Renaud’s House of Thesbians

Renaud’s House of Thesbians is a small Paris theater whose importance to Lestat far exceeds its size: it gives the restless younger son of an impoverished noble family a craft, a chosen community, and his first experience of belonging. Years later, after his transformation into a vampire, he buys the playhouse and then tries to send its company away, unable to reconcile the happiness he remembers there with the threat he now poses to the people who made it possible.

The Playhouse and Its World

In late-eighteenth-century Paris, the theater belongs to a lively boulevard tradition distinct from the state-sanctioned houses. The Comédie-Française and the Théâtre des Italiens hold the government’s monopoly on serious drama, while older Italian comedy survives among fairground spectacles and the permanent theaters along the boulevard du Temple. Those boulevard houses play to the poor as well as to aristocrats and wealthy bourgeois spectators, offering performances less stiff than the prestigious dramas of Racine and Voltaire. The legal restriction shapes the company’s repertoire: it presents improvised Italian comedy, songs, and comic entertainments rather than risk being accused of staging the straight plays reserved to the official theaters.

The building is a precarious wooden house seating no more than three hundred, but its modest scale is not a measure of its imaginative reach. Its small stage and props are elegant; a blue velvet curtain, screened private boxes, and a company of experienced performers make the rickety interior a concentrated theatrical world. For five or six hours each evening, its actors work amid shouting, laughter, quarrels, and practical cooperation. Lestat remembers the company as people bound together in the wings even when they are not friends, like occupants of a boat at sea who must pull together because none can escape the others.

Lestat Finds a Stage

The theater answers a longing that began before Lestat reached Paris. As a boy in the Auvergne, with no inheritance or prospects and a family estate so depleted that hunting helped keep the household from starvation, he encountered itinerant performers. Their commedia dell’arte fascinated him: actors kept lifelong roles but improvised their dialogue and actions anew, and they let him perform Lelio, the young lover of Isabella. They praised his ability to invent the role. In Paris, the boulevard theater gives that early discovery a home and a possible profession.

The stage also offers refuge from the fear of darkness that afflicts Lestat and that Nicolas calls his malady of mortality. As twilight approaches, the trembling begins; he makes sure to be safely inside the brightly lit theater. He learns by watching and imitating, memorizes, asks questions, and serves the company, including helping actresses into costume and emptying slop buckets. He has dropped his aristocratic surname in favor of Lestat de Valois, a name that means little, and the players know nothing of his family. In this company, work and performance matter more than the rank he has left behind.

Nicolas’s violin becomes one of the theater’s defining sounds for Lestat. Each night Lestat pauses his lessons long enough to hear Nicolas rise from the tiny orchestra and play a brief sonata that brings down the house. Their shared life in the playhouse joins Lestat’s hunger to perform with Nicolas’s musicianship, while the bustling company supplies the belonging Lestat had not found in his provincial home.

A Mortal Career and a Sudden Reversal

In late August, Lestat finally makes his first regular appearance as Lelio. The hot, crowded house and the melting white paint on his face sharpen his nervousness before he steps onstage. After the performance, the manager, Renaud, tells him he has done tolerably well and will be allowed to perform regularly. By September, Lestat’s name appears on the handbills. The company is performing a farce by a famous playwright whose work cannot be staged at the Comédie-Française during a general playwrights’ strike; although the author’s name is withheld, the court crowds the theater. Lestat is not the lead, but he plays the young lover, steals scenes, and has extra lines written for him by the fourth performance. Nicolas, meanwhile, draws the audience with a Mozart sonata at the intermezzo.

That promise ends in transformation. After becoming a vampire, Lestat arranges for money to be sent to the theater’s owner, Renaud, and asks his lawyer to learn whether the playhouse carries debts. Yet he initially resolves to stay away: he does not want the company to discover what has happened to him or to be contaminated by his new existence. The name of the mortal actor remains on torn playbills as he stands outside the theater on the boulevard du Temple, now hungry enough to smell blood in the streets. The visible remnant of his former identity makes the distance between the young performer and the vampire immediate.

His attempt to care for the company from afar turns into an effort to control what he has lost. Lestat learns that Nicolas has not left the theater despite the gifts and new opportunities arranged for him. He understands that Nicolas remains because he loves the place as Lestat did. He sends wine and champagne, flowers for Jeannette and Luchina, and more gold for Renaud, then learns that the manager wants him to buy the playhouse and provide capital for larger productions. Lestat first refuses, then returns and agrees to purchase it, giving Renaud ten thousand crowns to pursue his ambitions. The investment is at once an act of generosity and a response to the pain of remembering a community from which Lestat believes himself excluded.

The Return and the Theater’s Transformation

Lestat eventually returns to the playhouse in courtly dress, arriving by hired carriage before entering through the stage door as he once did. The familiar backstage world gathers around him: greasepaint, sweaty and perfumed costumes, dust, the lit stage glimpsed beyond the props, laughter from the hall, and acrobats waiting to perform. Luchina cries out; Renaud and the others hurry to greet him. Yet this reunion is unstable. Lestat feels dizzy and afraid, and even a smoking candelabrum makes him recoil with a plea to have the light put out.

The moment he goes onto the stage, the company’s welcoming performance space becomes the setting for an involuntary display of his altered nature. He commands an acrobat to move, then begins to dance, turning and tumbling with the agility he had shown as a boy. The audience applauds as he imitates the fairground performers he once studied. He sings the fragment of a song associated with his mortal role as Lelio, then wills himself upward: he touches the rafters and descends soundlessly, before soaring again in somersaults. The spectators cheer, while those backstage fall silent and Nicolas stands at the edge of the stage, silently shaping Lestat’s name. The company’s shared craft cannot explain what it sees; the performance is no longer merely an actor’s trained imitation, but a supernatural feat that separates Lestat from the people watching him.

That separation gives the theater’s memory its tragic force. Lestat wants the troupe gone from Paris, the playbills removed, and the doors shut—not because the theater has ceased to matter, but because it remains the place where he knew the greatest and most sustained happiness of his mortal life. He is ashamed of frightening his friends and recognizes that money and gifts cannot make him part of their world again. He orders his lawyer to close the theater and move the company to London, offering to fund Renaud’s own theater at Drury Lane and allowing the troupe to continue onward to Saint-Domingue, New Orleans, or New York. The playhouse begins as a refuge from isolation and becomes the emblem of an intimacy Lestat can protect only by leaving it behind.