"I have kept you here as surely as your father has, " she said. "Not on account of pride, but on account of selfishness. And now I'm going to atone for it. I'll see you go. And I don't care what you do when you reach Paris, whether you sing while Nicolas plays the violin, or turn somersaults on the stage at the St. Germain Fair. But go, and do what you will do as best you can. " 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.
"Nicolas's father knows about your plans, " she said. "The innkeeper overheard you. It's important you leave right away. Take the diligence at dawn, and write to me as soon as you reach Paris. There are letter writers at the cemetery of les Innocents near the St. Germain Market. Find one who can write Italian for you. And then no one will be able to read the letter but me. " When she left the room, I didn't quite believe what had happened. For a long moment I stood staring before me. I stared at my bed with its mattress of straw, at the two coats I owned and the red cloak, and my one pair of leather shoes by the hearth. I stared out the narrow slit of a window at the black hulk of the mountains I'd known all my life. The darkness, the gloom, slid back from me for a precious moment. And then I was rushing down the stairs and down the mountain to the village to find Nicolas and to tell him we were going to Paris! We were going to do it. Nothing could stop us this time. He was with his family watching the bonfire. 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. The air smelled fresh and green as it does only in spring. Even the villagers' singing didn't sound so horrible. I started dancing around in a circle.
"Get your violin! " I said. "Play a song about going to Paris, we're on our way. We're going in the morning! "
"And how are we going to feed ourselves in Paris? " he sang out as he made with his empty hands to play an invisible violin. "Are you going to shoot rats for our supper? "
"Don't ask what we'll do when we get there! " I said. "The important thing is just to get there. "
7
Not even a fortnight passed before I stood in the midst of the noonday crowds in the vast public cemetery of les Innocents, with its old vaults and stinking open graves-the most fantastical marketplace I had ever beheld-and, amid the stench and the noise, bent over an Italian letter writer dictating my first letter to my mother. Yes, we had arrived safely after traveling day and night, and we had rooms in the lie de la Cite, and we were inexpressibly happy, and Paris was warm and beautiful and magnificent beyond all imagining. I wished I could have taken the pen myself and written to her. I wished I could have told her what it was like, seeing these towering mansions, ancient winding streets aswarm with beggars, peddlers, noblemen, houses of four and five stories banking the crowded boulevards. I wished I could have described the carriages to her, the rumbling confections of gilt and glass bullying their way over the Pont Neuf and the Pont Notre Dame, streaming past the Louvre, the Palais Royal. I wished I could describe the people, the gentlemen with their clocked stockings and silver walking sticks, tripping through the mud in pastel slippers, the ladies with their pearl- encrusted wigs and swaying panniers of silk and muslin, my first certain glimpse of Queen Marie Antoinette herself walking boldly through the gardens of the Tuileries. Of course she'd seen it all years and years before I was born. She'd lived in Naples and London and Rome with her father. But I wanted to tell her what she had given to me, how it was to hear the choir in Notre Dame, to push into the jam-packed cafes with Nicolas, talk with his old student cronies over English coffee, what it was like to get dressed up in Nicolas's fine clothes-he made me do it-and stand below the footlights at the Comedie-Francaise gazing up in adoration at the actors on the stage. But all I wrote in this letter was perhaps the very best of it, the address of the garret rims we called our home in the lie de la Cite, and the news:
"I have been hired in a real theater to study as an actor with a fine prospect of performing very soon. " What I didn't tell her was that we had to walk up six flights of stairs to our rooms, that men and women brawled and screamed in the alleyways beneath our windows, that we had run out of money already, thanks to my dragging us to every opera, ballet, and drama in town. And that the establishment where I worked was a shabby little boulevard theater, one step up from a platform at the fair, and my jobs were to help the players dress, sell tickets, sweep up, and throw out the troublemakers. But I was in paradise again. And so was Nicolas though no decent orchestra in the city would hire him, and he was now playing solos with the little bunch of musicians in the theater where I worked, and when we were really pinched he did play right on the boulevard, with me beside him, holding out the hat. We were shameless! We ran up the steps each night with our bottle of cheap wine and a loaf of fine sweet Parisian bread, which was ambrosia after what we'd eaten in the Auvergne.
And in the light of our one tallow candle, the garret was the most glorious place I'd ever inhabited. As I mentioned before, I'd seldom been in a little wooden roam except in the inn. Well, this room had plaster walls and a plaster ceiling! It was really Paris! It had polished wood flooring, and even a tiny little fireplace with a new chimney which actually made a draft. 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. By day I almost forgot the vision of the inn, and the darkness. Unless, of course, I glimpsed some uncollected corpse in a filthy alleyway, of which there were many, or I happened upon a public execution in the place de Grave. And I was always happening upon a public execution in the place de Grave. I'd wander out of the square shuddering, almost moaning. I could become obsessed with it if not distracted. But Nicolas was adamant.
