“And when the night was empty and still, I heard the voices of Interview with the Vampire singing to me, as if they sang from the grave. I read the book over and over. And then in a moment of contemptible anger, I shredded it to bits.”
“… As for the lies he told, the mistakes he made, well, I forgive him his excess of imagination, his bitterness, and his vanity, which was, after all, never very great… But little things like this don’t really matter. He told the tale as he believed it… And why should I bother to tell of the times he came to me in wretched anxiety, begging me never to leave him…”
where Lestat, Louis, and Claudia are walking through the streets, and Lestat is saying how much he wants a Creole to feed on. The following exchange then takes place:
Louis: Yankees are not to your taste?
Lestat: Their Democratic flavor doesn’t suit my palate, Louis.
As someone who was born and lived a good chunk of my childhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts (rather close to Boston), I blinked in surprise.
I was not aware we had a distinct flavor.
OH BUT WE DO.
I think Lestat’s deal is that he has the Mind Gift, and he can *see* his victim’s thoughts (a short reel of their lives, typically showing all the evil scenes prominently, as he targets evildoers) as he kills them. Perhaps as he drains them he can see that the evil they did may have been justified in some way by being Democrats? I don’t really know the political idealogy of immigrants to NOLA in the mid-19th century 😛
His comment was probably more to demonstrate that NOLA was getting gentrified and cleaned up, and the hipsters of that time were taking over, and Old Man Lestat was whinging about how they were ruining the character of the place and that they should get off his lawn, those damned kids!!!
Plus, it’s also kinda hilarious when you remember that Louis had such an enormous struggle killing people before, and now he’s fine with it, and even being totally fine with discussing taste and palette of kills!
Louis saying he wouldn’t “recommend” rats to Claudia, as if he were discussing any perfectly normal food-related topic with his daughter
Louis’ brother: “He had the smoothest skin and the largest blue eyes. He was robust, not thin as I am now and was then” (IWTV) Not sure whether it’s canon or fanon but Paul was supposedly blond. He was 15 when he died, right after an argument in which Louis had laughed at him, had not believed him, and so, felt responsible for Paul’s death.
Louis’ sister: Unnamed (it’s fanon that her name is Henriette “Minette“ de Pointe du Lac), she played the harpsichord. After Paul died “My sister went to bed rather than face the funeral… 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… I did come to know my sister, forbidding her the plantation for the city life which she so needed in order to know her own time of life and her own beauty and come to marry, not brood for our lost brother or my going away or become a nursemaid for our mother.”
Louis’ mother: Unnamed (it’s fanon that her name is
Paulette de Pointe du Lac) Louis didn’t seem to have a great relationship with his mother. When Paul died, “my mother told everyone in the parish that something horrible had happened in my room which I would not reveal; and even the police questioned me, on the word of my own mother.”
Louis’ father: Unnamed (it’s fanon that his name is
Aurestile Jean Michel Pointe du Lac) At the beginning of IWTV, Louis is 25, his father is dead and Louis “was head of the family and I had to defend [Paul] constantly from my mother and sister.” Defend him from their trying to get him to go out and have fun; but Paul was committed to the Bible.
“When you separate an entwined particle and you move both parts away from the other,even at opposite ends of the universe, if you alter or affect one, the other will be identically altered or affected.”
Absolutely agreed. I first read the first four Vampire Chronicles back in the 90s when I was fourteen and I knew then that the one more likely to lie to the reader, perhaps to protect his own ego, would be Lestat. As much as I love him he does have an ego and that was a pretty miserable condition he was in. He admitted he was in that condition yet denied the conversation. It seems more likely that it did happen than that it didn’t.
Yep, I think it did happen, and Lestat’s ego couldn’t handle it.
Ooooh good question! In IWTV, Louis says that he did visit Lestat (and it was in the movie).
We actually don’t know if it happened :-
book!IWTV has Louis following a young vampire to Lestat’s door.
In the Tale of the Body Thief, Lestat says it never happened.
We have discrepancy in canon. Your headcanon may be that it happened, and someone else’s may be that it didn’t. With Louis’ book, was he telling his tale to try to call out Lestat? Maybe he knew that inventing a scene like this might provoke Lestat to respond. If so, it worked, Lestat wrote TVL as a response to IWTV. Also, Louis told his story to Daniel, who then had to send it to his editor(s), so maybe it was invented by someone other than Louis for whatever reason.
So who do I believe? Umm, I don’t think Louis is a liar, and I don’t think anyone invented it. Lestat has said, “I never lie, at least not to those I don’t love.” which means that he DOES lie to those he loves.
I’m going w/ Louis on this and saying that it happened as Louis described it.
1. Book!IWTV:
“Because shortly after that I saw a vampire in New Orleans, a sleek white-faced young man walking alone on the broad sidewalks of St. Charles Avenue…” (this mystery vampire kills a woman and takes her baby to a shabby old house where he meets up with another vampire) “My eyes widened as I studied this stooped and shivering vampire whose rich blond hair hung down in loose waves covering his face… I saw clearly, unmistakably, the profile of Lestat, that smooth skin now devoid of even the faintest trace of his old scars.”
BTW, it’s implied that that young vampire was one of Lestat’s own fledglings (another mystery fledgling?!):
“ `You all leave me!’ he whined now in a thin, high-pitched voice.“
(Louis taps at the window)
…” `It’s Louis! Louis!’ he said. `Let him in’ And he gestured frantically, like an invalid, for the young `nurse’ to obey. … and I could see the tears welling in his eyes…How baffling and awful it was, this smoothfaced, shimmering immortal man bent and rattled and whining like a crone.”
2. HOWEVER…
In Tale of the Body Thief, Lestat calls Louis a liar, and I think he’s referring to the whole visit scene:
“Ah, that makes you out to be a perfect liar,” I said furiously. “You described my weeping in your miserable memoir in a scene which we both know did not take place!”
Seldom did I see my feet in black socks. I knew almost nothing personally about my feet. They looked rather small for the twenty-first century. Bad luck. But six feet was still a good height.
“I’m Lestat,” I said in a low voice. “Your Lestat. I’m the same Lestat you’ve always known, and no matter how I’m changed, I’m still that same being.”
“I know,” he said warmly.
I kissed him. I pressed my lips to his and I held this kiss for a long silent moment. And then I gave in to a silent wave of feeling, and I took him in my arms. I held him tight against me. I felt his unmistakable silken skin, his soft shining black hair. I heard the blood throbbing in him, and time dissolved, and it seemed I was in some old and secret place, some warm tropical grotto we’d once shared, ours alone in some way, with the scent of sweet olive blossoms and the whisper of moist breeze. “I love you,” I whispered.
In a low intimate voice, he answered: “My heart is yours.”(Lestat and Louis in Prince Lestat, by
I-want-my-IWTV 