His devotions engaged the King until nine o'clock, at which hour his family joined him in the dining-room,—that is to say, during the period in which it was still permitted him to communicate with them. He sat with them at breakfast, eating nothing himself; he had made it a rule in prison to fast until the dinner-hour. After breakfast the King took his son for lessons in Latin and geography, and whilst Marie Antoinette taught their daughter, sister Elizabeth plied her needle. The children had an hour's play at mid-day, and at one o'clock the family assembled for dinner. The table was always well supplied, but Louis ate little and drank less, and the Queen took nothing but water with her food. After dinner the parents amused their children again as best they could, round games at the table being the favourite recreation. To these poor little pleasures succeeded reading and conversation, and at nine the prisoners supped. After supper, Louis took the boy to his bed-chamber, where a little bed was placed for him beside his own. He heard him recite his prayers, and saw him to bed. Then he returned to reading, and fell to his own prayers at eleven. When the doomed King, husband, and father was denied the solace of his family, the time that he had devoted to them was given almost wholly to his books. The Latins were his favourite authors, and a day seldom passed on which he had not conned afresh some pages of Tacitus, Livy, Seneca, Horace, Virgil, or Terence. In French he was especially fond of books of travel. He read the news of the day as long as he was supplied with it, but his not unnatural interest in the affairs of revolutionary France seemed to trouble his gaolers, and the newspapers were withdrawn from him. Thrown back upon his books, he studied more than ever, and on the eve of his death he summed up the volumes he had read through during the five months and seven days of his captivity in the Temple: the number was two hundred and fifty-seven. Towards the end he suffered some brusque interruptions of his ignominious solitude. Three times he awoke to find a new valet in his bedroom. Chamilly's place in this capacity was taken by Hue, and Hue was succeeded by Cléry, who was all but a stranger to the King. Chamilly and Hue barely came off with their lives in the prisons to which they were removed from the Temple. The abandoned King took shock upon shock with not a little fortitude. He was skimming his Tacitus one day when the cannibals of September stopped under his window to brandish on a pike the bleeding and disfigured head of the Princess Lamballe.