Leicester decided to go to New Orleans

Lestat’s decision to go to New Orleans follows the destruction of the world from which he had fled. A letter reports that his family’s castle has been looted and his brothers, their wives and children, and its defenders have been killed; his father alone escaped and now pleads for help from a distant former French colony. Faced with this news in Alexandria, Lestat chooses to cross the ocean to his surviving parent, though he cannot say what life will hold after his father dies. The voyage is both an act of filial duty and a departure into uncertainty.

The News from France

The letter places Lestat’s personal loss amid the upheaval of the French Revolution. It reports that the Paris mobs attacked the Bastille on July 14 and that riots spread across France. For months, the writer had tried unsuccessfully to reach Lestat’s family and remove them from the country. The decisive news is that peasants and tenant farmers rose against his father’s house: Lestat’s brothers, their wives and children, and those who tried to defend the castle were slain before the estate was looted.

His father survives because loyal servants hid him during the siege and later brought him to the coast. He has reached New Orleans, then in the former French colony of Louisiana, where he is grieving among strangers and asks Lestat to come to his aid. The letter’s details overwhelm Lestat. After reading the account, he sets it down and stares at the desk and the lamplight; the distant revolt has become the annihilation of his family and the urgent need to answer his father’s appeal.

A Family’s Decline and Ruin

The catastrophe destroys what was already a precarious inheritance. Lestat had been the youngest of three surviving sons in a family whose wealth had long since been spent. His eldest brother, Augustin, was heir to the title and property, but had used his wife’s small dowry soon after marrying. Lestat himself had no claim to the estate and few prospects. His decision to go to his father is therefore not a return to a secure aristocratic future: the family home and its material basis have been lost, and the father who remains is displaced and bereaved.

The family’s earlier history also makes the news a reversal of Lestat’s established separation from home. In Auvergne, his father’s castle, estate, and nearby village had formed his entire universe, though he was restless and alienated from its old-fashioned expectations. When the family’s poverty left him with little future, his brother directed him toward a life as a teaching brother rather than an ecclesiastical career suited to their rank. Lestat understood this as being left to live illiterate and poor, and wept at the supper table over what he called the household’s chaos. The family that had constrained his prospects is now a family nearly erased by revolution; only his father remains to summon him back into obligation.

The Decision in Alexandria

At the time of the decision, Lestat is in Alexandria with Gabrielle. Their trunks have already been sent ahead, and the ship will leave in two nights. He has only a small valise left, with clothes for the passage and his violin. The practical arrangements make the choice immediate: he is not merely considering whether to help his father, but preparing to leave on the next available route.

When Gabrielle asks where he will go, Lestat answers that he intends to travel to a little house on Rue Dumaine in the old French city of New Orleans. He will go to his father, he says, and after his father has died and is at rest, he has no idea what he will do. That qualification gives the decision its particular force. The destination is definite, but the future beyond the journey is blank; Lestat commits himself to one remaining family duty without pretending that it supplies a life plan.

His route is also specified. He is booked on the next ship out of Alexandria, will go first to Naples and then Barcelona, and will leave for the New World from Lisbon. These stages turn the resolve into a concrete passage across the Mediterranean and onward over the Atlantic. Lestat’s answer is cold and precise, while the scene around it carries the strain of the parting: Gabrielle’s face sharpens, she says little, and tears rise in her eyes. He looks away and holds his hands still so they will not tremble.

Gabrielle and the Parting

The decision occurs in the presence of Gabrielle, whose response makes clear that Lestat’s departure is not a simple family reunion. He addresses her as his mother and asks what she needs from him, then offers money. The exchange is set against a room whose familiar objects have been emptied or dispersed: his brilliantly colored birds have been given away, probably for sale in the bazaar. He remembers that the gray African parrots can live as long as men, and that Nicki lived to be thirty. The details of possessions and loss place the planned voyage within a life already marked by departures.

Gabrielle asks where Lestat will go, and his reply gives her a destination but no assurance of what follows. She tells him he cannot mean it. He insists that he is booked on the next ship, and her face tightens as tears come to her eyes. Lestat feels her emotion reaching him, but looks away and busies himself at the desk. His recollection of Nicki’s hands, taken with him into the fire, reveals another grief intruding on the moment: Lestat thinks that, had Nicki’s hands not gone with him, he would have to return to Paris to retrieve them before continuing his journey. He does not turn back. The choice to go to New Orleans is made amid losses that the voyage cannot undo.

Duty Without a Settled Future

Lestat’s journey to New Orleans joins a political upheaval to an intensely private obligation. The Revolution has overturned the social world in which his family possessed land and rank, while its violence has reduced that family to a father in exile and a son who must cross an ocean to reach him. Lestat’s own earlier resentment of his narrow prospects does not cancel that bond; when the appeal arrives, he makes his father’s need the immediate purpose of his departure.

Yet the decision does not promise restoration. The castle has been looted, the rest of the family is dead, and Lestat anticipates his father’s death without knowing what he will do afterward. Even the route—Alexandria, Naples, Barcelona, Lisbon, then the New World—describes movement rather than a recovered home. The action ends with a clear commitment to sail, but with Lestat’s life beyond that commitment deliberately unresolved.