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LESTAT: The name of Lestat creates a quick, analytical, and clever mind; you are creative, versatile, original, and independent. You have large ambitions, and it is difficult for you to be tolerant and understanding of those who desire less in life or who are more slow and methodical by nature. Patience is not your forte. You do, however, have leadership ability and would never be happy in a subservient position. You are ambitious and aggressive by nature. You would be happiest in positions where you are free to express individually and creatively and where opportunities are not restricted; you desire freedom, and do not tolerate being possessed by others. You appreciate change and travel, and the opportunity to meet and mix with others, and to influence them with your creative ideas. You are very self-confident and feel you can accomplish anything you set out to do, and you can, although, this name does not allow proper completion of undertakings, and forced changes cause financial losses and bitter experiences. This name also creates caustic _expression_ and moods which prevent harmony and happiness in close association. When under strain, tension could affect the stomach and solar plexus. There is a tendency for you to worry. BIOGRAPHY The vampire who made Louis into a vampire and therefore was responsible for telling of The Vampire Chronicles. He is the narrator of VL, QD, BT, and MD, but makes his entrance in IV. When Louis becomes a vampire in IV, he claims that a blond blue-eyed, angel-faced vampire who quoted Shakespeare - Lestat - seduced him. However, Lestat loses the air of innocence and enchantment when Louis notes that Lestat seemed quite nonchalant, even wasteful, about the act of killing. Louis goes on to present Lestat as a thoughtless, vulgar, self-centered being who covets Louis's plantation and who whines whenever things fail to go his way. (IV 13, 25-34) Lestat even makes a child vampire, Claudia, whom he intends to use to control Louis (although in BT, Lestat almost redeems himself by confessing to his motives for that act were to acquire a friend, pupil, muse, and daughter). Louis and Claudia attempt to rid themselves of their maker by cutting him to pieces and tossing him into the swamp, but Lestat survives and returns for revenge. They manage to escape Lestat's clutches when he is trapped in a burning town house. (IV 95-160) In the first draft of IV, Lestat's involvement with Louis ends here. Louis leaves him in the burning town house, concluding that what he left behind was not really Lestat but an animated corpse much like the creatures he later sees in Eastern Europe. To his mind, Lestat is dead. Another dimension of Lestat added in this early version is that Lestat had been a poet as a boy; it was his poetry, full of dreams and longings, that endeared Louis to him. When Louis tries to get Lestat to talk about his poetry, Lestat curtly dismisses it, as he views it a s merely an idealistic boy's worthless fancies. In the published version of IV, Lestat reenters the lives of Louis and Claudia in Paris, where he incites the coven at the Theater of the Vampires to destroy Claudia. (In VL, Lestat claims to have only been guilty of not defending her.) Louis does not mention Lestat again until he encounters him years later in New Orleans, when Lestat is too weak to kill for himself and seems to be slowly dying from his inability to adapt to change. Despite Lestat's pleas for Louis to remain there with him, Louis leaves and is not really sure what happened to Lestat. (IV 297-306, 329-335) VL picks up after the publication of IV. Lestat had weakened to the point of going into the ground in a trancelike state from 1929 until 1984. Barely aware of the changing world, he is awakened by the sound of rock music being played down the street. He rises and feeds on animals until he is ready to face the world again. He visits the rock group down the street, they hand him a paperback copy of IV, and Lestat reads it and decides to write his own story. In Lestat's mind, Louis, whom Lestat described as the "sum of his flaws," has misperceived their whole relationship because of his dependent, resentful perspective. Lestat wants to set the record straight, and he begins his story by showing how he jumps right into things. (VL 13, 498) In VL, Lestat tells about his life as a mortal in France, where he was the seventh son of an indigent marquis, and only one of the three sons who survived. His character is formed from the conflicting demands of being aristocratic but poor. At the age of twelve, he decides he wants to pursue life in the