The Vampire Lestat by Anne RiceMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
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“A PSYCHOLOGICAL, MYTHOLOGICAL SOJOURN…
FRIGHTENING, SENSUAL…
We feel for these creatures….Anne Rice will live on through the ages of literature…. To read her is to become giddy as if spinning through the mind of time, to become lightheaded as if our blood is slowly being drained away.”
San Francisco Chronicle
My favorite review of hers on the back of my copy of the book!
“Lestat is more than a sequel to Interview; it's also a prequel and a supplement, swallowing the earlier novel whole….Lestat is fiercely ambitious, nothing less than a complete unnatural history of vampires…. In Anne Rice's hands, vampires have come of age. They now have a history and a vital new tradition; instead of creeping about in charnel houses, they stand center stage, with a thousand spotlights on them. And they smile straight at the camera, licking without shame their voluptuous lips and white, sharp teeth.”
The Village Voice
“She has redefined the nature of the vampire….what Rice has created is the gestalt [an organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts] of the vampire, a mythos that encompasses this monster’s history, passions and weakness in startling and even incredible detail, the monster made so real, so palpable that it is as if the vampire actually existed before it emerged from the pages of this book….here, then, is the vampire Lestat…come to dreadful and dazzling life, holding the power to haunt our imaginations and beckoning us to some sense of magic inside ourselves. What can one say but that—Dracula is dead. Vive Lestat! [Italian]”
Houston Chronicle
I got this book online from Thrift Books. The book is so much heavier than I expected! The pages almost feel like the pages of a bible. They’re so soft! And the smell of the pages is so lovely!
I can’t believe it’s been years since I read The Vampire Chronicles!!
Photo on 11-3-22 at 6.34 PM, I love the embellished book designs throughout this book! <3
“I am The Vampire Lestat. I'm immortal. More or less. The light of the sun, the sustained heat of an intense fire—these things might destroy me. But then again, they might not.
I'm six feet tall, which was fairly impressive in the 1780s when I was a young mortal man. It's not bad now. I have thick blond hair, not quite shoulder length, and rather curly, which appears white under fluorescent light. My eyes are gray, but they absorb the colors blue or violet easily from surfaces around them. And I have a fairly short narrow nose, and a mouth that is well shaped but just a little too big for my face. It can look very mean, or extremely generous, my mouth. It always looks sensual. But emotions and attitudes are always reflected in my entire expression. I have a continuously animated face.
My vampire nature reveals itself in extremely white and highly reflective skin that has to be powdered down for cameras of any kind.
And if I'm starved for blood I look like a perfect horror—skin shrunken, veins like ropes over the contours of my bones. But I don't let that happen now. And the only consistent indication that I am not human is my fingernails. It's the same with all vampires. Our fingernails look like glass. And some people notice that when they don't notice anything else” (3).
“Regarding my English—the language I use in my autobiography—I first learned it from a flatboatmen who came down the Mississippi to New Orleans about two hundred years ago. I learned more after that from the English language writers—everybody from Shakespeare through Mark Twain to H. Rider Haggard, whom I read as the decades passed. The final infusion I received from the detective stories of the early twentieth century in the Black Mask magazine. The adventures of Sam Spade by Dashiell Hammett in Black Mask were the last stories I read before I went literally and figuratively underground.
That was in New Orleans in 1929” (3-4).
The first issue of the Black Mask magazine from April 1920.
September 1929 issue.
“I was enchanted by the world of rock music—the way the singers could scream of good and evil, proclaim themselves angels or devils, and mortals would stand up and cheer. Sometimes they seemed the pure embodiment of madness. And yet it was technologically dazzling, the intricacy of their performance. It was barbaric and cerebral in a way that I don't think the world of ages past had ever seen” (5).
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1fetCPkFQ0ynmRIxqtOqa9?si=b8e37ab5582b4e76
“...and I had a little Sony Walkman stereo in my pocket that fed Bach's Art of the Fugue through tiny earphones right into my head as I blazed along” (6).
“During much of that time, I was roaming again, crashing through the night on my Harley-Davidson motorcycle with the Bach Goldberg Variations turned up to full volume” (13).
“All the more reason for me to bring the book and the band called The Vampire Lestat to fame as quickly as possible. I had to find Louis. I had to talk to him. In fact, after reading his account of things, I ached for him, ached for his romantic illusions, and even his dishonesty. I ached even for his gentlemanly malice and his physical presence, the deceptively soft sound of his voice.
Of course I hated him for the lies he told about me. But the love was far greater than the hate. He had shared the dark and romantic years of the nineteenth century with me, he was my companion as no other immortal had ever been.
And I ached to write my story for him, not an answer to his malice in Interview with the Vampire, but the tale of all the things I'd seen and learned before I came to him, the story I could not tell him before” (16).
Lestat “ached” four times for Louis. 🖤
“But that other lovely possibility of real revelation and disaster… Well, that added a hell of a lot of spice!” (18).
