Lestat and Nicolas’s Flight to Paris is the decisive escape from a life circumscribed by inheritance, family poverty, and a mother’s fear of losing her son. Lestat’s mother gives him the money she has left and urges him to go, transforming an uncertain plan into a departure they can no longer postpone. The two reach Paris within a fortnight, where the freedom they sought arrives not as security but as a garret, depleted funds, and work in a shabby boulevard theater. That precarious beginning becomes the ground on which Lestat discovers a life in the theater.

Background and the Decision to Leave

Lestat’s desire to leave grows out of a position that offers neither inheritance nor a future of his own. Though born to a marquis’s family, he is the youngest of the three sons to reach manhood, with no claim to the title or land. The family’s wealth has already been squandered: his eldest brother, Augustin, has spent even his wife’s small dowry. On the estate in the Auvergne, Lestat hunts pheasant, venison, and trout to feed the household, a solitary responsibility that in some years helps keep the family from starvation. His father’s castle, estate, and neighboring village form the limits of his world, one he has long found stifling.

An earlier prospect of religious education narrows rather than opens his choices. Augustin explains that Lestat was sent to learn reading and writing, not to pursue a church career worthy of his rank: the family cannot finance a path to a bishopric or cardinalate. The expected alternative is to remain at home, illiterate and dependent, and to consider duties to his nieces and nephews. Lestat breaks down at supper, calling the household “chaos,” and is sent back to his room. Paris represents a chance to escape this imposed life, though not a promise of a stable livelihood.

The immediate decision is made in a quiet room by the hearth. Lestat’s mother knows that he and Nicolas are planning to run away; Nicolas’s father has also learned of the plan after the innkeeper overheard them. Rather than insist that Lestat stay until her death, she tells him to take the money left from her own family and go to Paris. She wants to know he is there and free when her time comes, and admits that she has kept him at home out of selfishness as well as pride. She will accept whatever work he and Nicolas can find, whether performing with Nicolas’s violin or turning somersaults at the St. Germain fair. Her blessing makes the departure an act of release as well as escape.

Departure and Arrival

Lestat’s mother insists that the escape happen at once. He is to take the diligence at dawn and write when he reaches Paris. Because he cannot write for himself, she directs him to find an Italian letter writer at the cemetery of Les Innocents, near the St. Germain Market, and dictate in Italian so that only she will be able to read his letter. This practical instruction joins the intimacy of their parting to the material circumstances that have shaped Lestat’s life: he has been denied an education, yet is now leaving to make a future beyond his family’s reach.

Once his mother leaves, the familiar objects in Lestat’s room briefly fix the scale of what he is abandoning: a straw mattress, two coats, a red cloak, one pair of leather shoes, and the mountains beyond a narrow window. Then he rushes down the stairs and the mountain to find Nicolas. Nicolas is watching a bonfire with his family. Lestat pulls him away from the crowd and the blaze and tells him to get his violin and play a song about their journey to Paris. Nicolas answers by pretending to play an invisible violin and asking how they will feed themselves there; Lestat refuses to let the question delay them. They leave in the morning.

Less than a fortnight later, Lestat is standing in the crowded public cemetery of Les Innocents, with its old vaults and open graves, dictating his first letter to his mother. He reports that he and Nicolas have arrived safely, found rooms on the Île de la Cité, and are happy in a Paris that seems warm, beautiful, and magnificent. The place where he writes is at once a cemetery and a bustling marketplace, an image of the strange, vivid world into which the escape has delivered him. He wishes he could hold the pen himself, but the letter still carries the essential news: the son who could not write at home has crossed into a life of his own.

A Theatrical Life in Poverty

Lestat gives his mother the good news that he has been hired at a real theater to study acting and may soon perform. The claim conceals the harsher terms of their arrival. He and Nicolas climb six flights of stairs to their rooms, while men and women brawl and scream in the alley below. Lestat has spent their money taking Nicolas to operas, ballets, and dramas, and they have already run short. His job is at a shabby boulevard theater, barely above a fairground platform: he helps the players dress, sells tickets, sweeps, and throws out troublemakers.

Yet Lestat experiences the theater as a kind of paradise. He and Nicolas share a garret made glorious by a single tallow candle, cheap wine, and a loaf of fine Parisian bread. When money is especially tight, Nicolas plays violin solos on the boulevard while Lestat holds out a hat. The work is humble and the circumstances insecure, but the theater gives Lestat an absorbing world of performance and companionship. For five or six hours each evening, he lives among actors and workers who shout, laugh, quarrel, and struggle together. Their closeness is not founded on universal friendship; it comes from being comrades in the wings, bound to the same confined, turbulent enterprise.

The theater’s place in Paris helps explain both Lestat’s opportunity and his social dislocation. The Comédie-Française and the Théâtre des Italiens are the only government-sanctioned theaters, and serious tragedy and comedy belong to those houses. The old Italian commedia, with figures such as Pantaloon, Harlequin, and Scaramouche, survives at fairs alongside acrobats, jugglers, tightrope walkers, and puppeteers. The permanent boulevard theaters have grown from those fairground spectacles. Though they serve audiences unable to afford the grand houses, their lively performances also attract aristocrats and wealthy bourgeois spectators, offering a less formal alternative to the works of Racine and Voltaire.

Class, Friendship, and the Life Ahead

Paris does not erase Lestat’s noble birth, but he chooses not to trade on it. He drops the name de Lioncourt in favor of the simple Lestat de Valois, which means nothing in particular, and the actors do not know his family background. The choice allows him to enter the theater through practical labor rather than inherited status. It also sharpens the contrast between his new life and the assumptions of Nicolas’s prosperous student friends, who regard Nicolas’s circumstances as madness and have no words for seeing a nobleman dress actresses and empty slop buckets.

Lestat is eager to learn. He memorizes, mimics, and asks questions, absorbing whatever the stage can teach him. Each night, that education pauses for Nicolas’s violin solo: Nicolas rises from his place in the tiny orchestra, is picked out by the spotlight, and plays a short sonata that brings down the house. The performance preserves a central part of their shared life even as their fortunes diverge—Nicolas contributes music, while Lestat pursues acting and works his way through the theater’s daily labor.

The route to Paris thus opens freedom without resolving the conditions that made escape necessary. The bourgeois spectators who aspire to aristocratic status are, in Lestat’s telling, caught up in the Revolution that abolishes the class they hoped to join. Later, news reaches him that on July 14 the Parisian mobs attacked the Bastille and that rebellion has spread through France; peasants and tenant farmers have risen against his father’s house, killing his brothers, their wives and children, and the castle’s defenders. His father alone escapes and reaches New Orleans, asking Lestat to come to his aid. The journey to Paris first frees Lestat from the family estate, but the Revolution eventually makes that departure inseparable from the violent destruction of the world he left behind.