monastery because he loves the rituals, orderliness, and sense of being good. His father forbids it and takes Lestat's books away. Lestat later attempts to run away with a wandering group, but is once again thwarted. (VL 23, 30-35) Responsive to change and restraint to monotony, Lestat goes out to hunt a pack of wolves and nearly dies trying to fight off these eight hunger-maddened animals. As a result oh his bravery, Nicolas, the son of a local merchant, befriends him. (VL 23-28, 42-63) Together, Lestat and Nicolas go to Paris, where they eventually become part of a theater group. There, a vampire, Magnus, targets Lestat to become his heir. Lestat resists but is overpowered. The same night Lestat becomes a vampire, Magnus destroys himself, leaving Lestat to learn all by himself what it means to be a vampire. Lestat's sense of adventure and curiosity propels him into his new form of existence. He is twenty years old. (Lestat gives his age as twenty-one when he fought the wolves, so this is a contradiction in the text.) (VL 63-96) Eventually Lestat makes his dying mother, Gabrielle, a vampire, along with Nicolas. (VL 158, 238) In the process he encounters Armand and his coven, which then strive to bring Lestat's new existence to an end. They have existed for centuries according to a system of rules and rituals, and Lestat's "unvampirelkie" behavior, according to their ideas, threatens their manner of existence. Much to Armand's grief, Lestat instead empowers the coven to break free of their long tradition of religious superstition. Armand then wants to join with Lestat and Gabrielle, telling them his story in an attempt to gain their sympathy, but they leave him behind in Paris. Lestat decides to seek out Armand's maker, Marius, in a quest to find a deeper understanding of what it means to be a vampire. (VL 209-233, 382, 318) The search takes ten years, and Lestat eventually despairs of achieving any success, going into a ground to experience "the first death." (VL 323-363) Marius then arrives and resuscitates him, taking him to an island where he tells Lestat the tale of the origins of the vampire race and shows him the vampire Father and Mother, Enkil and Akasha. (VL 367-466) Lestat brashly wakes the Mother, Akasha, and drinks her blood until Enkil tears him away from her; nevertheless, the brief nourishment empowers Lestat to sustain a near-fatal attack years later from his fledglings, Louis and Claudia. Marius sends Lestat away for his own goes, and Lestat arrives in New Orleans to be with his aging mortal father. (VL 486, 492, 493) When Lestat encounters Louis there, he senses in him an echo of Nicolas: an intense, self-destructive, and cynical nature, one filled with despair. (VL 497) Louis's beauty, refinement, and "staggering dependence" seduce Lestat, and he makes Louis into a vampire. Louis's anger and resentment strain their relationship until Lestat makes Claudia, both to see what would happen when the Dark Gift was given to a child and to keep Louis with him. He also performs the act in an attempt to feel like God, for he is creating another being in his own image. he enjoys the little "family" he has created, but Louis and Claudia view him with fear and mistrust. After an uneasy bond that lasts sixty-five years, Lestat's two fledglings decide to seek their freedom and rise up against him. (VL 498-501, IV 112-137) After the attack, Lestat is considerably weakened and his injuries only increase when he seeks out Armand to help him. Nursing nearly a century's worth of bitterness for having had his life (i.e., his coven) dismantled and for having been rejected, Armand pushes Lestat off a tower. He also uses Lestat to help destroy Claudia so that Armand can have Louis for himself. (VL 505-508) Lestat finally takes refuge in a house in New Orleans, where he lives off the blood of animals. (Lestat claims that the scene Louis describes in IV, of him groveling and pleading with Louis not to leave him, never took place; and both go on to allude to this fabrication in BT.) In 1929, Lestat goes into the ground, for the second time to allow his battered body to heal. (VL 508-513, BT 108) Lestat lives according to his own whim and in brash defiance of social propriety and rules of conduct. "My strength, my will, my refusal to give up," he claims, "those are the only components of my heart and soul which I can truly identify." (BT 252) Yes, Lestat courts disaster and tragedy, such as the time he decides to fly straight into the sun (BT 47), but he also gains rewards from his excess and the risks he takes. For example, although he is told not to reveal what he knows of other vampires, he deliberately