plantation yielded even in bad years when the coast talked of abandoning the indigo 
production altogether and going into sugar. But then at other times he would bully the 
old man, as I mentioned. He would erupt into such rage that the old man whimpered like a 
child. `Don't I take care of you in baronial splendor!' Lestat would shout at him. `Don't 
I provide for your every want! Stop whining to me about going to church or old friends! 
Such nonsense. Your old friends are dead. Why don't you die and leave me and my bankroll 
in peace!' The old man would cry softly that these things meant so little to him in old 
age. He would have been content on his little farm forever. I wanted often to ask him 
later, `Where wag this farm? From where did you come to Louisiana?' to get some clue to 
that place where Lestat might have known another vampire. But I didn't dare to bring 
these things up, lest the old man start crying and Lestat become enraged. But these fits 
were no more frequent than periods of near obsequious kindness when Lestat would bring 
his father supper on a tray and feed him patiently while talking of the weather and the 
New Orleans news and the activities of my mother and sister. It was obvious that a great 
gulf existed between father and son, both in education and refinement, but how it came 
about, I could not quite guess. And from this whole matter, I achieved a somewhat 
consistent detachment.
  "Existence, as I've said, was possible. There was always the promise behind his mocking 
smile that he knew great things or terrible things, had commerce with levels of darkness 
I could not possibly guess at. And all the time, he belittled me and attacked me for my 
love of the senses, my reluctance to kill, and the near swoon which killing could produce 
in me. He laughed uproariously when I discovered that I could see myself in a mirror and 
that crosses had no effect upon me, and would taunt me with sealed lips when I asked 
about God or the devil. `I'd like to meet the devil some night,' he said once with a 
malignant smile. `I'd chase him from here to the wilds of the Pacific. I am the devil.' 
And when I was aghast at this, he went into peals of laughter. But what happened was 
simply that in my distaste for him I came to ignore and suspect him, and yet to study him 
with a detached fascination. Sometimes I'd find myself staring at his wrist from which rd 
drawn my vampire life, and I would fall into such a stillness that my mind seemed to 
leave my body or rather my body to become my mind; and then he would see me and stare at 
me with a stubborn ignorance of what I felt and longed to know and, reaching over, shake 
me roughly out of it. I bore this with an overt detachment unknown to me in mortal life 
and came to understand this as a part of vampire nature: that I might sit at home at 
Pointe du Lac and think for hours of my brother's mortal life and see it short and 
rounded in unfathomable darkness, understanding now the vain and senseless wasting 
passion with which rd mourned his loss and turned on other mortals like a maddened 
animal. All that confusion was then like dancers frenzied in a fog; and now, now in this 
strange vampire nature, I felt a profound sadness. But I did not brood over this. Let me 
not give you that impression, for brooding would have been to me the most terrible waste; 
but rather I looked around me at all the mortals that I knew and saw all life as 
precious, condemning all fruitless guilt and passion that would let it slip through the 
fingers like sand. It was only now as a vampire that I did come to know my sister, 
forbidding her the plantation for the city life which she so needed in order to know her 
own time of life and her own beauty and come to marry, not brood for our lost brother or 
my going away or become a nursemaid for our mother. And I provided for them all they 
might need or want, finding even the most trivial request worth my immediate attention. 
My sister laughed at the transformation in me when we would meet at night and I would 
take her from our flat out the narrow wooden streets to walk along the tree-lined levee 
in the moonlight, savoring the orange blossoms and the caressing warmth, talking for 
hours of her most secret thoughts and dreams, those little fantasies she dared to tell no 
one and would even whisper to me when we sat in the dim lit parlor entirely alone. And I 
would see her sweet and palpable before me, a shimmering, precious creature soon to grow 
old, soon to die, soon to lose these moments that in their tangibility promised to us, 
wrongly . . . wrongly, an immortality. As if it were our very birthright, which we could 
not come to grasp the meaning of until this time of middle life when we looked on only as 
many years ahead as already lay behind us. When every moment, every moment must be first 
known and then savored.
  "It was detachment that made this possible, a sublime loneliness with which Lestat and 
I moved through the world of mortal men. And all material troubles passed from us. I 
should tell you the practical nature of it.
  "Lestat had always known how to steal from victims chosen for sumptuous dress and other 
promising signs of extravagance. But the great problems of shelter and secrecy had been 
for him a terrible struggle. I suspected that beneath his gentleman's veneer he was 
painfully ignorant of the most simple financial matters. But I was not. And so he could 
acquire cash at any moment and I could invest it. If he were not picking the pocket of a 
dead man in an alley, he was at the greatest gambling tables in the richest salons of the 
city, using his vampire keenness to suck gold and dollars and deeds of property from 
young planters' sons who found him deceptive in his friendship and alluring in his charm. 
But this had never given him the life he wanted, and so for that he had ushered me into 
the preternatural world that he might acquire an investor and manager for whom these 
skills of mortal life became most valuable in this life after.
  "But, let me describe New Orleans, as it was then, and as it was to become, so you can 
understand how simple our lives were. There was no city in America like New Orleans. It 
was filled not only with the French and Spanish of all classes who had formed in part its 
peculiar aristocracy, but later with immigrants of all kinds, the Irish and the German in 
particular. Then there were not only the black slaves, yet unhomogenized and fantastical 
in their different tribal garb and manners, but the great growing class of the free 
people of color, those marvelous people of our mixed blood and that of the islands, who 
produced a magnificent and unique caste of craftsmen, artists, poets, and renowned 
feminine beauty. And then there were the Indians, who covered the levee on summer days 
selling herbs and crafted wares. And drifting through all, through this medley of 
languages and colors, were the people of the port, the sailors of ships, who came in 
great waves to spend their money in the cabarets, to buy for the night the beautiful 
women both dark and light, to dine on the best of Spanish and French cooking and drink 
the imported wines of the world. Then add to these, within years after my transformation, 
the Americans, who built the city up river from the old French Quarter with magnificent 
Grecian houses which gleamed in the moonlight like temples. And, of course, the planters, 
always the planters, coming to town with their families in shining landaus to buy evening 
gowns and silver and gems, to crowd the narrow streets on the way to the old French Opera 
House and the Theatre d'Orleans and the St. Louis Cathedral, from whose open doors came 
the chants of High Mass over the crowds of the Place d'Armes on Sundays, over the noise 
and bickering of the French Market, over the silent, ghostly drift of the ships along the 
raised waters of the Mississippi, which flowed against the levee above the ground of New 
Orleans itself, so that the ships appeared to float against the sky.
  "This was New Orleans, a magical and magnificent place to live. In which a vampire, 
richly dressed and gracefully walking through the pools of light of one gas lamp after 
another might attract no more notice in the evening than hundreds of other exotic 
creatures -if he attracted any at all, if anyone stopped to whisper behind a fan, `That 
man . . . how pale, how he gleams . . . how he moves. It's not natural!' A city in which 
a vampire might be gone before the words had even passed the lips, seeking out the alleys