Tag Archives: interview with the vampire
Voice of Louis
We got a question about our headcanon of Louis’ accent in our coffee shop AU collab, and, I thought others might be interested in our answer so here it is!
[^X] My answer: in canon, Louis would have spoken French as his native language, and Creole in NOLA. Being a vampire, he probably began learning English from various people during his travels with Armand after Paris, and then really got the full dose of it when they were living in NY together in the 20th century.
For our AU, I think of him as having moved to NOLA as a child, and his family moved back to France when he was in college or otherwise old enough to be living on his own; or that he still has family in NOLA, and in modern day, people do speak English there. There’s definitely some Creole and a mixture among the natives now so he might have picked up some of that, but I would think he always went to schools where he had to speak English.
When I visited NOLA (I’ve been a few times now) I didn’t notice everyone there having a heavy southern accent. I would think that a bookworm like Louis might have even less, being kind of antisocial and learning his words from books and speaking mainly to his few close friends and family.
As in canon, his French accent should be noticeable but doesn’t mark him as completely a foreigner, just different emphasis on certain letters, a tendency to hit “th” a little like a “d,” for example.
Gaspard Ulliel’s voice is my headcanon for Louis’ accent, although it is a lower register than I think of Louis.
@wicked-felina added:
Yep, I pretty much echo what @i-want-my-iwtv says and my headcanon is more or less in tune with hers –
In the fic, Louis comes from a solidly French family from Brittany (I believe we may have stolen this location from @gairid). He moves with them to New Orleans (or its environs) when he is a child, and he learns English whilst there.
However, his accent is tempered by the following things:
a) His family are Francophone and speak French almost exclusively at home;
b) Their relatives in Louisiana are Acadian, so there is that dialect of French and/or Franglais colouring his accent;
c) The family is upper classOf course, his English would have the Louisiana lilt to it, but all that above, too.
From my own experience, French people seem to be amongst the ones who most strongly cling to their accent when speaking English. I have worked with and have many friends from France (including from Brittany) who are fluent in English but have that ‘sharpness’ to the consonants that Daniel references in IWTV.
I also have found that every French person I know pronounces ‘idea’ as ‘idee’ (i.e. the French way) no matter how fluent they are. I pointed this out to my French boss once and was told that we pronounce it The Wrong Way because it is a French word. XD
Lovely Lestat, as you know Daniel’s transition into vampirism hasn’t been graceful. Do you have advice to any young naive mortals before they agree to take their last mortal breath and join you and others in death?
♛Advice to “young naive mortals” before they agree to become one of us…
*laughs* Well, Louis would simply say, “Don’t.”
[^X @phantom-evil]
I can’t speak for Daniel’s transition, but from what he told me, what made it into the record that I compiled as the novel Queen of the Damned… he originally wanted the Dark Gift because he fell in love with Louis’ story, and wanted a seat at our table, so to speak. When he met Armand, it became about wanting to be with Armand, made so much more frustrating because of Armand’s struggle to accept Daniel, whether to bring him over.
Then, when that had been overcome, there was Daniel as a fledgling; there are so many physical and emotional changes that happen to a vampire during that time that few of us really experience it as a very “graceful” time. I famously vomited up my own blood and then, in a state of delirium, licked it off the stone floor of a filthy cell full of rotten corpses! Among many other grotesque things that happened in those first nights.* Two exceptions to the awkward fledgling phase: Gabrielle and Claudia, who both bloomed in their own ways, very gracefully, as fledgling vampiresses.
Advice…
One thing is for sure, satisfaction is not guaranteed, ma petite. In every sense of the phrase.
The process itself is dangerous. It’s called the Dark “Trick” for a reason. Your maker has to kill you first. It’s extremely erotic, but extremely painful. They have to actually forcibly pull your life away entirely – and you’ll fight them through it if you want to survive – and then feed a demon, a kind of cancer, into your body and soul. We still don’t know if it’s contamination or evolution. And it doesn’t always work.
There are worse things than death.
