The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice Page B

how his student cronies gathered in cafés 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 Encyclopédie, 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 Palais 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