"I rolled over on my face and tucked my arm under my head and started crying like a child. I was perishing from exhaustion. I was worn and miserable and I loved crying. I couldn't do anything else. I gave in to it fully. I felt that profound release of the utterly grief-stricken. I didn't give a damn who saw or heard. I cried and cried.
"Do you know what I think about crying? I think some people have to learn to do it. But once you learn, once you know how to really cry, there's nothing quite like it. I feel sorry for those who don't know the trick. It's like whistling or singing.
"Whatever the case, I was too miserable to take much consolation just from feeling good for a moment in a welter of shudders and salted, bloodstained tears."
"I alone put the fear of God into the servants or tenants by the time I was eighteen. I alone provided the food for us. And for some strange reason this gave me satisfaction. I don't know why, but I liked to sit at the table and reflect that everyone there was eating what I had provided."
- Lestat in The Vampire Lestat
Oh, no. Oh, no. I am going to imprint on Lestat. Help. Why is he so eldest daughter coded? Why do I feel kinship to him? Oh, I am not going to survive this book with my sanity intact.
“Meanwhile Louis and Fontayne had become fast friends. Fontayne had been given a spacious apartment in the new southeast tower, and there they read War and Peace together in English, with Fontayne sometimes reading the novel in Russian to Louis, who was picking up the language very fast.”
TVL reread part 2.5! [In which I am sad a lot because Lestat is a little birdie with broken wings and his dogs are dead. I get mad at Gabrielle for being a terrible Mother. I point out Louis’s privilege and classist themes in this series. And I call out Nicky for being DTF since the very beginning.]
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“Two times in my life I’d tried to escape this life, only to be brought back with my wings broken.” - Lestat
And this quote pretty much summarizes the entirety of my feelings regarding this part of the story.
Overall, I was pretty emotional reading about Lestat’s home life. It just brought up a lot of memories about my time in foster care. My opinion has changed a over the years in regards to Lestat. I found myself really empathizing with him in this chapter.
I actually cried during the wolf fight scene.
I’m embarrassed to admit this but Lestat describes how he witnesses all his dogs get killed then later how he has to put down his horse whom was severely injured. Then this:
What had happened in that one single moment was irreparable, and the next thing I knew I was lying alone in my room. I didn’t have the dogs in bed with me as always in winter because the dogs were dead, and though there was no fire lighted, I climbed, filthy and bloody, under the bed covers and went into deep sleep.
For days I stayed in my room.
Maybe a week passed. When I could stand having other dogs near me, I went down to my kennel and brought up two pups, already big animals, and they kept me company. At night I slept between them.
I was so sad over these fictional pets. What is wrong with me? 😂
We’re only ever told that Lestat’s brothers mistreated him because they were assholes.
But I wonder if the brothers treatment of him worsened since he was obviously favored by Gabrielle and she spent her limited wealth on him.
Lestat mentions he “put the fear of God into the servants”.
I thought this pretty interesting just because I only ever really remembered Louis and Pandora having servants. Maybe Marius did too, i hardly remember B&G. Sybelle at one point “owned” Benji. Lots of classism in this series and it’s always always made me super uncomfortable.
I think it’s pretty shitty of Gabrielle to never have bothered to teach any of her children how to read.
Lestat himself resented her for this, although she did fight for him to be able to go to the monastery. He was obviously self-conscious about being illiterate.
All my life I’d watched her read her Italian books and scribble letters to people in Naples, where she had grown up, yet she had no patience even to teach me or my brothers the alphabet. And nothing had changed after I came back from the monastery. I was twenty and I couldn’t read or write more than a few prayers and my name. I hated the sight of her books; I hated her absorption in them.
That last sentence in particular makes me think this is why Lestat has always been resentful of Louis’s reading habits.
And also it explains why Lestat constantly made snide remarks in Interview about Louis’s wealth. He was obviously jealous and more than a bit resentful about his bourgeois lifestyle because he never had such things growing up and ---wow, that’s fucking sad. I’m sad.
I understand why Lestat feels resentful. I grew up really poor and it’s hard when you see people that are able to afford to get into nice schools, participate in activities that you can’t just because their parents have money and provided those things for them. I had friends whose parents paid for them to take music or art lessons during their free time or sent them to private school and summer camps. And I was always incredibly envious because I was a really good student and got better grades then some of these kids I knew, but that ultimately didn’t matter.
I’m not saying Louis is some entitled rich boy, because he ran the plantation on his own and definitely wasn’t lazy...but he was incredibly privileged (and I fucking love Louis so don’t come at me because will @ back). And Lestat sees that so he acts like a dick to him without maybe being conscious of his own feel of inadequacy that make him act that way. *sigh* This makes me sad and feel a little bit more empathetic towards his characterization in IWTV.
Lestat and Gabrielle bond over mutual thoughts of killing their entire family. ….Yay? 😅
This entire conversation about Nicolas between Lestat and Gabrielle is incredibly foreshadowing about future events and I just can’t get over it:
“And so Nicolas has no violin now?”
“He has a violin. He promptly ran away to Clermont and sold his watch to buy another. He’s impossible all right, and the worst part of it is that he plays rather well.”
“You’ve heard him?”
She knew good music. She grew up with it in Naples. All I’d ever heard were the church choir, the players at the fairs.
“I heard him Sunday when I went to mass,” she said. “He was playing in the upstairs bedroom over the shop. Everyone could hear him, and his father was threatening to break his hands.”
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.
“Of course he’ll never be anything,” she went on.
“Why not?”
“He’s too old. You can’t take up the violin when you’re twenty. But what do I know? He plays magically in his own way. And maybe he can sell his soul to the devil.”
I laughed a little uneasily. It sounded tragic.
HE REALLY DID BECOME ALL OF THOSE THINGS. 😱 I’m sad again.
Lestat is a bottom/switch y’all IDC what you say.
Lestat is trying to ask Nicolas questions about Paris and Nicky’s just like “let’s go somewhere more private. I have a room upstairs” And biiiitch even at fifteen I understood the subtext and people that still believe they’re “just friends” are fucking delusional.
^ Gay. If you don’t think so you are wrong. 👀
I’m gonna end this here but I feel like I may jump over Lestat and Nicky’s time in Paris. Because I already summarized how I felt about that in this post. Nicky pisses me off and I would just rather skip to my son Armand’s introduction.
