fully. Make your salutations to her
majesty, the Queen!"

He was rewarded by a hug and a kiss from the Queen and then ran off
with the dog barking at his heels.

Little Louis was, as we have seen, an eager and brilliant scholar and
one day he begged the Abbe to give him lessons in grammar which he had
begun to learn some time before.

"Gladly," answered the Abbe, "your last lesson, if I remember rightly,
was upon the three degrees of comparison--the positive, the comparative
and the superlative. But you must have forgotten all that."

"You are mistaken," answered the Dauphin, "and I will prove it to you.
Listen:--the positive is when I say, 'my Abbe is a kind Abbe'; the
comparative is when I say 'my Abbe is kinder than another Abbe,' and
the superlative," he continued, looking at the Queen who was
listening--"is when I say, 'mamma is the kindest and most amiable of
all mammas!'"

The retort was so clever, the manner of saying it so charming, that the
Abbe and Marie Antoinette exchanged glances of amusement and pride, but
the little prince was unconscious of having said or done anything
unusual.

Besides grammar, Louis studied Italian, which he could speak and read
fluently; he also studied Latin, and some of the sentences he
translated have been preserved, such as "True friends are useful to
princes." "I know a prince who easily flies into a passion."
"Flatterers are very dangerous to princes." From these sentences it is
evident that the Abbe was trying to teach his clever little scholar
more than one thing at a time. Louis was also taught arithmetic,
geometry and geography, this last by means of a huge hollow globe lit
by a lantern, which had been invented for the special use of the
Dauphin, by a celebrated professor in the University of Paris. Louis
also was trained in all sorts of athletic sports and when he was seven
years old was sturdy of body and far more mature of mind than many
older boys. At seven, according to the court custom of France, he was
obliged to be given into the care of a governor. The people wished to
choose this governor and named several candidates who were utterly
unworthy of the position, but they were obliged to set aside their
wishes and accept a man named by the king, who also himself continued
to superintend his son's education.

At this time the clouds of political disaster were again hanging over
the palace, and even the Dauphin could see and feel the uneasiness that
surrounded