BIOGRAPHY The first vampire to tell his story to a mortal. The protagonist of Interview with the Vampire, Louis describes to a young reporter what it has been and is like to be a vampire. After nearly two centuries he is weary of his existence.? Louis is twenty-three years old when he becomes a vampire in 1791. A plantation owner in New Orleans, he owns seven other pieces of Louisiana property. He had made himself vulnerable to the vampire Lestat while he was deep in grief over his bother's death. Louis felt responsible for this death because his brother had taken a fatal fall after Louis had refused his request to sell the plantation and use the money for religious work. (IV 4-8) Lestat had then spotted Louis and had fallen in love with his air of despair. Although Louis had been unable to accept the possible sainthood of his brother, he sees Lestat as an angel and suddenly knows "totally the meaning of possibility." (IV 13) Lestat offered him immortality and Louis took it, although at first he begged merely to be killed. (IV 16, 19-20) When he is transformed, Louis is amazed at the vividness of the world around him and at the love he feels for everything. Yet he is horrified by the neccessity of killing mortals for survival. Louis is a dark brown-haired man of the shadows who prefers contemplaton and reading to action and adventure. He does not look willingly into mirrors because there he sees what he cannot control. An intellectual, Louis thinks through the consequences of his behavior rather than acting on whim, as Lestat often does. He is impelled to search for answers to the ultimate questions of life, and he is especially concerned to discover whether God exists, and if so, if that makes him a child of the Devil. Although Louis soon despises Lestat and mourns his decision to become a vampire, he finds a new purpose when he helps Lestat to make Claudia, a five-year-old child, into a vampire. (IV 95) She comes to meaneverything to him, and he attempts to keep her a child, despite the evidence thatinside her tiny body she has matured into a woman. He accompanies Claudia to Europe and when she is destroyed, his world changes dramatically. Louis clings to Claudia's memory and resists the approach of another vampire, Armand, who is strongly attracted to him and who manipulated Claudia's destruction in order to gain Louis's exclusive companionship. By the end of his story, Louis seems cynical; he is unable to appreciate what a gift he has in immortality. (IV 335-341) Lestat's perspective on Louis is that he is the most human of all the immortals, the least godlike. (BT 105) Louis was never able to surrender to his vampire identity, and, as a result, his memories are erroneous, the "sum of his flaws." (VL 499) He does not kill only evildoers - as Lestat does - because he is too passive to make any such judgments. In fact, he causes more innocent blood to be shed than many of the other vampires because he simpy kills almost any person he runs into. (QD 443) Resentfu; and dependant, Louis is never quite able to rise above his human needs and is limited by his fears. He experiences claustrophobia, fear of being alone, fear of heights, and fear of his own passion and freedom. He cannot move into an indefinable immortality and spends much of his vampire existence looking for security, even if it means he must see himself as a child of the Devil and thus eternally damned. When he is later reunited with Lestat in VL, after Lestat has told his own side of the story, they are as lovers rejoined. Nevertheless, Louis never quite gets over his horror at being a vampire and hwen Lestat comes to him in a mortal form in BT and asks for his help in becoming a vampire again. Louis refuses. He willnot willingly pass on the Dark Gift to anyone ever again. (BT 268) Louis is also one of the surviving vampires n QD; Akasha spared him because Lestat loves him. He moves through the novel passively, noticed by the others but saying little, although he does brave Akasha's anger by pointing out that she has no right to intervene in the human world. She responds that he is actually the most predatory of all the immortals. (QD 443) After Akasha's demise, Louis goes ins earch of Claudia. (QD 475) He follows Jesse's lead that Claudia's ghost has appeared in New Orleans and he makes his permanent home there, living in a shack behind a large but empty Victorian house. There he reads by candlelight and is seemingly unaware of all the broken windows. Lestat angrily torches this shack after Louis refuses to help him become a vampure again. (BT 270) Once Lestat gets his body back, however, he confronts Louis, then upon forgiving him invited Louis to live with him again in the refurbished town house. Louis accepts. (BT 258, 405, 429) In MD, Lestat mentions that louis has been with Armand in Paris. This is a breakthrough for Louis because he had been avoiding Paris due to the pain it had caused him from Claudia's death there. However, when Lestatgoes to New Orleans after his ordeal with Memnoch, Louis is waiting for him. David and Armand had shipped Roger's religious treasures to St. Elizabeth's, Lestat's new home, and Louis had set them up and dusted them. "It seemed the right thing to do," he said. (MD 345) He tells Lestat that he is inclined to believe in the authenticity of Veronica's veil, but he makes no real commitment to a religion that has long plagued him with guilt. To prepare Lestat to hear Memnoch's message, Louis helps Maharet chain him. Yet he begs Maharet not to nail Lestat into a windowless, bricked-up room (probably due to the recollection of his own claustrophobic experience when Armand's coven had nailed him into a coffin). While Lestat recovers fromhis shock and horror, Louis takes Wynken de Wilde's books back to the town house to read them. He appreciates the skillful artistry and invites Lestat to join him one day soon in looking through them. (MD 108, 345, 350, 351-352) Louis stays by Lestat's side while Lestat lies on the chapel floor. He sometimes reads to him, after Lestat awakens to the music of Beethoven's Appasionata, Louis plays classical records in hopes of rousing him yet again. This does not work Louis meets Merrick, a Mayfair witch. He asks Merrick to call up the spirit of Claudia in order to ask her where she is and what's happened to her. Merrick agrees to do this and once the spirit appears it curses Louis for what he and Lestat have done to her and now she must suffer in hell. Louis is devestated by this. Seeing Louis, Merrick is taken with him and subtly she bewitches him into making her a vampire. Louis is decieved by her, he believes that he actually loves Merrick. After this he decides to burn himself in the sun. The next evening David and Merrick find his burnt body in a coffin on a street. The burning of Louis finally rouses Lestat out of his stupor. The three feed Louis until he is completely restored. Now Louis is as strong as Lestat and no longer the weakling that he has alway been. Louis, Lestat, David, and Merrick decide to leave New Orleans because the Talamasca has threatened them.
