Gabrielle is a BAMF.
[X](Yes, Gabs. That’s what happens. As of QOTD. Also that’s your son’s GF you’re talking about wasting,… awkward…)
Poor Madeleine! Did not deserve to die like that ;A; Unfortunately, I’d say she was condemned to die by proxy, being so attached to Claudia.
I don’t think Madeleine’s death was totally under Armand’s control. He was not really the leader of the TdV (see more quotes on that below the cut); in TVA Armand says: “For the record, [Claudia] was slain by my Coven of mad demon actors and actresses,… it became all too clear to too many that she had tried to murder her principal Maker, The Vampire Lestat. It was a crime punishable by death, the murdering of one’s creator or the attempt at it”
^“slain by my Coven” but not that he ordered them to do it. Just that he didn’t stop it from happening.
This is an #unreliable narrator situation again, as there are at least three different accounts of the trial that was held under TdV (see more below the cut)(four if you include the above statement from TVA). In all instances, the important part of the “trial” was that Claudia was the one who had to be convicted and sentenced to death. Louis and Madeleine were secondary concerns.
There was no explanation for why Madeleine was also condemned to death, I would suggest that Santiago (and/or Armand) wanted to kill Madeleine bc she was mad (the extent of which we don’t really know) and/or they didn’t really know what else to do with her. Santiago probably wanted to do it bc it’s thrilling to kill another vampire, as Armand pointed out in book!IWTV: “`You see,’ he said, `killing other vampires is very exciting; that is why it is forbidden under penalty of death.’
Again, one would guess that Armand at least negotiated w/ Santiago beforehand.
In movie!IWTV, we see Armand closing the door on the screams of the condemned, and the explanation as to why he didn’t come out to help when Louis called for him? He had told Louis that he wasn’t really the leader of this coven, “But if there were a leader, I would be that one.”
In book!IWTV, similarly:
“ `Are you the leader of this group?’ [Louis] asked him.
” `Not in the way you mean leader,’ [Armand] answered. But if there were a leader here, I would be that one.’
Armand knows that to exert power, you have to defend it:
[Louis says:] “ `Stop them if you will, advise them that we don’t mean any harm.
Why can’t you do this? You say yourself we’re not your enemies, no
matter what we’ve done… ’
” I could hear him sigh, faintly. [Armand says:] `I have stopped them for the time
being,’ he said. `But I don’t want such power over them as would be
necessary to stop them entirely. Because if I exercise such power, then
I must protect it. I will make enemies. And I would have forever to
deal with my enemies when all I want here as a certain space, a certain
peace. Or not to be here at all. I accept the scepter of sorts they’ve
given me, but not to rule over them, only to keep them at a distance.‘
^Armand, IWTV
The Ao3 Tag of the Day is: Yet another trope I will devour no matter what even though I know exactly what is going to happen.
“Now, I’m getting into the coffin, and you will get in on top of me if you know what’s good for you.” – Lestat de Lioncourt, Interview with the Vampire
Well I found it! In TVL, when Armand is telling Lestat and Gabrielle his story:
“In quiet allegiance to the Dark Ways, Armand
continued to serve. Yet in the centuries of his long obedience, Armand
kept two secrets to himself. These were his property, these secrets,
more purely his than the coffin in which he locked himself by day, or
the few amulets he wore. The first was that no matter how great his
loneliness, or how long the search for brothers and sisters in whom he
might find some comfort, he never worked the Dark Trick himself.
He wouldn’t give that to Satan, no Child of Darkness made by him.”
Hit the jump for more, cut for length.
Still in TVL, that quote above is right after he’s gone over how he’s seen so many vampires die:
In this particular, let
Armand observe that there was no vampire then living who was more
than three hundred years old. No one alive then could remember the
first Roman coven. The devil frequently calls his vampires home….He had witnessed
the inevitable dissolution of covens, seen immortality defeat the most
perfectly made Children of Darkness, and it seemed at times some
awesome punishment that it never defeated him. Was he destined to
be one of the ancient ones? The Children of the Millennia? Could one
believe those stories which persisted still?
He’s also mentioned that the Dark Trick is not an exact science (also TVL):
But
let Armand understand here also that the effect of the Dark Trick is
unpredictable, even when passed on by the very young vampire and
with all due care. For reasons no one knows, some mortals when Born
to Darkness become as powerful as Titans, others may be no more
than corpses that move. That is why mortals must be chosen with
skill. Those with great passion and indomitable will should be avoided
as well as those who have none.
