20th century

The twentieth century is the period in which Lestat’s estrangement from the modern world deepens into seclusion and underground sleep. He does not remember when the century began: from his perspective, its defining change is not a date but the apparent disappearance of the beauty he associated with the eighteenth century, as his failing body and diminished appetite for life draw him away from human society.

A Century He Barely Notices

Lestat’s account makes the passage into the twentieth century almost an absence of memory. He recalls only that everything seemed uglier and darker, and that the beauty of the old eighteenth-century world increasingly felt like a fanciful idea. The contrast is social as well as aesthetic: he sees the bourgeoisie governing by dreary principles and distrustful of the sensuality and excess associated with the ancien régime. The new century therefore reaches him as a collapse of the values by which he had understood beauty, not as a story of progress or renewal.

That judgment stands against the history that had shaped his earlier life. Born the youngest surviving son of an impoverished aristocratic family in Auvergne, Lestat had no claim to land or title; his brother Augustin made clear that the family could not finance a church career worthy of its rank. In Paris, Lestat found a different kind of life in the boulevard theaters, permanent establishments on the Boulevard du Temple where popular performances drew both poor spectators and wealthy audiences. Serious drama remained the province of government-sanctioned houses such as the Comédie-Française, while the boulevard stages sustained the older Italian commedia and its lively mixture of performers. The twentieth-century world he later condemns is measured against this earlier world of theatrical energy and sensual spectacle.

The Modern World and Its Diminishing Light

As the century advances, Lestat’s retreat becomes material as well as emotional. He spends the final years of the nineteenth century in seclusion in the old Garden District, near Lafayette Cemetery, sleeping beneath oaks in a house without furniture. Books fill room after room; he reads by candle or oil lamp, occasionally breaking into a library or bookstore for more, and hoards candles, oil, and periodicals. The routines preserve a thin connection to human culture even as his ability to participate in the living world ebbs.

His experience of the new century is filtered through this isolation. When he forces himself to walk to the shabby Happy Hour theater near the waterfront slums to watch silent moving pictures, he hides his gaunt face and skeletal hands beneath a greatcoat, muffler, and gloves. Even the image of the daytime sky on the screen terrifies him. The films’ black-and-white tones seem suited to what he calls a colorless age: cinema offers a glimpse of modern life, but the glimpse confirms rather than relieves his sense of loss.

Decline and Underground Sleep

The changing century coincides with Lestat’s worsening condition. His thoughts and vision grow clouded, and he stops hunting humans. Because a vampire cannot thrive without human blood and human death, he survives instead on neighborhood animals—pampered dogs and cats—and, when those are unavailable, rats he can summon. This degraded means of survival makes his withdrawal more than a chosen retreat: his weakening leaves him increasingly cut off from the source of strength on which his existence depends.

In 1929, with no candles or lamp oil left, Lestat considers the money, jewels, and legal arrangements that will continue to maintain his properties. He reads the story of Sam Spade and the Maltese Falcon by the light of the heavens, checks the magazine’s date, and drinks enough rat blood to dig deep into the earth. The century thus reaches its decisive point not through public action but through a private act of burial. Lestat enters the ground weary and badly wounded in body and soul, with the prospect that the city above will continue without him.

Historical Rupture and Narrative Meaning

The twentieth century’s bleakness is framed by memories of an earlier upheaval. Lestat’s family had already been destroyed in the violence surrounding the French Revolution: after the Bastille fell on July 14, Paris and the countryside were in turmoil, and peasants and tenant farmers killed his brothers, their wives and children, and those defending the family castle. Only his father escaped. That earlier catastrophe had turned historical change into intimate bereavement; the twentieth century brings a more gradual loss, expressed through cultural alienation, hunger, and withdrawal.

Lestat tells the reader that the account of his early education and adventures has ended, but that his story is not finished; he must still explain the painful events that led him underground in 1929. The structure makes the century both a historical setting and a retrospective threshold. It separates the eighteenth-century world that formed his sensibility from the long sleep that will eventually end, while leaving the intervening story suspended between remembered splendor and an uncertain return.