I knelt. Aghast, I noticed there was a stain of boiled egg on the thigh of my breeches. "Thank you, Sir," I stammered.

"I will have you taken to the dog immediately, Merivel. Food and drink and night linen will be brought to you and any surgical instruments you may need made available to you. You will stay until the dog dies or recovers. Call for any medicines you deem suitable."

"Yes, Sir."

"The dog's name is Bibillou. He also answers to Bibi and Lou-Lou."

"Lou-Lou, Your Majesty?"

"Yes. Your own name, by the way, has a very pleasing cadence."

"Thank you, Sir."

"Merivel. Very pretty, to my ear."

I left the royal presence and followed two servants down acres (or should I say hectares, in that the King appears committed to distributing French names everywhere?) of corridor. I was shown into a pleasant bedroom, with a view of the river and the crowded wharves. A fire had been lit. In front of the fire, in a little basket, a brown and white Spaniel was lying. Its body was pitifully thin and its breath rasping. On a table near the window, a decanter of claret, a goblet and a dish of Portuguese figs had been placed. Laid over the bed was a fine linen nightshirt and a matching nightcap, which, once the servants had left me alone with the dog, I immediately put on, suffering as I was that day from a scabrous itching under my wig. I also removed my shoes and coat and poured myself a glass of claret.

I felt extraordinarily tired. I had slept badly since the fire, but it was more a total exhaustion of the mind, rather than of the body, that I felt. I was glad to be alone. I took the claret over to the bed and half reclined on it, sipping the wine greedily, like a Roman senator. Once or twice, I glanced in the direction of the dog. It twitched and whimpered in its dreams. "Lou-Lou," I called softly, but it didn't stir. Presently, I told myself, I will get up and examine the dog and see what can be done. Meanwhile, I went on drinking the claret, which was some of the finest I'd ever tasted, and soon began to feel a delicious ease, like velvet, caressing my mind. Once, experiencing a sudden hunger, I forced myself to get up and eat a couple of figs, but my body felt as heavy and unsteady as a barrel of eels in a swell, and I stumbled back to the bed, where I passed out in a stupor of claret and delayed grief for my parents' dying.

I slept, it seems, for seven hours. When I awoke, it was dark, but my room had been lit with candles and a supper of roast partridges and boiled salad placed on the claret table. Had the servants tried to wake me? If so, they would have had to report to the King that Physician Merivel lay in a drunken sleep, with his nightcap fallen over his eyes. I groaned. For the second time, I had been near to preferment, and yet again I had let it elude me.

I got up, my legs still unsteady. I knelt down by the fire, which still burned well, with fresh logs laid on it by the invisible servants. I stroked the head of poor Lou-Lou. To my surprise, he opened a watery brown eye and looked at me. I bent and listened to his breathing. The rasp in it had lessened. I looked in his mouth. His tongue was swollen and his muzzle dry. I fetched water from my washstand and spooned a little into his mouth. He lapped it with all the eagerness a sick Spaniel can muster. It is as if, I said to myself, the purging and vomiting he's been forced to endure has drained his body of its vital moisture. And with this realisation, I suddenly saw that my hopes of curing the dog were probably greater now than they had been when I had arrived eight hours before. My own neglect of him could, indeed, be the key to his recovery. For while I'd slept, he'd been left alone, possibly for the first time in several days and nights, and nature had had a chance to work quietly within him.

"Studenti!" Fabricius would thunder, his voice echoing like the word of God round the tiers of his primitive anatomy theatre. "Non dimenticare la natural! Do not forget nature! For nature is a better doctor than any of you – particularly you Germans, who are so noisy – are ever likely to be!"

I watched over Lou-Lou for the next seventeen hours. I sent for alcohol to dress the boils and lesions made by the cuppings, but otherwise I didn't touch him, only gave him water, and when his fever lessened, fed him morsels of partridge mashed in my own mouth. By the following night, when a meal of guinea fowl, cream and radishes was brought to me, I was confident that he wouldn't die. And I was right. Four days later, I carried him to the King's bedchamber and set set him on the Royal lap, where he stood entranced and wagged his tail.

5. The fifth beginning is the strangest, the most unlooked for and the most momentous. Without it, the story in which I find myself would not have happened as it has.

I can tell it with reasonable brevity. (I am, unlike Pearce, usually able to come swiftly to the point of a story, whereas his tales are so larded with lugubrious metaphysical observations that his audience is prone to lose the thread of the thing almost before he's begun.) Here it is then:

I abandoned my studies at the Royal College and my lodgings at Ludgate. I was allotted two pleasant rooms inside the Palace, which lacked only, alas, a view of the river, which was of great fascination to me, in all its hubbub, vagabondage and changing light. My duties were defined as follows: "The daily Care and Comfort of the eighteen Royal Dogs, with, as required, the right to perform operations upon them, prescribe Remedy for Disease and do all in my power to ensure the Continuity of their Life." The stipend paid to me was one hundred livres per annum, and this, added to the two hundred and thirty-seven livres left to me and mercifully found unharmed in my parents' damp cellar, was quite enough to keep me in good claret, high-heeled shoes, silk coats, Brussels lace and well-made wigs for the foreseeable future. Astonishing good fortune had, in short, fallen on me ("All undeserving you are, Merivel," noted Pearce, who was struggling on, trying to cure the paupers of St Barts and – ghastly enterprise – the lunatics of Bedlam).

I celebrated by visiting Mrs Pierpoint, getting drunk with her at the Leg Tavern and tumbling her in a muddy ditch on Hampstead Fields. Afterwards, she had the temerity to ask me whether, now that I was in the King's employ, I could get some position at Court for the uncouth Mr Pierpoint, who is a mere bargeman, and I learned at once a lesson I never let myself forget: that power and success carry in their train a clamouring queue of greasers and supplicants, the noise and sight of which haunt my private pleasures and my dreams, but from whom multifarious and handsome bribes may very often be had.

A year passed most profitably and pleasurably. My nature, I quickly understood, was in every particular well suited to life at Court. My fondness for gossip and laughter, my brimming appetites, my tendency to sartorial chaos and my trick of farting at will made me one of the most popular men at Whitehall. Few games of Cribbage or Rummy were started without me, few musical evenings or soirées dansantes were given to which I was not invited. Women found me hilarious and in magnificent numbers allowed me to tickle not only their humours but their charming and irresistible centres of pleasure, and I seldom slept alone. And – most fortunate of all – the King showed towards me from the start a most flattering affection, stemming, he told me, not only from my curing of Lou-Lou, but from my ability to amuse him. I was, I suppose, his Fool. When I made him hold his sides with laughter, he would beckon me to him, take hold of my squashed nose with his elegant hand and draw me towards him in order to smack an affectionate kiss on my mouth.

After a while, I realised that he actively sought my company and this realisation was to me a most astounding thing. He would show me his gardens and his orchards and his tennis court, and began coaching me at tennis, at which I proved more adept and nimble than I expected. He gave me presents: a handsome French clock from the collection I'd seen that first afflicting day, a set of voluminous striped table napkins, large enough to cover my whole suiting while I ate, lending me the risible appearance of a man in a tent and thus causing mirth at the dinner table, and a dog of my own, a sweet Spaniel bitch he insisted I christen Minette, after his own adored sister.