So Armand’s reasons for refusing to turn Daniel, if you trust him to be honest about the ones he’s giving, seem to be that:
There is a vague repeated cry of
danger, but no one seems to know whence it comes. They only know that we are being sought out and
annihilated, that coven houses, meeting places, go up in flames.“ – QOTD)
Later, in QOTD, Daniel refers to it as a vow, maybe that’s he terminology Armand used when he told Daniel about it:
[Daniel says:] “Of course I believed you. The vow you made, you explained everything. But Armand, this is my question, to
whom did you make this vow?"Laughter.
^He made the vow to himself ;A;
[Armand says:] "So you would have me break my vow. You would have what you think you want. But look well at this
garden, because once I do it, you’ll never read my thoughts or see my visions again. A veil of silence will
come down.”
1. I think this is definitively where Daniel realizes Armand’s not going to turn him:
Then the realization had come to Daniel as they stood together in the ruined dining room with its famous
murals of ritual flagellation barely visible in the dark: He isn’t going to kill me after all. He isn’t going to do it.
Of course he won’t make me what he is, but he isn’t going to kill me. The dance will not end like that.
2. Then Armand starts trying to get Daniel to understand his reasons for not wanting to give him the Dark Gift
“Give me what I want,” Daniel had demanded.
“I’m giving you everything you could ever ask for."
"Yes, but not what I have asked for, not what I want!"
"Be alive, Daniel.” A low whisper, like a kiss. “Let me tell you from my heart that life is better than death.”
3. … which intensifies:
Ugly fights, terrible fights, finally, Armand broken down, glassy-eyed with silent rage, then crying softly but
uncontrollably as if some lost emotion had been rediscovered which threatened to tear him apart. “I will not
do it, I cannot do it. Ask me to kill you, it would be easier than that. You don’t know what you ask for, don’t
you see? It is always a damnable error! Don’t you realize that any one of us would give it up for one human
lifetime?
Re: @firelight-fading‘s post: “How many of you actually feel that Louis’ visiting Lestat at the end of IWTV and the conversation that followed actually happened? Lestat insists that it didn’t, but both him and Louis are unreliable narrators…”
Hey, look, you are free to believe in whichever unreliable narrator you want! Clearly we don’t all agree on this. I still don’t know what I believe, but I lean towards it happening, that they met, just maybe not as Louis described it.
Anon says: If the scene didn’t take place at all how did Louis get such an accurate description of Lestat’s condition?…
It’s not like Louis can take images from Armand’s mind either.
^Louis had seen a pretty battered Lestat around 1865, and then he thought Lestat was destroyed in the TdV fire, so he’s probably guessing that his maker looks like toast now, if he’s in fact still alive.
Lestat acknowledges in TVL that Armand came around to pester him in NOLA, which, yes, is presumably after Armand and Louis went their separate ways. But Armand could have visited Lestat before that separation, or gotten the information from another vampire who had seen Lestat in NOLA. They’re probably not the only vampires in New York during the time that they’re there.
Anon says: even if he had visited once before why would he give Louis the full disclosure? In IWTV, Armand tells Louis that Lestat is in NOLA:
“Then, finally, Armand urged me in another way. He told me something he’d concealed from me since the time we were in Paris.
“Lestat had not died in the Theatre des Vampires. I had believed him to be dead, and when I asked Armand about those vampires, he told me they all had perished. But he told me now that this wasn’t so. Lestat had left the theater the night I had run away from Armand and sought out the cemetery in Montmartre. Two vampires who had been made with Lestat by the same master had assisted him in booking passage to New Orleans.
^So how Armand knew this, we don’t know, but I assume he read it from Lestat’s thoughts when he visited Lestat in NOLA prior to Armand’s separation with Louis, or from another vampire who had seen Lestat passing through NY.
Armand wants Louis to see Lestat for himself bc he wants Louis to “come back to life.”
” `You care about nothing …’ [Armand] was saying. And then he sat up slowly and turned to me so again I could see that dark fire in his eyes. `I thought you would at least care about that. I thought you would feel the old passion, the old anger if you were to see him again. I thought something would quicken and come alive in you if you saw him . . . if you returned to this place.’
^Sorry Armand, fail on that 😛
Whether Louis actually met with Lestat the way he described it in IWTV is up for debate, but Louis might have gotten such an accurate description of Lestat’s condition verbally from Armand. Perhaps, as you say, Louis might have exaggerated the patheticness of the conversation to get a reaction from Lestat, as he was trying to provoke Lestat into coming out of wherever he was hiding.