tells all about his race in his autobiography. "I want to affect things," he exclaims, "to make something happen!" (VL 522) The vampire establishment does rise against him, but Akasha chooses to favor and protect him. As a vampire, Lestat wants to use his evil image to do good. His goal is eventually to redeem himself, and so he chooses to feed on those mortals who commit the most evil against their own kind: serial killers. Lestat also becomes a rock star, partly because he wants to spread vampire lore through his songs in order to inspire mortals to eradicate vampires, and partly because he loves to play to an audience: "I could feel the attention as if it were an embrace." (VL 67) He equates actors and musicians with saints, so the medium of rock music seems to him to be the perfect way to do good with his evil nature. (VL 520, 531) Yet his music brings the Mother, Akasha, out into the open, and she abducts him to make him her partner in killing off the most of the world's population of men so that she can reign over women as the vampire goddess. (QD 299) Lestat resists, but in the process becomes more aware of what he is: a vampire. Akasha teaches him the true strength of his powers and he moves toward the more godlike aspects of being a vampire. He can fly through the air, move or burn through things telepathically, survive the sun, and exercise other vampiric powers to their greatest degree. Although he craves blood more than ever, he discovers he is actually free of requiring blood for his survival. (QD 466, BT 2, 10) On the heels of his experience with Akasha, Lestat befriends the mortal David Talbot of the Talamasca. He lures David toward vampirism even as he is lured toward becoming a human. (BT 31) Lestat's two firm beliefs - both of which are proven to be illusions in BT - are that no mortal can refuse the Dark Gift (but David does) and that vampires want to be mortal again. (BT 109) Lestat meets Raglan James, who offers to temporarily switch bodies with him so that Lestat can experience once more what it is like to be a human. Lestat agrees but upon making the switch and becoming mortal soon realizes he prefers being a vampire. Raglan James, however, has other ideas; he has taken Lestat's body permanently, whish requires Lestat to forcibly steal his body back. This adventure dispels all of Lestat's illusions about being redeemed. Of his own free will, he has chosen to be reborn to darkness and he also furthers his notion of himself as an evil creature by forcing David into accepting the Dark Gift. (BT 165-167, 206, 340, 417-422) Lestat dictates his next book, Memnoch the Devil, to David Talbot, who records it for him. He begins with an episode of being stalked while he himself is stalking a notorious killer names, Roger. Sensing something different about his stalker, Lestat believes the Devil is after his soul. He discusses whether there is some connection between Lestat's targeted victim and this creature that so frightens him. Lestat is unsure, so he kills Roger to find out. To his astonishment, Roger then appears to him as a ghost. (MD 4-39) Roger tells Lestat the story of how he acquired wealth via criminal activities and how he used it to collect valuable religious artifacts from a round the world. He wants to give something to his daughter, Dora, a televangelist, to help ground her religion on something solid and miraculous. Among his possessions are twelve books by a mystic named Wynken de Wilde, who had devised a spiritual path that involved great sensuality. Roger wants Lestat to keep these books safe and also to appear to Dora as proof of the supernatural. Lestat is unsure about the latter, but he agrees to do what he can for Dora. (MD 48-92) He meets Dora in New Orleans at her home, St. Elizabeth's, a former orphanage. Although she realizes he is not human, she shows no fear. He tells her he wants to help her, but the presence of his stalker, whom he knows is most definitely interested in his soul, causes him to flee. (MD 110-128) The stalker turns out to be the Devil, although he calls himself Memnoch. He tells Lestat that he is not evil and that, in fact, he desires to reverse the tide of evil in the world. For that, he needs help from someone as strong as Lestat. He invites Lestat to come with him to meet God and to see Heaven and Hell. Afterward, he can make his decision whether or not to become the Devil's lieutenant. (MD 129-140) Memnoch tells Lestat about the nature of angels and the stages of creation. The key point he wants to emphasize is that by making destruction, death, and suffering part of the energy exchange of nature, God Himself included evil in His