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by
Anne Rice
Started reading
October 2, 2022
“People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil. I don’t know why. No, I do indeed know why. Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.
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.’
“Remarkable, if for nothing else, because of this, that all of those men and women who stayed for any reason left behind them some monument, some structure of marble and brick and stone that still stands; so that even when the gas lamps went out and the planes came in and the office buildings crowded the blocks of Canal Street, something irreducible of beauty and romance remained; not in every street perhaps, but in so many that the landscape is for me the landscape of those times always, and walking now in the starlit streets of the Quarter or the Garden District I am in those times again. I
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“He shook his head. ‘Louis!’ he said. ‘You are in love with your mortal nature! You chase after the phantoms of your former self.
“ ‘Does it bring you happiness?’ he asked. ‘You wander through the night, feeding on rats like a pauper and then moon at Babette’s window, filled with care, yet helpless as the goddess who came by night to watch Endymion sleep and could not have him. And suppose you could hold her in your arms and she would look on you without horror or disgust, what then? A few short years to watch her suffer every prick of mortality and then die before your eyes? Does this give happiness? This is insanity, Louis. This is vain. And what truly lies before you is vampire nature, which is killing.
‘Vampires are killers,’ he said now. ‘Predators. Whose all-seeing eyes were meant to give them detachment. The ability to see a human life in its entirety, not with any mawkish sorrow but with a thrilling satisfaction in being the end of that life, in having a hand in the divine plan.’
“ ‘I like to do it,’ he said. ‘I enjoy it.’ He looked at me. ‘I don’t say that you have to enjoy it. Take your aesthete’s tastes to purer things. Kill them swiftly if you will, but do it! Learn that you’re a killer!
‘Evil is a point of view,’ he whispered now. ‘We are immortal. And what we have before us are the rich feasts that conscience cannot appreciate and mortal men cannot know without regret. God kills, and so shall we; indiscriminately He takes the richest and the poorest, and so shall we; for no creatures under God are as we are, none so like Him as ourselves, dark angels not confined to the stinking limits of hell but wandering His earth and all its kingdoms.
‘Locked together in hatred,’
“ ‘I came to make peace with you, even if you are the father of lies. You’re my father,’ she said. ‘I want to make peace with you. I want things to be as they were.’
Claudia is a woman in her sixties in the body of a small girl. The description of her crying reads like a a small child’s behavior, while also feeling intentionally feminine. It feels like even the present (narrator) Louis does not realize extent to which this feels like a performance. Despite having very much letting her mask slip and allowing Louis to see what a calculating, ruthless killer she is, she manipulates him by playing into both his parental and romantic feelings toward her. And it works. Ye gods does this hit differently after a couple decades of life experience.