Oh God! XD
“On the giant television set I played the cassette of the beautiful Visconti film Death in Venice” (18).
“And she had very clear cobalt blue eyes fringed with thick ashen lashes” (36).
“But there was one startling young man among them I didn't recognize immediately.
He was my age perhaps, and quite tall, and when our eyes met I remembered who he was. Nicolas de Lenfent, eldest son of the draper, who had been sent to school in Paris.
He was a vision now” (41).
🖤
“I took the cloak and the boots. I thanked them as effusively as I'd ever thanked anybody for anything.
And behind me, I heard my brother Augustin say:
‘Now he will really be impossible!’
I felt my face color. Outrageous that he should say this in the presence of these men, but when I glanced to Nicolas de Lenfent I saw the most affectionate expression on his face.
‘I too am impossible, Monsieur,’ he whispered as I gave him the parting kiss. ‘Someday, will you let me come to talk to you and tell me how you killed them all? Only the impossible can do the impossible.’
None of the merchants ever spoke to me like that. We were boys again for a moment. And I laughed out loud. His father was disconcerted. My brothers stopped whispering, but Nicolas de Lenfent kept smiling with a Parisian's composure” (42).
*blushes* XD ♥️
“I gave a little gasp at the cruelty of it. I was powerfully fascinated! I think I loved him already, doing what he wanted like that” (43).
❤️
“But no matter how deadening was this sarcasm of his, a great energy poured out of him, an irrepressible passion. And this drew me to him. I think I loved him. Another two glasses of wine and I might say something absolutely ridiculous like that” (47).
<3 XD
“I laughed.
‘If I turn into a wolf,’ I answered, ‘I can tell you this much. I won't hang around here to kill the children. I'll get away from this miserable little hellhole of a village where they still terrify little boys with tales of burning witches. I'll get on the road to Paris and never stop till I see her ramparts.’
‘And you'll find Paris is a miserable hellhole,’ he said. ‘Where they break the bones of thieves on the wheel for the vulgar crowds in the place de Grève.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I'll see a splendid city where great ideas are born in the minds of the populace, ideas that go forth to illuminate the darkened comers of this world.’
‘Ah, you are a dreamer!’ he said, but he was delighted. He was beyond handsome when he smiled.
‘And I'll know people like you,’ I went on, ‘people who have thoughts in their heads and quick tongues with which to voice them, and we'll sit in cafés and we'll drink together and we'll clash with each other violently in words, and we'll talk for the rest of our lives in divine excitement.’
He reached out and put his arm around my neck and kissed me. We almost upset the table we were so blissfully drunk.
‘My lord, the wolfkiller,’ he whispered” (48-49).
This picture is from one of the graphic novels. It is on page nine of Lelio Rising (Anne Rice's The Vampire Lestat #2) by Faye Perozich (Adapter), Daerick Gröss (Illustrator), Vickie Williams (Letterer), John Bolton (Cover Artist), David Campiti (Editor), Anne Rice (Original Author)
“The words began to pour out of me as they had out of him, and soon we were talking about a thousand things we had felt in our hearts, varieties of secret loneliness, and the words seemed to be essential words the way they did on those rare occasions with my mother. And as we came to describe our longings and dissatisfactions, we were saying things to each other with great exuberance, like ‘Yes, yes,’ and ‘Exactly,’ and ‘I know completely what you mean,’ and ‘And yes, of course, you felt that you could not bear it,’ etc” (49).
I love that Lestat found his equal: someone who understands him. I think all of us want that in some capacity. 💔
“I had never known music like it, the rawness of it, the intensity, the rapid glittering torrents of notes that came out of the strings as he sawed away. It was Mozart that he was playing, and it had all the gaiety, the velocity, and the sheer loveliness of everything Mozart wrote.
When he'd finished, I was staring at him and I realized I was gripping the sides of my head.
‘Monsieur, what's the matter!’ he said, almost helplessly, and I stood up and threw my arms around him and kissed him on both cheeks and kissed the violin.
‘Stop calling me Monsieur,’ I said. ‘Call me by my name.’ I lay back down on the bed and buried my face on my arm and started to cry, and once I'd started I couldn't stop it.
He sat next to me, hugging me and asking me why I was crying, and though I couldn't tell him, I could see that he was overwhelmed that his music had produced this effect. There was no sarcasm or bitterness in him now.
I think he carried me home that night.
And the next morning I was standing in the crooked stone street in front of his father's shop, tossing pebbles up at his window.
When he stuck his head out, I said:
‘Do you want to come down and go on with our conversation?’” (49-50).
This beach is SO damn dramatic, isn’t he?! OMG!! XDXD I loved the part where he got so mad when Nicki didn’t call him by his name. I mean, I was wondering that as well, especially since they’ve been talking for four hours! And then the crying into his arm! Mon Dieu, Lestat ! He definitely is an actor and performer!! And then it ends with Lestat doing what the people do in those old movies; throwing pebbles at their partner’s windows. I have to admit that that was so cute!
