We went on to more abstract things, how the newspapers reported events, how his student 
cronies gathered in cafes to argue. He told me men were restless and out of love with the 
monarchy. That they wanted a change in government and wouldn't sit still for very long. 
He told me about the philosophers, Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau.
  
  I couldn't understand everything he said. But in rapid, sometimes sarcastic speech he 
gave me a marvelously complete picture of what was going on.
  
  Of course, it didn't surprise me to hear that educated people didn't believe in God, 
that they were infinitely more interested in science, that the aristocracy was much in 
ill favor, and so was the Church. These were times of reason, not superstition, and the 
more he talked the more I understood.
  
  Soon he was outlining the Encyclopedie, the great compilation of knowledge supervised 
by Diderot. And then it was the salons he'd gone to, the drinking bouts, his evenings 
with actresses. He described the public balls at the Palms Royal, where Marie Antoinette 
appeared right along with the common people.
  
  "I'll tell you," he said finally, "it all sounds a hell of a lot better in this room 
than it really is."
  
  "I don't believe you," I said gently. I didn't want him to stop talking. I wanted it to 
go on and on.
  
  "It's a secular age, Monsieur," he said, filling our glasses from the new bottle of 
wine. "Very dangerous."
  
  "Why dangerous?" I whispered. "An end to superstition? What could be better than that?"
  
  "Spoken like a true eighteenth-century man, Monsieur," he said with a faint melancholy 
to his smile. "But no one values anything anymore. Fashion is everything. Even atheism is 
a fashion."
  
  I had always had a secular mind, but not for any philosophical reason. No one in my 
family much believed in God or ever had. Of course they said they did, and we went to 
mass. But this was duty. Real religion had long ago died out in our family, as it had 
perhaps in the families of thousands of aristocrats. Even at the monastery I had not 
believed in God. I had believed in the monks around me.
  
  I tried to explain this in simple language that would not give offense to Nicolas, 
because for his family it was different.
  
  Even his miserable money-grubbing father (whom I secretly admired) was fervently 
religious.
  
  "But can men live without these beliefs?" Nicolas asked almost sadly. "Can children 
face the world without them?"
  
  I was beginning to understand why he was so sarcastic and cynical. He had only recently 
lost that old faith. He was bitter about it.
  
  But no matter how deadening was this sarcasm of his, a great energy poured out of him, 
an irrepressible passion. And this drew me to him. I think I loved him. Another two 
glasses of wine and I might say something absolutely ridiculous like that.
  
  "I've always lived without beliefs," I said.
  
  "Yes. I know," he answered. "Do you remember the story of the witches? The time you 
cried at the witches' place?"
  
  "Cried over the witches?" I looked at him blankly for a moment. But it stirred 
something painful, something humiliating. Too many of my memories had that quality. And 
now I had to remember crying over witches. "I don't remember," I said.
  
  "We were little boys. And the priest was teaching us our prayers. And the priest took 
us out to see the place where they burnt the witches in the old days, the old stakes and 
the blackened ground."
  
  "Ah, that place." I shuddered. "That horrid, horrid place."
  
  "You began to scream and to cry. They sent someone for the Marquise herself because 
your nurse couldn't quiet you."
  
  "I was a dreadful child," I said, trying to shrug it off. Of course I did remember now 
-- screaming, being carried home, nightmares about the fires. Someone bathing my forehead 
and saying, "Lestat, wake up."
  
  But I hadn't thought of that little scene in years. It was the place itself I thought 
about whenever I drew near it -- the thicket of blackened stakes, the images of men and 
women and children burnt alive.
  
  Nicolas was studying me. "When your mother came to get you, she said it was all 
ignorance and cruelty. She was so angry with the priest for telling us the old tales."
  
  I nodded.
  
  The final horror to hear they had all died for nothing, those long-forgotten people of 
our own village, that they had been innocent. "Victims of superstition," she had said. 
"There were no real witches." No wonder I had screamed and screamed.
  
  "But my mother," Nicolas said, "told a different story, that the witches had been in 
league with the devil, that they'd blighted the crops, and in the guise of wolves killed 
the sheep and the children -- "
  
  "And won't the world be better if no one is ever again burnt in the name of God?" I 
asked. "If there is no more faith in God to make men do that to each other? What is the 
danger in a secular world where horrors like that don't happen?"
  
  He leaned forward with a mischievous little frown.