"What principles? " I asked. Ignoring the question, she went on.
"Imagine, " she said, "not merely this stealthy and loathsome feeding on mortals, but something grand as the Tower of Babel was grand before it was brought down by the wrath off God. I mean a leader set up in a Satanic palace who sends out his followers to turn brother against brother, to cause mothers to kill their children, to put all the fine accomplishments of mankind to the torch, to scorch the land itself so that all would die of hunger, innocent and guilty! Make suffering and chaos wherever you turn, and strike down the forces of good so that men despair. Now that is something worthy of being called evil. That is what the work of a devil really is. We are nothing, you and I, except exotica in the Savage Garden, as you told me. And the world of men is no more or less now than what I saw in my books in the Auvergne years ago. " 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.
"But what about your aesthetic questions? " I asked. "What you explained to Armand before, that you wanted to know why beauty existed and why it continues to affect us? " She shrugged.
"When the world of man collapses in ruin, beauty will take over. The trees shall grow again where there were streets; the flowers will again cover the meadow that is now a dank field of hovels. That shall be the purpose of the Satanic master, to see the wild grass and the dense forest cover up all trace of the once great cities until nothing remains.
"And why call all this Satanic? " I asked. "Why not call it chaos?
That is all it would be. "
"Because, " she said, "that is what men would call it. They invented Satan, didn't they? Satanic is merely the name they give to the behavior of those who would disrupt the orderly way in which men want to live. "
"I don't see it. "
"Well, use your preternatural brain, my blue-eyed one, " she answered, "my golden-haired son, my handsome wolfkiller. It is very possible that God made the world as Armand said. "
"This is what you discovered in the forest? You were told this by the leaves? " She laughed at me.
"Of course, God is not necessarily anthropomorphic, " she said. "Or what we would call, in our colossal egotism and sentimentality, 'a decent person.' But there is probably God. Satan, however, was man's invention, a name for the force that seeks to overthrow the civilized order of things. The first man who made laws-be he Moses or some ancient Egyptian king Osiris- that lawmaker created the devil. The devil meant the one who tempts you to break the laws. And we are truly Satanic in that we follow no law for man's protection. So why not truly disrupt? Why not make a blaze of evil to consume all the civilizations of the earth? " I was too appalled to answer.
"Don't worry. " She laughed. "I won't do it. But I wonder what will happen in the decades to come. Will not somebody do it? "
"I hope not! " I said. "Or let me put it this way. If one of us tries, then there shall be war. "
"Why? Everyone will follow him. "
"I will not. I will make the war. "
"Oh, you are too amusing, Lestat, " she said.
"It's petty, " I said.
"Petty! " She had looked away, out into the courtyard, but she looked back and the color rose in her face. "To topple all the cities of the earth? I understood when you called the Theater of the Vampires petty, but now you are contradicting yourself. "
"It is petty to destroy anything merely for the sake of the destroying, don't you think? "
"You're impossible, " she said. "Sometime in the far future there may be such a leader. He will reduce man to the nakedness and fear from which he came. And we shall feed upon him effortlessly as we have always done, and the Savage Garden, as you call it, will cover the world. "
"I almost hope someone does attempt it, " I said. "Because I would rise up against him and do everything to defeat him. And possibly I could be saved, I could be good again in my own eyes, as I set out to save man from this. " I was very angry. I'd left my chair and walked out into the courtyard. She came right behind me.
"You have just given the oldest argument in Christendom for the existence of evil, " she said.
"It exists so that we may fight it and do good. "
"How dreary and stupid, " I said.
"What I don't understand about you is this, " she said. "You hold to your old belief in goodness with a tenacity that is virtually unshakable. Yet you are so good at being what you are! You hunt your victims like a dark angel. You kill ruthlessly. You feast all the night long on victims when you choose. "
"So? " I looked at her coldly. "I don't know how to be bad at being bad. " She laughed.
"I was a good marksman when I was a young man, " I said, "a good actor on the stage. And now I am a good vampire. So much for our understanding of the word 'good. "' After she had gone, I lay on my back on the flagstones in the courtyard and looked up at the stars, thinking of all the paintings and the sculptures that I had seen merely in the single city of Florence. I knew that I hated places where there are only towering trees, and the softest and sweetest music to me was the sound of human voices. But what did it matter really what I thought or felt? But she didn't always bludgeon me with strange philosophy. Now and then when she appeared, she spoke of the practical things she'd learned. She was actually braver and more adventurous than I was. She taught me things. We could sleep in the earth, she had ascertained that before we ever left France. Coffins and graves did not matter. And she would find herself rising naturally out of the earth at sunset even before she was awake. And those mortals who did find us during the daylight hours, unless they exposed us to the sun at once, were doomed. For example, outside Palermo she had slept in a cellar far below an abandoned house, and when she had awakened, her eyes and face were burning as if they had been scalded, and she had in her right hand a mortal, quite dead, who had apparently attempted to disturb her rest.
"He was strangled, " she said, "and my hand was still locked on his throat. And my face had been burned by the little light that leaked down from the opened door. "
"What if there had been several mortals? " I asked, vaguely enchanted with her. She shook her head and shrugged. She always slept in the earth now, not in cellars or coffins. No one would ever disturb her rest again. It did not matter to her. I did not say so, but I believed there was a grace in sleeping in the crypt. There was a romance to rising from the grave. I was in fact going to the very opposite extreme in that I had coffins made for myself in places where we lingered, and I slept not in the graveyard or the church, as was our most common custom, but in hiding places within the house. I can't say that she didn't sometimes patiently listen to me when I told her these things. She listened when I described to her the great works of art I had seen in the Vatican museum, or the chorus I had heard in the cathedral, or the dreams I had in the last hour before rising, dreams that seemed to be sparked by the thoughts of mortals passing my lair. But maybe she was watching my lips move. Who could possibly tell? And then she was gone again without explanation, and I walked the streets alone, whispering aloud to Marius and writing to him the long, long messages that took the whole night sometimes to complete.
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. " By the time we left Italy I was playing dangerous little games with mortals. I'd see a man, or a woman-a human being who looked perfect to me spiritually- and I would follow the human about. Maybe for a week I'd do this, then a month, sometimes even longer than that. I'd fall in love with the being. I'd imagine friendship, conversation, intimacy that we could never have. In some magical and imaginary moment I would say: "But you see what I am, " and this human being, in supreme spiritual understanding, would say: "Yes, I see. I understand.