What’s also kind of beautiful about this little moment (and part of why we love Lestat) is that we can see Lestat’s internal self-deprecation juxtaposed so starkly w/ his external display. Just a few lines after he reveals how “the sheer excitement was excruciating, and the love I felt for him was positively humiliating”, he has to immediately take a stab at Louis, somehow, and it’s almost stuttered out in these teensy bite-sized sentences:
“One thing, Louis,” “Those clothes. Impossible.”
He wants to make sure Louis is suffering as much as he is, w/o really injuring him, and if he has to stoop so low as to criticize his fashion sense, HE’LL DO IT, DAMN YOU. The Lestat we see in IWTV is an even crueler sassy bastard, much of it being self-defense for how much he was hurting during that time period, too ;A;
Louis is, fortunately, more durable than he appears to be, and clever enough to have figured this out, which is why they’ve survived each other been able to stay together so long ;]
In canon, Louis doesn’t speak a lot in French (sometimes the narrative will indicate the characters have switched to another language but the writing will continue in English for the benefit of the reader). He does throw in a mon dieu! (my god!) here and there. He says it when Lestat first picks him up to show him he has the Cloud Gift in QOTD.
It’s fanon that Louis and Lestat still speak to each other in French, an older version of it that mortals usually aren’t all that familiar with. Lestat still remembers a few old French songs from his childhood.
Louis is actually French, his family moved to New Orleans from France before he took over the plantation from his father: “You see, we lived far better [in Louisiana] than we could have ever lived in France.” – IWTV. So French was most likely his native language.
He gives the interview in English because that’s the language Daniel speaks, and Louis must have learned it at some point, probably in his travels with Armand. But the languages he probably spoke in New Orleans during his ~70 years there were French and Creole, and then when he goes to Paris, he would have spoken the more classic French and he probably had a noticeably Americanized accent, yet another reason for them to dislike him bc TOURISTS.