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We took long walks up the rocky slopes, had our bread and wine in the sun on the grass, roamed south through the ruins of an old monastery. We hung about in my rooms or sometimes climbed to the battlements. And we went back to our room at the inn when we were too drunk and too loud to be tolerated by others.

And as the weeks passed we revealed more and more of ourselves to each other. Nicolas told me about his childhood at school, the little disappointments of his early years, those whom he had known and loved.

And I started to tell him the painful things—and finally the old disgrace of running off with the Italian players.

It came to that one night when we were in the inn again, and we were drunk as usual. In fact we were at that moment of drunkenness that the two of us had come to call the Golden Moment, when everything made sense. We always tried to stretch out that moment, and then inevitably one of us would confess, “I can’t follow anymore, I think the Golden Moment’s passed.”

On this night, looking out the window at the moon over the mountains, I said that at the Golden Moment it was not so terrible that we weren’t in Paris, that we weren’t at the Opéra or the Comédie, waiting for the curtain to rise.

“You and the theaters of Paris,” he said to me. “No matter what we’re talking about you bring it back to the theaters and the actors—”

His brown eyes were very big and trusting. And even drunk as he was, he looked spruce in his red velvet Paris frock coat.

“Actors and actresses make magic,” I said. “They make things happen on the stage; they invent; they create.”

“Wait until you see the sweat streaming down their painted faces in the glare of the footlights,” he answered.

“Ah, there you go again,” I said. “And you, the one who gave up everything to play the violin.”

He got terribly serious suddenly, looking off as if he were weary of his own struggles.

“That I did,” he confessed.

Even now the whole village knew it was war between him and his father. Nicki wouldn’t go back to school in Paris.

“You make life when you play,” I said. “You create something from nothing. You make something good happen. And that is blessed to me.”

“I make music and it makes me happy,” he said. “What is blessed or good about that?”

I waved it away as I always did his cynicism now.

“I’ve lived all these years among those who create nothing and change nothing,” I said. “Actors and musicians—they’re saints to me.”

“Saints?” he asked. “Blessedness? Goodness? Lestat, your language baffles me.”

I smiled and shook my head.

“You don’t understand. I’m speaking of the character of human beings, not what they believe in. I’m speaking of those who won’t accept a useless life, just because they were born to it. I mean those who would be something better. They work, they sacrifice, they do things …”

He was moved by this, and I was a little surprised that I’d said it. Yet I felt I had hurt him somehow.

“There is blessedness in that,” I said. “There’s sanctity. And God or no God, there is goodness in it. I know this the way I know the mountains are out there, that the stars shine.”

He looked sad for me. And he looked hurt still. But for the moment I didn’t think of him.

I was thinking of the conversation I had had with my mother and my perception that I couldn’t be good and defy my family. But if I believed what I was saying …

As if he could read my mind, he asked:

“But do you really believe those things?”

“Maybe yes. Maybe no,” I said. I couldn’t bear to see him look so sad.

And I think more on account of that than anything else I told him the whole story of how I’d run off with the players. I told him what I’d never told anyone, not even my mother, about those few days and the happiness they’d given me.

“Now, how could it not have been good,” I asked, “to give and receive such happiness? We brought to life that town when we put on our play. Magic, I tell you. It could heal the sick, it could.”

He shook his head. And I knew there were things he wanted to say, which