Or maybe Louis just wanted to tell his story to another soul, like confession, and get some feeling of absolution from the act of telling, maybe it felt good to invent this portion for no good reason. I don’t personally think that’s very IC for Louis but… who knows?
Can we just look at this for a minute….
Two vampires who had been made with Lestat by the same master had assisted him in booking passage to New Orleans.
^This used to really irritate me, these two vampire siblings of Lestat who never appeared again in canon, I have to assume Armand invented them for whatever reason (make Louis jealous that he didn’t help Lestat himself?) or that Daniel’s publisher added them in for whatever reason *shrugs*
(2/2) moment to moment in a way that made me picture a silver clock ticking in a void: the painted face, the delicately carved hands looked upon by no one, looking out at no one, illuminated by a light which was not a light, like the light by which God made the world before He had made light. Ticking, ticking, ticking, the precision of the clock, in a room as vast as the universe.”
[X]
Are you homework anon? I got this ask right around the same time as the homework ask… part of your assignment (if you are homework anon!) is probably to practice critical thinking on your own and figure out what you think this passage means.
It doesn’t have to mean the same exact thing to everyone, and that’s what makes discussion about canon interesting, all our varied opinions. It’s great when we agree, but we don’t always on all topics 😉
But of course I wrote out a long answer despite the fact that I didn’t want to! Oh well.
I’d suggest that the opening line is the topic sentence on which he’s going to build support or undermine the statement, or both. Louis has already had a number of great adventures (or so it appears to the reader!), so what makes him call THIS one the great adventure? Only now, embarking on the great Looking for Other Vampires: European Tour w/ Claudia, does he feel the freedom Lestat wanted him to feel when he was first turned. Louis didn’t embrace his vampire nature then, he fought it, he fought Lestat, he was not having a good time at all, and although he did reluctantly admit to enjoying some of the aspects of vampiring, he was holding back. Claudia shows up and Louis has a new purpose, he loves her, and she helps to inspire in him a hunger to be alive. ❤
“What does it mean to die when you can live until the end of the world?” – He’s not saying that he can’t still die, bc he’s seen a vampire be killed (at least, he thinks so). But now he’s really considering immortality as a possibility, maybe he wants to be with Claudia forever!
“And what is `the end of the world’ except a phrase, because who knows even what is the world itself?” – Now he’s asking questions of his topic sentence, he’s unsure of the excitement he feels about this new chapter in his life. Is it legit? Can he actually give himself over to enjoying it and being excited about it? Keep in mind that he’s never mentioned traveling before (except for the fact that he came to America from France), he’s lived an isolated life in NOLA and probably expected to die there. He might really have mixed anxiety and excitement about everything and everywhere outside of NOLA.
“I had now lived in two centuries,” – it’s around 1860 when he leaves NOLA with Claudia, he was alive at the end of the 18th century, and experienced half of the 19th century. Obviously a lot of things changed, as he says he’s “seen the illusions of one utterly shattered by the other,”
Then he goes on to talk about himself, and how he’s had internal changes of his own, probably re: embracing his nature, finding a will to live, and I don’t want to translate each piece for you bc it seems fairly self-explanatory: “been eternally young and eternally ancient, possessing no illusions,”
This is Louis being poetic:
“living moment to moment in a way that made me picture a silver clock ticking in a void: the painted face, the delicately carved hands looked upon by no one, looking out at no one, illuminated by a light which was not a light, like the light by which God made the world before He had made light. Ticking, ticking, ticking, the precision of the clock, in a room as vast as the universe.”
^but it seems to relate to him feeling outside of nature, outside of religion, and yet still touched by God’s light, being a vampire, like something that can’t affect anything but can watch and take notice of all the things evolving around it. Something Marius later calls a continuous awareness:
“And for no apparent reason, I was possessed of a strange idea about life, a strange concern that amounted almost to a pleasant obsession… That it came to me in these last free hours as a Roman citizen was no more than coincidence.
The idea was simply that there was somebody who knew everything, somebody who had seen everything. I did not mean by this that a Supreme Being existed, but rather that there was on earth a continual intelligence, a continual awareness.
…My idea of who or what it was, was vague. But I was comforted by the notion that nothing spiritual – and knowing was spiritual – was lost to us. That there was this continuous knowing…” (TVL)
^It seems like something Anne Rice has always been passionate about, how the vampires exist in this world, and how they are dependent upon it, fascinated by it, and yet kept apart from it, how they absorb and contain all this historical knowledge of this world that they’re obsessed with by their very nature… and she has carried through to some extent in even the most recent VC.
