Lestat sends Nicolas and the theater troupe away

Lestat sends Nicolas and the theater troupe away in a desperate effort to keep the people he loves beyond the reach of his newly unrestrained hunger. He wants the theater closed and Nicolas removed from Paris, but the plan does not restore their former intimacy: the troupe returns to work, Nicolas refuses its return, and Lestat keeps his distance while arranging a separate escape for his friend.

Background and Stakes

Before his transformation, Lestat had found his strongest sense of belonging in the boulevard theater. In Paris, serious drama was formally reserved for government-sanctioned houses such as the Comédie-Française and the Théâtre des Italiens; the boulevard stages, rooted in fairground entertainments, offered another kind of theatrical life. Their performances combined old Italian comedy with acrobats, jugglers, and other attractions, and drew both poorer spectators and wealthy audiences. Lestat had immersed himself in that world, learning the stage from the wings alongside Nicolas.

That attachment makes the theater more than a business to him. He had bought Renaud’s theater and helped turn it into a showcase of the boulevard, but after his appetite has changed, its familiar rooms become dangerous: its actors and Nicolas are among those he fears he may harm. His wish to send them away is therefore bound to a painful reversal. The place associated with the greatest sustained happiness of his mortal life is now something he believes he must shut down to protect its inhabitants from himself.

The immediate stakes are sharpened by Lestat’s recognition that his former limits have vanished. He tells Roget that a bullet missed him, then insists that the troupe must leave Paris. His fear is not simply that they will learn what he has become. He is also ashamed of having frightened them and understands that his affection cannot make him safe to be near.

The Attempt to Close the Theater

Lestat first imagines ending the theater’s activity altogether. He wants its playbills taken down and its doors shut, seeking silence in the place where he had once been happiest. Yet the people around him do not understand the true reason for the upheaval. The troupe accepts Roget’s explanation that Lestat has returned from the tropical colonies and that Paris wine has gone to his head; money is available to repair the damage. The following evening, performances resume, and the boulevard audience supplies its own ordinary explanations for the previous night’s disorder.

Lestat’s order to Roget goes beyond repairing the theater. He tells him to send the company to London, offer Renaud enough money for a theater there, and allow the players to continue onward to places such as Saint-Domingue, New Orleans, or New York. The order is abrupt and expansive: Lestat is willing to spend whatever is required, even to dismantle the Paris enterprise he had financed. His stated priority is removal, not the preservation of his investment.

The scheme reveals a contradiction in Lestat’s position. He wants the troupe gone because he loves them and fears what proximity to him could mean, but he also wants to erase the very setting that had made him feel part of a human community. He imagines that distance might end his ache and stop his memories of the provincial boy who had emptied the actors’ slop buckets and loved being among them. The plan cannot undo that history; it can only sever its daily setting.

Nicolas and the Italian Journey

Nicolas does not follow the troupe back into regular performances. He has taken to heavy drinking, gives up returning to the theater and studying music, insults Roget when he visits, and wanders alone through dangerous streets at night. Lestat learns these details from Roget while keeping himself at a distance from the candle on the table. Nicolas’s withdrawal makes the separation more urgent, but also more difficult to arrange through ordinary persuasion.

Lestat therefore gives Roget a second, more personal task: persuade Nicolas to go to Italy and take Lestat’s mother with him. The proposed journey is presented as practical as well as protective. Nicolas can study music at the conservatories in Naples, while Lestat’s ill mother should make the journey there; she is fond of Nicolas, and he writes to her. Lestat tells Roget to make all the arrangements and persuade Nicolas that she cannot travel without him.

The arrangement uses Nicolas’s attachment to Lestat’s mother as the means of moving him away. Roget points out how difficult Nicolas will be to persuade, but Lestat insists that the plan must succeed by the end of the week. He believes that if Nicolas stays in Paris, he will be driven slowly out of his mind. That fear is Lestat’s clearest explanation for the urgency: sending Nicolas away is not merely an effort to hide the supernatural truth or protect the theater’s finances, but an attempt to remove his friend from a situation Lestat thinks is destroying him.

Separation and Unresolved Consequences

Lestat does not carry out the separation through a direct reconciliation with Nicolas. As the nights pass, he struggles not to seek him out or risk one final exchange. His reliance on Roget preserves distance, but also leaves Nicolas to receive the consequences through intermediaries and arrangements made in his absence. Lestat’s protective intent therefore takes the form of control over travel, employment, money, and access rather than a shared decision between friends.

The troupe’s return to the stage and Nicolas’s refusal to return mark different outcomes of the same attempt. The theater survives the immediate disturbance, its audiences continuing to gather beneath the chestnut trees, but Nicolas’s former life there has broken apart. Lestat’s plan to close the theater does not take effect as he intended; his separate plan for Nicolas and his mother is an urgent proposal, not evidence that the journey has already happened.

The episode’s emotional force lies in that gap between care and presence. Lestat believes that staying away may protect Nicolas, yet he cannot stop thinking of him and cannot make his absence feel like a cure. The effort to send the troupe and Nicolas beyond his reach exposes the changed terms of Lestat’s attachment: he still longs for the company he once found in the theater, but now treats separation as the only safeguard he can offer.