“...and even in moments of exquisite happiness there was the darkness lurking, the sense of our frailty and our hopelessness” (59).
“I tried to take her in my arms. She stiffened at first but then I felt her weaken and she melted against me, and she gave herself over so completely to me in that moment that I think I understood why she had always been so restrained. She cried, which I'd never heard her do. And I loved this moment for all its pain. I was ashamed of loving it, but I wouldn't let her go. I held her tightly, and maybe kissed her for all the times she'd never let me do it. We seemed for the moment like two parts of the same thing.
And then she grew calm. She seemed to settle into herself, and slowly but very firmly she released me and pushed me away.
She talked for a long time. She said things I didn't understand then, about how when she would see me riding out to hunt, she felt some wondrous pleasure in it, and she felt that same pleasure when I angered everyone and thundered my questions at my father and brothers as to why we had to live the way we lived. She spoke in an almost eerie way of my being a secret part of her anatomy, of my being the organ for her which women do not really have.
‘You are the man in me,’ she said. ‘And so I've kept you here, afraid of living without you, and maybe now in sending you away, I am only doing what I have done before.’
She shocked me a little. I never thought a woman could feel or articulate anything quite like this” (61-62).
I feel that I can relate to Gabrielle de Lioncourt here. I have similar feelings to her. I really want to be a man sometimes. A man with a flat chest and torso, so I could wear exquisite suits and shiny dress shoes. And wear my hair short and style it as a side part and have waves like that 1920s inspired hairstyle I wore for that party and also similar to Sam Reid’s hair in Despite the Falling Snow (2016). I want to wear ties and especially suspenders and feel supported in myself, in my clothes. And be most confident in myself. Oh what a dream that would be!
“And as soon as he saw me, he threw his arm around my neck, and I hooked my arm around his waist and I dragged him away from the crowds and the blaze, and towards the end of the meadow” (62).
<3 Nicki + Lestat = LeNicki? idk <3
“So what if we had to sleep on lumpy pallets, and the neighbors woke us up fighting. We were waking up in Paris, and could roam arm in arm for hours through streets and alleyways, peering into shops full of jewelry and plate, tapestries and statues, wealth such as I'd never seen. Even the reeking meat markets delighted me. The crash and clatter of the city, the tireless busyness of its thousands upon thousands of laborers, clerks, craftsmen, the comings and goings of an endless multitude” (64-65).
♡ I appreciate and admire how Lestat feels about the magical city of Paris. I feel the same way about New York and I love that!
“I didn't care if we ever saw Nicolas's friends again. The actors didn't know about my family, and in favor of the very simple Lestat de Valois, which meant nothing actually, I'd dropped my real name, de Lioncourt” (66).
“The sleep was slipping off me like garments” (79).
“I saw the partially opened window, and then suddenly the glass burst into thousands of fragments and the wooden frame was broken out. I was flying over the alleyway, six stories above the ground.
I screamed. I kicked at this thing that was carrying me. Caught up in the red cloak, I twisted, trying to get loose.
But we were flying over the rooftop, and now going up the straight surface of a brick wall! I was dangling in the arm of the creature, and then very suddenly on the surface of a high place, I was thrown down” (80).
This is similar to how Lestat treated Louis in the show.
“He lifted his hands and stroked my head as I cringed.
‘Sunlight in the hair,’ he whispered, ‘and the blue sky fixed forever in your eyes.’ He seemed almost meditative as he looked at me. His breath had no smell whatsoever, nor did his body, it seemed. The smell of mold was coming from his clothes” (86).
“In sum he was dressed as men had been centuries before. I had seen such clothes in tapestries in my home, in the paintings of Caravaggio and La Tour that hung in my mother's rooms” (86).
The Calling of Saint Matthew (1599) by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.
The Payment of Dues (1630) by Georges de La Tour
“‘Mon Dieu!’ I whispered” (94).
The first, « Mon Dieu ! » that I have seen so far in The Vampire Chronicles! :D
“With an ugly shock, I opened my eyes. The human in me looked helplessly about this chamber. He started to weep again and the newborn fiend was too young yet to rein him in. The sobs came up like hiccups, and I put my hand over my mouth.
Magnus, why did you leave me? Magnus, what I am supposed to do, how do I go on?
I drew up my knees and rested my head on them, and slowly my head began to clear.
Well, it has been great fun pretending you will be this vampire creature, I thought, wearing these splendid clothes, running your fingers through all that glorious lucre. But you can't live as this! You can't feed on living beings! Even if you are a monster, you have a conscience in you, natural to you . . . Good and Evil, good and evil. You cannot live without believing in— You cannot abide the acts that— Tomorrow you will . . . you will . . . you will what?
You will drink blood, won't you?
