Do what it is your nature to do

“Do what it is your nature to do” is the decisive imperative Lestat gives Louis when Louis’s conscience has made vampiric existence almost unbearable. Spoken beside the river after Louis has killed, the sentence presents appetite not as a temptation that can be escaped but as a nature that demands recognition. Its force lies in the conflict it creates: Louis experiences killing as both a source of peace and the proof of a damnable identity, while Lestat turns that contradiction into a command to proceed.

Context and Speaker

The expression occurs after Louis has been driven into profound psychological distress by the implications of his existence as a vampire. He has discovered that killing brings him a moment of peace, whereas feeding on beings less than human leaves him with only vague longing and dissatisfaction. Even while the warm blood of a murdered girl gives him physical strength and pleasure, he asks whether he can return to being human. His question exposes the gap between his moral desire and his bodily condition.

Lestat answers this crisis not with reassurance that Louis can recover humanity, but by interpreting pain itself as evidence. In the quiet darkness near the river, Louis briefly loses both pain and confusion while listening to the wind and flowing water. Lestat’s voice then interrupts that fragile stillness with the imperative, telling Louis to do what his nature requires and presenting the moment of relief as only a taste of what vampiric action can provide. The wording makes the command sound less like an argument than a law of being.

Meaning in Louis’s Transformation

The expression defines vampirism as an embodied condition that instructs the mind. Louis has attempted to make ethics govern appetite, but his experience repeatedly reverses that order: his body finds satisfaction in killing, while his consciousness produces guilt, longing, and the wish to return to mortal life. Lestat insists that Louis should not turn away from this evidence. The imperative therefore asks him to accept the lesson of his own physical nature rather than preserve a moral identity formed for human life.

Lestat immediately links the command to an end of suffering. He tells Louis that a vampire feels pain with exceptional intensity and that Louis does not want it to continue. Louis answers that killing will bring the same ecstatic release he experienced with the girl, when he felt “wed to her and weightless, caught as if by a dance.” The expression thus operates as a promise of relief, but also as a demand that Louis surrender the hope that conscience can remain untouched by immortal appetite.

Nature, Evil, and Moral Reversal

The sentence is inseparable from Lestat’s broader claim that “Evil is a point of view.” He portrays vampires as immortal beings who may kill without accepting mortal judgments of good and evil, comparing them to dark angels wandering the earth rather than confined to hell. Within this rhetoric, the imperative recasts predation as destiny and makes moral condemnation appear external to the vampire’s own mode of existence.

That argument does not resolve Louis’s ethical conflict; it intensifies it. Lestat’s language is persuasive because it names the peace Louis has actually felt, yet it is also manipulative because it converts a painful discovery into permission. The command suppresses neither guilt nor uncertainty. Instead, it teaches Louis to interpret his suffering as the price of resisting himself, creating a recurring tension between authentic acknowledgment of appetite and submission to Lestat’s influence.

Consequences and Recurrences

The expression’s immediate consequence is Louis’s movement toward another act of killing. Lestat leads him through the streets to a ward containing starving children, orphans of plague and fever, and identifies the previously wounded girl as Louis’s “daughter.” The command has prepared Louis to see the child not primarily as a helpless human being but as the object of a vampiric relation and appetite. In that setting, Lestat’s instruction becomes operational: nature is about to be enacted through blood.

The expression also gains retrospective force from the later account of Louis’s human brother. Before becoming a vampire, Louis could not believe that his brother’s visions might be genuine because familial familiarity prevented him from recognizing sanctity in someone so close to him. After the brother’s death, Louis’s refusal to believe him becomes the source of consuming guilt. The priest’s explanation that the brother had been possessed by the devil repeats the same egotistical reduction Louis has already made, while Louis’s violent reaction exposes how unstable such explanations are. Against both religious certainty and personal denial, “Do what it is your nature to do” offers a third, darker principle: action should follow the nature one discovers in oneself, even when that nature cannot be morally justified.

The phrase’s implications extend beyond Louis’s private struggle into the book’s vampire society. The vampires of the Théâtre des Vampires treat killing as entertainment, criticize one another for wasting opportunities, and identify the killing of one’s own kind as the crime punishable by death. Their rules show that “nature” does not eliminate law; it produces a separate community with its own prohibitions and enforcement. Louis’s later attempt to recover Claudia from the theater demonstrates the limit of Lestat’s doctrine. Louis acts from a bond that exceeds survival and appetite, returning toward danger because he cannot abandon her, even when Armand warns that rescue may cost them everything.

The Expression’s Significance

As an expression, “Do what it is your nature to do” condenses the central dilemma of Louis’s narration: whether identity is discovered through conscience or through the acts that bring bodily peace. It is at once an existential challenge, a seductive piece of counsel, and a verbal instrument of control. Lestat uses it to transform Louis’s anguish into a reason for obedience, while Louis’s continued guilt prevents the command from becoming a complete philosophy.

Its lasting significance lies in the unresolved conflict between nature and responsibility. The command claims that refusal produces pain and acceptance produces release, but the narrative repeatedly shows that neither choice is simple. Louis can kill, yet cannot stop judging the killing; he can reject human moral categories, yet remains bound to human attachments; and he can acknowledge his vampire nature without accepting Lestat’s interpretation of what that nature permits. The expression therefore marks not the end of Louis’s moral struggle, but the moment when that struggle is given its most concise and dangerous formulation.