Paris

Paris is a decisive setting in Lestat de Lioncourt’s life: the place where he and Nicolas de Lenfent escape the narrow prospects of the Auvergne for the theater, and where Lestat’s short experience of ordinary human life becomes a measure of what he has missed. It is at once a city of artistic possibility, precarious survival, class divisions, and political upheaval. Much later, the Paris he revisits has been remade by industrial modernity, while the theater that once promised belonging has become the site of his confinement and decline.

A destination beyond the Auvergne

Before reaching Paris, Lestat grows up on his father’s estate in the Auvergne, one of the younger sons of an impoverished noble family. His family cannot afford to advance him toward a distinguished career in the Church; the future presented to him is instead a life of dependency and obscurity. His attempt to escape the constraints of home through acting gives him a route toward the city, and Paris becomes the destination imagined by the theater players who promise that their troupe will perform at the Saint-Germain Fair before working along the boulevard du Temple. Their ambitions reach as far as the Comédie-Française and performances for Marie Antoinette and King Louis, though Lestat is ultimately taken home before he can make that journey with them.

When Lestat and Nicolas set out for Paris, they travel day and night and arrive in less than a fortnight. Their first view of the city is not a grand theater but the crowded cemetery of Les Innocents, where Lestat, unable to write for himself, dictates his first letter to his mother to an Italian letter writer. He tells her that he has found work at a real theater and expects to perform soon. The letter leaves out the precarious facts: the six flights of stairs to their garret on the Île de la Cité, the disorder in the streets below, their lack of money, and Lestat’s extravagant attendance at the city’s operas, ballets, and plays. Paris is already a place where his experience and the version of it he sends home diverge.

The boulevard theater and its social world

The theater where Lestat works is shabby, closer to a fairground platform than to the city’s prestigious stages. He helps actors dress, sells tickets, sweeps up, and removes disruptive spectators. Nicolas, whom no respectable Parisian orchestra hires, plays solos with the theater’s small group of musicians; when money runs short, he performs on the boulevard while Lestat holds out a hat. They are poor, but Lestat regards the garret, a bottle of cheap wine, and a loaf of sweet Parisian bread as a kind of paradise. The theater supplies the warmth and excitement he seeks, especially as evening brings on a distress that he says he can escape by being safely inside before dusk.

Paris’s theatrical life is divided by official rules and class, but not simply into separate worlds. Only the Comédie-Française and the Théâtre des Italiens are government-sanctioned houses for serious drama, including the tragedies and comedies of Racine, Corneille, and Voltaire. The Italian commedia tradition survives at fairs such as Saint-Germain and Saint-Laurent alongside acrobats, jugglers, and other platform acts. Boulevard theaters develop from these fairs into permanent venues along the boulevard du Temple. Though they serve audiences unable to afford the grand theaters, wealthy bourgeois and aristocrats also attend their livelier performances from the loges.

For Lestat, the boulevard theater is a close-knit working world rather than a route into established respectability. He spends five or six hours each evening among performers who shout, quarrel, and depend on their comrades backstage, even when they are not friends. He memorizes, mimics, asks questions, and studies the stage; each night, Nicolas’s violin solo is the performance he waits for. Meanwhile, Nicolas’s wealthy student acquaintances regard their way of life as irrational, and their presence throws Lestat’s own class position into relief: he is a nobleman doing the theater’s menial work, though he has concealed his family name and calls himself Lestat de Valois. He also observes the irony that bourgeois people who aspire to aristocratic rank become entangled in the Revolution that abolishes the class they hoped to join.

A brief human lifetime

Years later, Marius describes Paris as the sole place where Lestat tasted ordinary human life for more than a few months. In Marius’s account, Lestat’s six months there as a young man stand in contrast to his later existence as a vampire: a succession of wandering, haunting houses, and passing through other people’s lives. Marius argues that Lestat must live a complete lifetime in the world if he is to endure, rather than fall into despair and return to the earth. Paris therefore becomes more than a location in Lestat’s past. It is the brief human interval against which his long supernatural displacement is measured.

Lestat admits that when he had the chance to remain with the Theater of the Vampires in Paris, he could not do it. Marius rejects the theater as a substitute for life: it is a coven, just as his own island refuge is not the world. Too many horrors had happened to Lestat there, he says, and the New World city of New Orleans might offer a different possibility: residence among ordinary people, an understanding of the passing decades, and a household formed as a family rather than a coven. Paris’s theater had given Lestat a place to belong for a time, but Marius insists that a bounded community cannot provide the full human life he needs.

Return to a transformed city

On a later return, Paris is no longer the city Lestat remembers. He is brought through crowded streets in a carriage and sees a metropolis of steam trains and broad concrete boulevards. He cannot recognize the city through the industrial smoke and filth, and is uncertain whether the enormous theater before him stands on the boulevard du Temple. The familiar address and the transformed surroundings create a sharp break between remembered Paris and the modern city.

The theater’s interior offers no restoration of his former life. Lestat is taken down into a cellar containing copies of paintings by Goya, Brueghel, and Bosch, and then confined in a brick-lined cell. Starving and unable to call out, he is surrounded by the vibrations of omnibuses and tramcars passing above. When he discovers a dead human victim there, he feeds on the cold blood left in the corpse. The episode turns the old theatrical refuge into a place of isolation and physical decline, joining the city’s modern noise to Lestat’s estrangement from the human life he once briefly experienced.

Revolution and the family’s fate

Paris is also the source of the news that decisively breaks Lestat’s ties to his family’s old world. A letter reports that on July 14 the Parisian mobs attacked the Bastille and that riots had spread across France. It then tells him that peasants and tenant farmers rose against his father’s house: Lestat’s brothers, their wives and children, and the people who defended the castle were killed before it was looted. Only his father survived, concealed by loyal servants and brought to the coast; by the time the letter reaches Lestat, he is in New Orleans and asking his son to come to him.

The news places the destruction of the family estate within the wider upheaval of the French Revolution, but reaches Lestat through an intimate appeal from a father who is bereaved and among strangers. Paris is not where the family’s massacre takes place; it is the city from which the letter reports the Bastille’s fall and the wider chaos. In the arc of Lestat’s life, the message links the political collapse of the old order to his own departure from Europe and to the eventual importance of New Orleans as a new home.