The gold and the precious stones glowed like embers in the nearby chest, and beyond the bars of the window, there rose against the gray clouds the violet shimmer of the distant city. What is their blood like? Hot living blood, not monster blood. My tongue pushed at the roof of my mouth, at my fangs.
Think on it, Wolfkiller” (105).
“Well, the stench was nothing to the sight of it.
In a deep prison cell lay a heap of corpses in all states of decay, the bones and rotted flesh crawling with worms and insects. Rats ran from the light of the torch, brushing past my legs as they made for the stairs. And my nausea became a knot in my throat. The stench suffocated me.
But I couldn't stop staring at these bodies. There was something important here, something terribly important, to be realized. And it came to me suddenly that all these dead victims had been men—their boots and ragged clothing gave evidence of that—and every single one of them had yellow hair, very much like my own hair. The few who had features left appeared to be young men, tall, slight of build. And the most recent occupant here—the wet and reeking corpse that lay with its arms outstretched through the bars—so resembled me that he might have been a brother.
In a daze, I moved forward until the tip of my boot touched his head. I lowered the torch, my mouth opening as if to scream. The wet sticky eyes that swarmed with gnats were blue eyes!” (107).
“Pain circled my ribs. Blood came up like liquid fire into my mouth and it shot out of my lips, splashing on the floor in front of me. I had to reach for the open door to steady myself.
But through the haze of nausea, I stared at the blood. I stared at the gorgeous crimson color of it in the light of the torch. I watched the blood darken as it sank into the mortar between the stones. The blood was alive and the sweet smell of it cut like a blade through the stench of the dead. Spasms of thirst drove away the nausea. My back was arching. I was bending lower and lower to the blood with astonishing elasticity.
And all the while, my thoughts raced: This young man had been alive in this cell; this rotted food and milk were here either to nourish or torment him. He had died in the cell, trapped with those corpses, knowing full well he would soon be one of them.
God, to suffer that! To suffer that! And how many others had known exactly the same fate, young men with yellow hair, all of them.
I was down on my knees and bending over. I held the torch low with my left hand and my head went all the way down to the blood, my tongue flashing out of my mouth so that I saw it like the tongue of a lizard. It scraped at the blood on the floor. Shivers of ecstasy. Oh, too lovely!
Was I doing this? Was I lapping up this blood not two inches from this dead body? Was my heart heaving with every taste not two inches from this dead boy whom Magnus had brought here as he brought me? This boy that Magnus had then condemned to death instead of immortality?” (107-108).
“My back was arching” LOL XDDDD
“Why wasn't I locked in this cell? What test had I passed that I was not screaming now as I shook the bars, the horror that I had foreseen in the village inn slowly closing in on me?” (108).
“Ordinary objects in the room appeared to dance. A chest stared at me with its brass knobs for eyes. And a woman singing in an upstairs room over the low rumble of a stove seemed to be saying something in a low and vibrant secret language, such as Come to me” (119).
“In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art—the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard's canvases—beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawless as the earth had been eons before man had one single coherent thought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beauty was a Savage Garden” (131).
“But something else stirred in me, collecting strength so fast my mind raced to catch up with it and deny it even as it threatened to grow out of control. And I knew it for what it was, something monstrous and enormous and natural to me as the sun was unnatural. I wanted Nicki. I wanted him as surely as any victim I'd ever struggled with in the Ile de la Cité. I wanted his blood flowing into me, wanted its taste and its smell and its heat” (134).
<3
“I let the thirst rage. I let it tear at my insides. I just clung to the rafter and I saw in one great recollection all my victims, the scum of Paris, scraped up from its gutters, and I knew the madness of the course I'd chosen, and the lie of it, and what I really was. What a sublime idiocy that I had dragged that paltry morality with me, striking down the damned ones only—seeking to be saved in spite of it all? What had I thought I was, a righteous partner to the judges and executioners of Paris who strike down the poor for crimes that the rich commit every day? Strong wine I'd had, in chipped and broken vessels, and now the priest was standing before me at the foot of the altar with the golden chalice in his hands, and the wine inside it was the Blood of the Lamb” (135).
I know this is weird, but later in this quote Anne mentioned the blood of the lamb. Sam Reid was part of a project that involved something called “Lambs of God”. I just watched it for Sam, but on my second viewing I might just have to watch it thoroughly.
* My mom and I are watching AMC’s IWTV together and I love that! I explained to her that Anne Rice’s vampires are not following the Dracula rules and most importantly that Anne Rice’s vampires have no sexual desire at all. I was extremely excited talking about her universe and Ale had plenty of questions to ask! I loved that very much!! I explained to her personally because that’s the only way that she would understand, I think. I said that, “it’s like if you and my dad loved each other and you had no sexual organs and you still loved each other. It’s a companion love.” I thought that was a good way to explain how Anne Rice’s vampires love each other.