//ooc: *@gairid/@vampchronfic has such a beautiful and tragic story about another thing Lestat did in those first nights, that you really should read it, We Are Our Own Saviors (Chapters 15-16). #Damn you and your perfect headcanon perfection ;A;
Lestat continues after the jump, cut for length.
♛The other aspect of being a vampire: Killing. Few people seem to realize how customer-service oriented this lifestyle really is. You’ll have to kill people, or practice the Little Drink (most fledglings have difficulty stopping mid-kill). If you are able to master it, you’ll spend even more nightly time pursuing more victims than just the few that would satisfy you if you killed them. Killing means you have to find fewer, but still, victims. Louis refused to choose, feeling unworthy of making that choice. Could you do it? Really? Or, you can not choose. As he later was able to embrace. Could you do that?
Louis’ practice of drinking animal blood as a substitute for human blood for his first few years, I’m convinced that’s one of the reasons he was so weak for so long. And so cranky! For whatever reason, animal blood is just not as satisfying for us as human blood is, and I would speculate that it has something to do with the difference in souls. Not to say animal souls are lesser; Mojo had more soul than so many humans I’ve met. But there is a difference. So the animal solution is the vampire equivalent of eating fast food, and it takes its toll.
Those are the main concerns, that young naive mortals should consider seriously before they agree to become one of us. There are many more, but these seem to be required for everyone. Should you be offered the choice to take the Dark Gift, your maker would be having these conversations with you, specific to you, and to them, about other considerations.
I really really like late 18th century waistcoats. Especially the 1790′s ones with the little lapels and straight waistlines, so here’s a photoset of some of my favourite ones. (And here’s a link to my pinterest board with more of them.)
1. Silk waistcoat c. 1790, Centraal Museum
2. Silk waistcoat with woven stripe pattern, c. 1790, Centraal Museum
3. Embroidered silk waistcoat, 1790′s, The Met
4. Embroidered silk waistcoat c. 1797-1801, Museo del Traje
5. Embroidered silk waistcoat c. 1787-89, The Met
6. Embroidered silk waistcoat c. 1785-95, Cooper Hewitt
7. Silk waistcoat with knotted net overlay, c. 1895, Cooper Hewitt
8. Linen canvas waistcoat with silk needlepoint and silk plush trim, c. 1789-94, LACMA
9. Embroidered silk waistcoat c. 1790, Cooper Hewitt
10. Embroidered silk waistcoat c. 1780-95, Cooper Hewitt👌👌
#Lestats closet
If the scene didn’t take place at all how did Louis get such an accurate description of Lestat’s condition? If I recall correctly Armand mostly spent time with Lestat after he and Louis had parted and even if he had visited once before why would he give Louis the full disclosure? It’s not like Louis can take images from Armand’s mind either. Louis might have exaggerated the patheticness of the conversation to get a reaction from Lestat but it’s hard for me to believe that they didn’t meet at all
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*
i’ve seen interview with the vampire
Hey, do you have any really good screencaps of Claudia? Also the one with her finger on her mouth (can picture it but don’t remember what scene.) I’m an artist and going to attempt to draw her. Hopefully I do her justice
Ah, they’re all mixed into my stuff ;A; But yeah, another purpose, originally, of my blog was that there weren’t enough decent IWTV screencaps out there for fanartists to draw from! I ended up not having that as much, just blank, but I make my memes from screencaps I pull, and I gather production stills.
But yes do the thing! Draw her! *u*
Try #the Vampire Claudia tag, bc I usually post images when I talk about the characters. There’s also the #production still tag, but you have to dig for her. Like this one.
^This what you were looking for? Here’s a still of it:
My ask is in two parts. And maybe a little hard. Louis says this in IWTV when they leave for Paris. But what does it mean? “The great adventure of our lives. What does it mean to die when you can live until the end of the world? And what is `the end of the world’ except a phrase, because who knows even what is the world itself? I had now lived in two centuries, seen the illusions of one utterly shattered by the other, been eternally young and eternally ancient, possessing no illusions, living
(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.
“The great adventure of our lives.”
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.
I-want-my-IWTV 