plan. Human beings, God insisted, are part of nature and thus part of the cycle. Memnoch claims to disagree with this, believing that the human spirit places humans somewhere between nature and divinity. He pleads with God to allow the souls of deceased humans into Heaven, but God allows only those He feels are worthy. At Memnoch's urging, however, God temporarily became a man to experience for Himself a human's perspective. Contrary to Memnoch's wishes, He offered Himself as sacrifice for the purpose of redeeming more souls. Memnoch thinks this scheme only resulted in more tyranny, suffering, and evil among humans. (MD 171-172) God invites Lestat to witness His passion. Lestat lines up with the crowd, who watch Christ carry the cross to His execution. he sees Veronica offer her veil and watches as Christ's face miraculously imprints itself on the material. Christ invites Lestat to drink his blood. As Lestat does so, he experiences a powerful sense of light and divinity, followed by an excruciating feeling of separation. For safekeeping, Christ the gives him the veil. Lestat flees with it, but Memnoch takes him on a journey straight into the bloody history of Christianity. Lestat keeps the veil out of harm's way, particularly during the Fourth Crusade. (MD 280-290) For Lestat's benefit, Memnoch replicates the discussion he had with God over the Devil's function on Earth in which it was decided that Memnoch's activities would contribute to purifying and illuminating souls in preparation for redemption. Memnoch then takes Lestat to Hell to show him where the souls are purged; however, they suffer extreme torment in the process. When Lestat sees how these souls are plagued by their victims, he realizes his own victims are awaiting him. Fleeing from Hell, he refuses to serve either God or the Devil. Memnoch tries to grab him and hold him fast, but instead ends up ripping out his left eye. Lestat escapes to Manhattan, where he had left Dora, feeling that none of them will ever truly be safe again. To gain sustenance without harming her, Lestat drinks from her menstrual blood, linking her to Veronica, the woman whom Christ had healed of a chronic flow of blood. Lestat vows never to take another human victim. (MD 291-324) David and Armand are with Dora, so Lestat tells them all at once what he has been through. He shows them the veil. Against Lestat's wishes, Dora takes it and displays it to the public as a miracle of Christianity. The media creates an event of it and people flock to Manhattan. To Lestat's horror, Armand destroys himself in the sun to affirm the veil's authenticity and the truth of God's existence, and other vampires soon follow suit. Lestat realizes that he has inadvertently given new life to a destructive religion. The spectacle drives him back to New Orleans; Dora has given him St. Elizabeth's and all of Roger's relics, so he goes there. Louis is waiting for him there, and Maharet arrives with a message from Memnoch. (MD 329-350) She gives Lestat back his eye, then binds his in chains as she tells him what Memnoch has to say. Memnoch congratulates Lestat on a job well done. Shocked and outraged, Lestat cannot bear to believe that he might have been a pawn in the Devil's game. When Maharet deems it safe, she unchains him and leaves. Lestat wanders the city, unable to feel any sense of certainty or security. What he has witnessed may have been the ultimate truth, a pack of lies and hallucinations, or part truth, part fiction. He does not know the meaning of his story, but he believes it happened just as he told it: "That is all I know." (MD 353) He ends the book by saying that he will pass now from fiction to legend. Throughout the next novel, The Vampire Armand, Lestat lies in a stupor on the chapel's floor being covered by dust. Louis, and the others visit him and stay with him, even Gabrielle returns to look over her son. When Armand gets stronger after his burning he also comes to visit him and also to find out if Lestat truly drank the blood of Christ. Armand disregards all warnings and drinks from Lestat. Something very powerful pushes Armand away but later he says that it was not Lestat. At the end of the novel Lestat is awakened by the Appassionata played by Marius' fledgling on the piano. After that Lestat slowly regresses but David continually plays classical music for him. The final push out of the stupor comes when Louis tries to burn himself in the novel Merrick. Lestat, David, and Merrick feed him their blood and finally Louis is fully regenerated and stronger than ever. Lestat and his little coven come under a threat from the Talamasca and they decide to leave New Orleans. |