Merci! I do my best with this thing.
Yes, it’s not always so easy to have a conversation w/ Monsieur Louis de Fancypants Language du Lac.
Mojo. Lestat’s real son, protective of his dad and loyal, a heart of gold, and basically a living security blanket. Lestat re: Mojo, TOBT:
And before this story moves any further, let me say something about this dog. He isn’t going to do anything in this book.
He won’t save a drowning baby, or rush into a burning building to rouse the inhabitants from near-fatal sleep. He isn’t possessed by an evil spirit; he isn’t a vampire dog. He’s in this narrative simply because I found him in the snow behind that town house in Georgetown, and I loved him, and from that first moment, he seemed somehow to love me. It was all too true to the blind and merciless laws I believe in – the laws of nature, as men say; or the laws of the Savage Garden, as I call them myself. Mojo loved my strength; I loved his beauty. And nothing else ever really mattered at all.
^He’s at least a little wrong, Mojo did alot in this book. He was quietly supportive when Lestat needed it most. He saw through to Lestat’s soul, bc he recognized Lestat even though the physical appearance changed drastically ❤ So many feels for Mojo!
Runners up, or, If I Had to Choose A People: (in no special order)
…There are more but those are the main ones that come to mind, and it’s a long enough list, so I’ll end it there.
Hmmm, this is a tough one! There are so many. I’m curious to know which you chose already!
It changes over time, but just skimming IWTV, these are some consistently favorite moments of mine. I think some of them are deep and meaningful, but what’s deep and meaningful to me may not be to you. We all sort of have a conversation with books, you bring your own experiences and tastes and see what matches up with the story you’re reading. Sometimes the story can expand your intellectual palette! It’s done that for me.
What makes a moment (scenes/lines/moments/passages/excerpts/etc.) a fave for me is the mixture of comedy and tragedy, so I’m drawn to parts where Lestat is insulting Louis, or they’re fighting with exquisite tension and clever dialogue, or bits of vampire physiology, or heartwrenching stuff.
While I’m less interested in things like artful descriptions or didactic lessons from the author, each VC book is a mixture of many things, and I obviously love the series as a whole and in parts. Fave moments, for me, are like amazing desserts in which you can’t always figure out what the ingredients were, it’s just DELICIOUS and you gotta have MORE.
I was going through IWTV and selecting passages but I’m doing too many! Here’s the first few that come to mind, in no particular order, which is a very small fraction of all my fave moments:
anachronistic
(” “That is, how would you say today … bullshit?” “)
A few more under the cut*
*From when I was starting at the beginning of the book and pulling faves but only got to p. 13 and had 4 already, so I had to stop doing that or I’d have more many than too many.
After Paul dies, Louis talking about his sister, how she felt like she had to act a certain way bc society expected it. This was one of the first things cluing me into the whole idea of disregarding societal expectations, bc what good did it do her to pretend?
“People in society asked my sister offensive questions about the whole incident, and she became an hysteric. She wasn’t really an hysteric. She simply thought she ought to react that way, so she did.”
The first time Louis really describes Lestat:
He came in from the courtyard, opening the French doors without a sound,
a tall fair-skinned man with a mass of blond hair and a graceful, almost feline quality to his movements. And gently, he draped a shawl over my sister’s eyes and lowered the wick of the lamp… His gray eyes burned with an incandescence, and the long white hands which hung by his sides were not those of a human being… the moment I saw him, saw his extraordinary aura and knew him to be no creature I’d ever known, I was reduced to nothing.
When Lestat is about to turn Louis, it’s so endearing, and there’s comedy in here, as well as some dubious consent, it’s just excellent.
But there was no time for courage. Or shall I say, there was no time in Lestat’s plan for anything but his plan. `Now listen to me, Louis,’ he said, and he lay down beside me now on the steps, his movement so graceful and so personal that at once it made me think of a lover. I recoiled…
…I wanted to struggle, but he pressed so hard with his fingers that he held
my entire prone body in check; and as soon as I stopped my abortive attempt at rebellion, he sank his teeth into my neck.”
Omg, Lestat telling his dad to get off his back about his lifestyle is priceless:
“[Lestat] was in his father’s bedroom meantime, telling the old man good-bye, that he would return in the morning. ‘But where do you go, why must you live by such a schedule!’ the old man demanded, and Lestat became impatient.
… `I take care of you, don’t I? I’ve put a better roof over your head
than you ever put over mine! If I want to sleep all day and drink all night, I’ll do it, damn you!’ The old man started to whine.”
I-want-my-IWTV 