"Lestat, no talk of the eternal, the immutable, the unknowable! " He threatened to hit me or shake me if I should start. And when twilight came on-the time I hated more than ever-whether I had seen an execution or not, whether the day had been glorious or vexing, the trembling would start in me. And only one thing saved me from it: the warmth and excitement of the brightly lighted theater, and I made sure that before dusk I was safely inside. Now, in the Paris of those times, the theaters of the boulevards weren't even legitimate houses at all. Only the Comedie-Francaise and the Theatre des Italians were government- sanctioned theaters, and to them all serious drama belonged. This included tragedy as well as comedy, the plays off Racine, Corneille, the brilliant Voltaire. But the old Italian commedia that I loved-Pantaloon, Harlequin, Scaramouche, and the rest- lived on as they always had, with tightrope walkers, acrobats, jugglers, and puppeteers, in the platform spectacles at the St. Germain and the St. Laurent fairs. And the boulevard theaters had grown out of these fairs. By my time, the last decades of the eighteenth century, they were permanent establishments along the boulevard du Temple, and though they played to the poor who couldn't afford the grand houses, they also collected a very well-to-do crowd. Plenty of the aristocracy and the rich bourgeoisie crowded into the loges to see the boulevard performances, because they were lively and full of good talent, and not so stiff as the plays of the great Racine or the great Voltaire. We did the Italian comedy just as I'd learned it before, full of improvisation so that every night it was new and different yet always the same. And we also did singing and all kinds of nonsense, not just because the people loved it, but because we had to: we couldn't be accused of breaking the monopoly of the state theaters on straight plays. The house itself was a rickety wooden rattrap, seating no more than three hundred, but its little stage and props were elegant, it had a luxurious blue velvet stage curtain, and its private boxes had screens. And its actors and actresses were seasoned and truly talented, or so it seemed to me. Even if I hadn't had this newly acquired dread of the dark, this "malady of mortality, " as Nicolas persisted in calling it, it couldn't have been more exciting to go through that stage door. For five to six hours every evening, I lived and breathed in a little universe of shouting and laughing and quarreling men and women, struggling for this one and against that one, aid of us comrades in the wings even if we weren't friends. Maybe it was like being in a little boat on the ocean, all of us pulling together, unable to escape each other. It was divine. Nicolas was slightly less enthusiastic, but then that was to be expected. And he got even more ironical when his rich student friends came around to talk to him. They thought he was a lunatic to live as he did. And for me, a nobleman shoveling actresses into their costumes and emptying slop buckets, they had not words at all. Of course all that these young bourgeois really wanted was to be aristocrats. They bought titles, married into aristocratic families whenever they could. And it's one of the little jokes of history that they got mixed up in the Revolution, and helped to abolish the class which in fact they really wanted to join. 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. I was learning everything I could about the stage. I memorized, I mimicked. I asked endless questions. And only stopped my education long enough each night for that moment when Nicolas played his solo on the violin. He'd rise from his seat in the tiny orchestra, the spotlight would pick him out from the others, and he would rip into a little sonata, sweet enough and just short enough to bring down the house. And all the while I dreamed of my own moment; when the old actors, whom I studied and pestered and imitated and waited upon like a lackey, would finally say: "All right, Lestat, tonight we need you as Lelio. Now you ought to know what to do. " It came in late August at last. Paris was at its warmest, and the nights were almost balmy and the house was full of a restless audience canning itself with handkerchiefs and handbills. The thick white paint was melting on my face as I put it on. I wore a pasteboard sword with Nicolas's best velvet coat, and I was trembling before I stepped on the stage thinking, 'This is like waiting to be executed or something.' But as soon as I stepped out there, I turned and looked directly into the jam-packed hall and the strangest thing happened. The fear evaporated. I beamed at the audience and very slowly I bowed. I stared at the lovely Flaminia as if I were seeing her for the first time. I had to win her. The romp began. The stage belonged to me as it had years and years ago in that far-off " country town. And as we pranced madly together across the boards-quarreling, embracing, clowning- laughter rocked the house. I could feel the attention as if it were an embrace. Each gesture, each line brought a roar from the audience-it was too easy almost-and we could have worked it for another half hour if the other actors, eager to get into the next trick as they called it, hadn't forced us finally towards the wings. The crowd was standing up to applaud us. And it wasn't that country audience under the open sky. These were Parisians shouting for Lelio and Flaminia to come back out. In the shadows off the wings, I reeled. I almost collapsed. I could not see anything for the moment but the vision of the audience gazing up at me over the footlights. I wanted to go right back on stage. I grabbed Flanunia and kissed her and realized that she was kissing me back passionately. Then Renaud, the old manager, pulled her away.