“I was humming the little ditty I'd sung as Lelio, no more than a fragment of the part, but the one I'd carried in the streets afterwards with me, ‘lovely, lovely, Flaminia,’ and on and on, the words forming meaningless sounds” (136).
I wonder what this “ditty” sounds like. I hope there’s a recording of it somewhere.
“And I knew my vision of the garden of savage beauty had been a true vision. There was meaning in the world, yes, and laws, and inevitability, but they had only to do with the aesthetic. And in this Savage Garden, these innocent ones belonged in the vampire's arms. A thousand other things can be said about the world, but only aesthetic principles can be verified, and these things alone remain the same” (143).
“‘Tomorrow . . . tomorrow night,’ I think I stammered. That line came back to me from Shakespeare's Macbeth … ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…’” (147).
Lestat is so dramatic lol ever the theater kid are we? XD
“She threw back her head and her laughter shook loose from her, growing louder and louder, until I put my hand over her mouth.
‘You can shatter all the glass in the room with your voice,’ I whispered” (161).
Now that I think about it, the scene where Claudia shatters the mirror with her screaming makes sense after reading this.
“‘If you follow your conscience, you do what you want,’ I said. ‘But it was simpler than that. I wanted you to have the wealth I gave you. I wanted you . . . to be happy.’
She reflected for a long time.
‘Would you have had me forget you?’ I demanded. It sounded spiteful, angry.
She didn't answer immediately.
‘No, of course not,’ she said. ‘And had it been the other way around, I would never have forgotten you either. I'm sure of it. But the rest of them? I don't give a damn about them. I shall never exchange words with them again. I shall never lay eyes on them.’
I nodded. But I hated what she was saying. She frightened me.
‘I cannot overcome this notion that I've died,’ she said. ‘That I am utterly cut off from all living creatures. I can taste, I can see, I can feel. I can drink blood. But I am like something that cannot be seen, cannot affect things.’
‘It's not so,’ I said. ‘And how long do you think it will sustain you, feeling and seeing and touching and tasting, if there is no love? No one with you?’
The same uncomprehending expression.
‘Oh, why do I bother to tell you this?’ I said. ‘I am with you. We're together. You don't know what it was like when I was alone. You can't imagine it’” (178-179).
💔
* I’m just after reading the part where Gabrielle cuts off her hair and she notices that it grows back the next night. I just have to say that I relate to Gabrielle on quite a few levels and I love her! I love this character immensely! I love Gabrielle de Lioncourt! <3 She just wants to be free! She is not a woman or a man, she is simply herself. I love that she wants to wear men’s clothes and cut off that annoying hair. I want the same! X( I want to be free and have a flat chest and torso and be able to wear all those lovely men’s suits and dress shoes. I want my hair short and style it in the 20s side part style. I might have said this already, but it is my dream and fantasy.
“A thousand Benedictions after that one had engraved into my mind the words of the old hymn.
O Salutaris Hostia
Quae caeli pandis ostium
Bella premunt hostilia,
Da robur, fer auxilium . . .” (191).
Translated from Latin to English:
O Salvation Host
What heavens do you open the door to?
Wars oppress enemies,
Give strength, bring help
“‘We're in the church!’ I whispered. ‘And we're safe.’
The singing surged on. ‘Tantum ergo Sacramentum, Veneremur cernui’” (192).
Translated from Latin to English: So I saw only the Sacrament, Venerem
“He moved into the glow of the candles on the side altar. His clothes were black velvet, once beautiful, and now eaten away by time, and crusted with dirt. But his face was shining white, and perfect, the countenance of a god it seemed, a Cupid out of Caravaggio, seductive yet ethereal, with auburn hair and dark brown eyes” (200).
Amor Vincit Omnia (Cupid as Victor) (Love Conquers All from Latin) by Italian painter Caravaggio.
Wow! This might as well be Armand! Also, Armand is such a liar in this scene here where Lestat first meets him. Like what is his problem?? He lied to his coven deliberately? And for what, Armand? I need to understand this character again…
“‘I shall never harm you, young one,’ she said. ‘Either of you.’ She looked lovingly at Gabrielle. ‘You are on the Devil's Road to a great adventure. What right have I to intervene in what the centuries have in store for you?’
The Devil's Road. It was the first phrase from any of them that had rung a clarion in my soul” (218).
“The faraway voice sharpened, like a note sung in the high mountains, touching my chest where I had laid my hand.
It pierced me as a beam pierces darkness, singing Come to me; all things will be forgiven if only you come to me. I am more alone than I have ever been” (251).
“But I felt an elation, an ecstasy. It was as if my spirit could know the glory of the Dark Trick without the blood flowing, in the intimacy of the voice dividing me and seeking the tenderest, most secret part of my soul” (251).
“And I saw his face in Notre Dame, boyish and almost sweet, like the face of an old da Vinci saint. A horrid sense of fatality passed over me” (252).
“St. John the Baptist” by Italian painter, Leonardo da Vinci.
