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Regiment perform manoeuvres in which the King could take part.
    Thus being educated became a matter of absorbing interest to the boy, who proved to be of more than average intelligence.
    There were other matters to interest him. He formed a friendship with one of his pages, the Marquis de Calvière, and these two spent many happy hours playing games and taking their toys to pieces and putting them together again. Louis developed an interest in cooking, and he enjoyed making sweetmeats and presenting them to Madame de Ventadour, Uncle Philippe, Villeroi, Fleury – any with whom he felt particularly pleased.
    It was impossible to be bored with so much of interest happening and it was not long before Louis discovered the intrigue which was going on.
    Monsieur de Villeroi feared and hated someone. Louis wondered whom.
    One day as they were making sweetmeats while the Duc de Villeroi was enjoying a siesta, Louis asked young Calvière if he had noticed it.
    ‘Look,’ said the King. ‘This is to be an Easter egg. For whom shall it be? My Governor? Uncle Philippe? Or Maman Ventadour? Or Monsieur de Fleury?’
    ‘That,’ said Calvière, ‘is for you to decide.’
    ‘Monsieur de Villeroi locks up my bread and butter,’ Louis announced.
    The page nodded.
    ‘And my handkerchiefs,’ went on Louis. ‘They are kept in a box with a triple lock.’
    ‘He is afraid,’ said Calvière.
    ‘Of what?’
    ‘He is afraid of poisoners.’
    ‘He is afraid someone will poison me !’ said the King. ‘Who?’
    Calvière lifted his shoulders. ‘That egg is not the right shape,’ he said.
    ‘It is,’ said Louis.
    ‘It is not.’
    ‘It is.’
    Louis picked up a wooden spoon and would have brought it down on the page’s head but Calvière jerked up his hand and the spoon hit Louis in the face. In a moment the two boys were wrestling on the floor.
    Suddenly they stopped and went back to the bench. ‘I shall make fondants,’ said Calvière.
    ‘My egg shall be for Uncle Philippe. I love him best today.’
    ‘I know why,’ said Calvière laughing. ‘It is because Monsieur de Villeroi made you dance before the ambassadors.’
    Louis stood still, remembering. It was true. The Maréchal had made him strut before the foreign ambassadors. ‘What do you think of the King’s beauty?’ he had asked. ‘Look at his beautifully proportioned figure and his beautiful hair.’ Then Villeroi had asked the King to run round the room, that the ambassadors should see how fleet he was; and to dance for them that they might see how graceful. ‘See! It might be his great-grandfather dancing before you. It is said that none danced as gracefully as Louis XIV. That is because they had not seen Louis XV.’
    ‘I like making sweetmeats better than dancing,’ said Louis. ‘Uncle Philippe does not ask me to dance. He laughs at old Villeroi. Yes, my egg shall be for Uncle Philippe.’
    And as the two boys continued their sweet-making the page said: ‘I wonder who Villeroi thinks is trying to poison you.’
    They began enumerating all the people of the Court until they tired of it; and when the egg was completed and was being tied about with a blue riband Uncle Philippe entered the room. As Louis leaped into his arms and was carried shoulder-high about the apartment he called to the page that Uncle Philippe should certainly have the Easter egg, for he was his favourite person today.
    Uncle Philippe had brought Easter eggs for Louis who immediately shared one of them with Calvière, while the Duc d’Orléans listened with amusement to their comparisons of other people’s sweetmeats with their own.
    Later, when Uncle Philippe had left, Louis showed the eggs to Villeroi, who seized them at once and said they must be examined.
    ‘We have already eaten one,’ Louis told him; and Villeroi’s face turned white with fear.
    Louis did not notice anything strange in this, at the time, but later when he was writing in his book in Latin his mind wandered from