Louis XIV declares: “L’État, c’est moi”—“I am the State.”⁶¹² A courtier tells Louis XV: “Tout cela est à vous—All of that is yours.” These are the devilish words of Villeroy, whom Hugo singles out in La Pitié suprême to explain his grim compulsion to omnipotence. Then, having tired of lines such as “Sanche! Alonze! Clovis! Sennachérib! Cambyse!,” Hugo sets about describing the chronic situation of Louis XV as none of the king’s contemporaries had managed: “Une stupide joie avec un vaste ennui—A stupid pleasure with a vast boredom.” Only Louis XV’s enemy, his opposite, had words free of resentment.^{613, 614} When the king died and not even his coffin could properly seal his fetid remains, transported in haste, spurning of all ceremony, at night, with an air of merriment, to Reims, only Frederick the Great was able to write to Voltaire what was sadly evident: that wretched man was un honnête homme whose only fault was to be king. Cardinal de Bernis, with forlorn courtesy, had written something similar in a letter which is a threnody for the Seven Years’ War: “I love the King, and I grieve for him with all my heart; an honnête homme capable of friendship and desiring only good, he allows evil to be done and to tarnish the splendor of a reign that could have been glorious and peaceful.”⁶¹⁵

“The end of every dynasty is marked by a king ignoring government to devote himself to dissipation. Nature announces his fall with inauspicious signs (comets, two suns, earthquakes, floods, diseases, etc.). In China, as we know, it is through the people that Heaven reveals its will to withdraw its mandate (ming) from the reigning king (revolution, songs of spirited young men). The dissipation of the king, however, is not just a simple expression of immoral conduct. It expresses the will to secure for his own profit all property, all power. … … …

“The ‘rois de perdition,’ in their arrogance, sought to reach Heaven building nine-storey towers, but also digging deep cellars.⁶¹⁶ Their conduct can be construed as an exceptional exaggeration of a normal spirit of celebration (if we think of the winter drinking sessions of the peasants). The wrong is not in the action itself, but in its ‘disproportion.’ It consists in doing too much and too often what can and must be done on certain occasions.”

We’ll never know much for sure about his dissipation, in the same way that we won’t know much for sure about his childish games. But one account describes how, at the age of seven, they amused him by filling a vast room with sparrows and suddenly releasing hawks that ripped them to pieces with their sharp beaks. Another account describes how “the king had a white fawn that he fed and nurtured, which ate from his hand and was very fond of the king; he had it taken to La Muette and said he wanted to kill it.⁶¹⁷ He had it sent a distance away and he shot and wounded it. The fawn dragged itself toward him and nuzzled him; once again he had it sent a distance away and he shot it a second time and killed it. His act seemed very cruel. There are other similar stories about him, involving certain birds that he has at Passy.”