“I waited. I wanted him to beg. I wanted him to give me that powerful voice full of lies and cunning, the voice that had made me believe for one pure and dazzling instant that I was alive and free and in the state of grace again. Damnable, unforgivable lie. Lie I'd never forget for as long as I walked the earth. I wanted the rage to carry me over the threshold to his grave” (277).
“‘So the time will come when you will seek other mortals,’ he went on, ‘hoping once more that the Dark trick will bring you the love you crave. And of these newly mutilated and unpredictable children you'll try to fashion your citadels against time. Well, they will be prisons if they last for half a century. I warn you. It is only with those as powerful and wise as yourself that the true citadel against time can be built’” (285).
“‘I curse you,’ and I felt it as if he'd declaimed it.
‘I offered myself to you at the moment you vanquished me,’ he said. ‘Remember that when your dark children strike out at you, when they rise up against you. Remember me’” (286).
“She spoke of what mattered to her with no thought of what had befallen him.
Come to a different plane, she had said, my plane. And he was stymied and belittled” (289).
* I thought it was kind of funny that Armand asked Lestat to love him and immediately when Lestat told him no Armand went straight to cursing him in entire rage! XDDDDDDD LOL Like DAM BEACH! Get a grip! - Part 5: The Vampire Armand: Chapter 2
* So after reading Armand's story, does Armand want Lestat to "love him" because Lestat reminds Armand of his Master, Marius? Because of his red cloak that reminded him of Marius's red cloak? His same blue eyes and light hair?
“‘That is merely another mystery,’ I said. ‘And there are a thousand mysteries. I think of Marius! And I'm too much the slave of my own obsessions and fascination. It's a dreadful thing to linger so on Marius, to extract that one radiant figure from the tale” (308).
“‘Doesn't matter,’ he said, eyes still on the fire. ‘You think too much in terms of decision and action. This tale is no explanation. And I am not a being who requires a respectful acknowledgment in your thoughts or in words. And we all know the answer you have given is too immense to be voiced and we all three of us know that it is final. What I don't know is why. So I am a creature very different from you, and so you cannot understand me. Why can't I go with you? I will do whatever you wish if you take me with you. I will be under your spell’” (309).
Does Armand want a new Master?
“He became the da Vinci saint again, or more truly the little god from Caravaggio” (316).
Bacchus (Dionysus) by Italian painter, Michelangelo Merisi de Caravaggio.
“But for me, there was no going back to Paris, no matter how lonely I might become. The world around me had become my lover and my teacher. I was enraptured with the cathedrals and castles, the museums and palaces that I saw. In every place I visited, I went to the heart of society: I drank up its entertainments and its gossip, its literature and its music, its architecture and its art” (329).
This is true for Lestat, the aesthete!
“He was the confidant who received my excitement, my enthusiasm, my sublime bewilderment at all the wonders and puzzles of the world” (331).
“I hated this conversation. And yet I was glad she was in the room with me, that I was speaking to somebody other than a poor deceived mortal. That I wasn't alone with my letters from home” (334).
😔
“What did I want of her, that she be more human, that she be like me? Armand's predictions obsessed me. And how could she not think of them? She must have known what was happening, that we were growing ever farther apart, that my heart was breaking and I had too much pride to say it to her.
‘Please, Gabrielle, I cannot endure the loneliness! Stay with me’” (337).
😢
* I think Lestat is human in that he fears loneliness and his love of art.
“There was more. Apologies, assurances, particulars . . . it ceased to make sense.
I put the letter down on the desk. I stared at the wood and the pool of light made by the lamp.
‘Don't go to him,’ she said.
Her voice was small and insignificant in the silence. But the silence was like an immense scream.
‘Don't go to him,’ she said again. The tears streaked her face like clown paint, two long streams of red coming from her eyes.
‘Get out,’ I whispered. The word trailed off and suddenly my voice swelled again. ‘Get out,’ I said. And again my voice didn't stop. It merely went on until I said the words again with shattering violence: ‘GET OUT!’” (350-351).
I can understand why Gabrielle hid the letter from Lestat: because she wanted to spend time with him without him being so worried, but I wonder why she doesn’t want Lestat to go to his father. Is it because of the way that he treated him? I am also fascinated at seeing Lestat caring for his family in his immortality.
“4
I dreamed a dream of family. We were all embracing one another. Even Gabrielle in a velvet gown was there. The castle was blackened, all burnt up. The treasures I had deposited were melted or turned into ashes. It always comes back to ashes. But is the old quote actually ashes to ashes or dust to dust?
Didn't matter. I had gone back and made them all into vampires, and there we were, the House de Lioncourt, whitefaced beauties even to the bloodsucking baby that lay in the cradle and the mother who bent to give it the wriggling longtailed gray rat upon which it was to feed.
We laughed and we kissed one another as we walked through the ashes, my white brothers, their white wives, the ghostly children chattering together about victims, my blind father, who like a biblical figure had risen, crying:
‘I CAN SEE!’
