not merely a prop: its weight and misdirected flight make the prank’s consequences irreversible within the scene. At the same time, Pinocchio’s wooden feet and quick dodging let him withstand the boys, while his cap between his teeth marks the ingenuity and desperation of his escape. His promise to study and become a real boy is thus set against an immediate sequence in which school companions draw him away from school and schoolbooks become instruments of violence.