My oldest brother put his arm around me. He looked marvelous in decent clothes. I'd never seen him look so good, and the vampiric blood had made him so spare and so spiritual in expression.
‘You know it's a damn good thing you came when you did with all the Dark Gifts.’ He laughed cheerfully.
‘The Dark Tricks, dear, the Dark Tricks,’ said his wife.
‘Because if you hadn't,’ he continued, ‘why, we'd all be dead!’” (351).
Part 6: On the Devil’s Road from Paris to Cairo: Chapter 4:
I thought that dream Lestat had was so sad because he just wants everything to go right. Then Gabrielle just wants Lestat to be with her, but he doesn't want what she wants, so they have to separate. So much sadness!!!! :'((((
Oh, chapter 4 may be the most saddest chapter in this novel! 😞
“‘But where will you go?’
‘To a little house in the race Dumaine in the old French city of New Orleans,’ I answered coldly, precisely. ‘And after he has died and is at rest, I haven't the slightest idea’” (352).
Oh, but, Lestat, you will! So soon enough you will have quite the adventure and be oh so in love! Hehe! XD
“‘You sense my loneliness,’ I answered, ‘my bitterness at being shut out of life. My bitterness that I'm evil, that I don't deserve to be loved and yet I need love hungrily. My horror that I can never reveal myself to mortals. But these things don't stop me, Mother. I'm too strong for them to stop me. As you said yourself once, I am very good at being what I am. These things merely now and then make me suffer, that's all’” (355).
Oh dear God this scene where Gabrielle leaves Lestat is SO sad! It made me all teary eyed! 😢
“But I couldn't move. In a cold silent way I imagined myself looking throughout Cairo for her. Calling her, telling her to come back. It almost seemed for a moment that I had done it, that, thoroughly humiliated, I had run after her, and I had tried to tell her again about destiny: that I had been meant to lose her just as Nicki had been meant to lose his hands. Somehow we had to subvert the destiny. We had to triumph after all” (355).
I thought that was an interesting point Lestat made about destiny. They were meant for these things, weren’t they, Les?
“‘All the stories I have told you are finally as useless as all ancient knowledge is to man and to us. Its images and its poetry can be beautiful; it can make us shiver with the recognition of things we have always suspected or felt. It can draw us back to times when the earth was new to man, and wondrous. But always we come back to the way the earth is now.
‘And in this world the vampire is only a Dark God. He is a Child of Darkness. He can't be anything else. And if he wields any lovely power upon the minds of men, it is only because the human imagination is a secret place of primitive memories and unconfessed desires. The mind of each man is a Savage Garden, to use your phrase, in which all manner of creatures rise and fall, and anthems are sung and things imagined that must finally be condemned and disavowed” (465).
“‘Marius, I can't imagine leaving now. I can't even…’ I felt anger suddenly. Why had he brought me here to cast me out? And I remembered all Armand's admonitions to me. It is only with the old ones that we find communion, not with those we create. And I had found Marius. But these were mere words. They didn't touch the core of what I felt, the sudden misery and fear of separation” (468).
Awwww, poor Lestat with his constant “fear of separation.” :’(
“I looked at the young blond-haired rake in the mirror.
‘Well, if it isn't the vampire Lestat,’ I said (491).
This part made me laugh out loud! Lol I was like this mofo really just did that?! XDDDD
“I think it was a palace in Germany where Haydn wrote his music” (491).
“...wandering out again to glimpse the silent flash of lightning, hear the dim roar of the thunder, feel the silky warmth of the summer rain” (494).
https://youtu.be/0AdNbz-wt1Y?t=167
Quote starts at 2:47 in this video.
“But I loved him, plain and simple. And it was out of the desperation to keep him, to bind him closer to me at the most precarious of moments, that I committed the most selfish and impulsive act of my entire life among the living dead. It was the crime that was to be my undoing: the creation with Louis and for Louis of Claudia, a stunningly beautiful vampire child” (498).
“His blindness to the motives or the suffering of others was as much a part of his charm as his soft unkempt black hair or the eternally troubled expression in his green eyes.
And why should I bother to tell of the times he came to me in wretched anxiety, begging me never to leave him, of the times we walked together and talked together, acted Shakespeare together for Claudia's amusement, or went arm in arm to hunt the riverfront taverns or to waltz with the dark-skinned beauties of the celebrated quadroon balls?
Read between the lines” (499).
I feel like there should be a “bitch” at the end of this last sentence because of the way Lestat said it! XD Like damn, beach! XDDDD
“Oh, Lestat, you deserve everything that ever happened to you. You'd better not die. You might actually go to hell” (501).
Lol when Lestat talks to himself XD
“Once again his eyes moved over me caressingly” (503).
Armand was like 😍 looking at Lestat. Lol he still out here asking to be loved by Lestat after all that happened between them! XD What did you expect, you beach lol XDDDD He basically checking him out looking him up and down! XD <3
“And then the descent into that hideous cellar full of ugly copies of the bloodiest paintings of Goya and Brueghel and Bosch” (505).
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Saturn Devouring His Son, 1819–1823 by Francisco de Goya
“Then I went back to reading about the Maltese Falcon, my lips moving to speak Sam Spade's lines” (510).
I love the sight of Lestat laying on the ground and casually reading detective stories XD
“The parquet floor glistened in the light of the chandelier and there was music coming from everywhere, the sound of a Vienna waltz, the rich harmony of violins” (512).
“Had they seen the video films: The Legacy of Magnus, The Children of Darkness, Those Who Must Be Kept?” (520).
“‘But at the moment,’ he said, ‘I think you are the one that they want to destroy. And they do know what you look like.’ Little smile. ‘Everybody knows now what you look like. Monsieur Le Rock Star’” (525).
<3 SO CUTE!! LOUSTAT!!
“The Dance of les Innocents is pounding through the walls’” (528).
“‘Is this an offer, Louis? Have you come back to me, as lovers say?’
His eyes darkened and he looked away from me.
‘I’m not mocking you, Louis,’ I said.
‘You've come back to me, Lestat,’ he said evenly, looking at me again. ‘When I heard the first whispers of you at Dracula's Daughter, I felt something that I thought was gone forever—’ He paused” (531-532).
<3
“‘Very well, then,’ he said. ‘I would like to go into San Francisco with you. I would like that very much. Will you take me with you?’
I couldn't immediately answer. Again, the sheer excitement was excruciating, and the love I felt for him was positively humiliating.
‘Of course I'll take you with me,’ I said.
We looked at each other for a tense moment. He had to leave now. The morning had come for him.
‘One thing, Louis,’ I said.
‘Yes?’
‘Those clothes. Impossible. I mean, tomorrow night, as they say in the twentieth century, you will lose that sweater and those pants’” (532).
Awwww lol
“The vast sprawling parking lots of the San Francisco Cow Palace were overflowing with frenzied mortals as our motorcade pushed through the gates, my musicians in the limousine ahead, Louis in the leatherlined Porsche beside me. Crisp and shining in the black-caped costume of the band, he looked as if he'd stepped out of the pages of his own story, his green eyes passing a little fearfully over the screaming youngsters and motorcycle guards who kept them back and away from us” (533).
<3 SO CUTE LOL
“The vibration went through my temples. A layer of skin was being peeled off. I clasped Louis's arm, gave him a lingering kiss, and then felt him release me.
Everywhere beyond the curtain people snapped on their little chemical cigarette lighters, until thousands and thousands of tiny flames trembled in the gloom” (534).
LOUSTAT ATTACKED ME HEREE <3333
Middle blue green / #8dd9cc Hex Color Code is LOUSTAT’s color, in my opinion.
This is what Lestat saw and it looks amazing! 🤩
“They were chanting in unison, now the volume swelling, what was it, LESTAT, LESTAT, LESTAT.
Oh, this is too divine. What mortal could withstand this indulgence, this worship? I clasped the ends of my black cloak, which was the signal. I shook out my hair to its fullest. And these gestures sent a current of renewed screaming to the very back of the hall” (536).
ME! I would be screaming his name too! XD I can totally see Sam Reid flipping his hair on stage and everyone going crazy for it! XDDDD
“I pitched myself into the dance, swinging my hips elastically, then pumping them as the two of us moved towards the edge of the stage” (538).
Oh my! I really want to see those hips lol XD 😍
“‘I AM TELLING YOU I AM A VAMPIRE!’ I screamed suddenly.
Ecstasy, delirium.
‘I AM EVIL! EVIL!’
‘Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, YES, YES, YES.’
I threw out my arms, my hands curved upwards:
‘I WANT TO DRINK UP YOUR SOULS!’” (539).
DAMN! Lol this bitch so extra XD
“Deliver me from this, deliver me from loving it. Deliver me from forgetting everything else, and sacrificing all purpose, all resolve to it. I want you, my babies. I want your blood, innocent blood. I want your adoration at the moment when I sink my teeth. Yes, this is beyond all temptation” (540).
<3 Awww we’re Lestat’s babies XD :D
“Unbroken screaming, like fifteen thousand drunks on the town, right up to the final moments, when it was the ballad from the last clip, Age of Innocence” (540).
“And Louis had been so taken with her, sitting back in the shadows as he watched her, reticent, musing as he'd always been. Immaculate he was again, as if his garments were entirely at his command, and we'd just come from the last act of La Traviata to watch the mortals drink their champagne at the marble-top cafe tables as the fashionable carriages clattered past” (547).
“‘Mon Dieu, it could have been anything,’ Gabrielle had said finally. ‘That music of yours could wake the dead’” (548).
Maybe Lestat learned this phrase from his mother!
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