The Vampire Chronicles Collection - Anne Rice [202]
For five to six hours every evening, I lived and breathed in a little universe of shouting and laughing and quarreling men and women, struggling for this one and against that one, all of us comrades in the wings even if we weren’t friends. Maybe it was like being in a little boat on the ocean, all of us pulling together, unable to escape each other. It was divine.
Nicolas was slightly less enthusiastic, but then that was to be expected. And he got even more ironical when his rich student friends came around to talk to him. They thought he was a lunatic to live as he did. And for me, a nobleman shoveling actresses into their costumes and emptying slop buckets, they had no words at all.
Of course all that these young bourgeois really wanted was to be aristocrats. They bought titles, married into aristocratic families whenever they could. And it’s one of the little jokes of history that they got mixed up in the Revolution, and helped to abolish the class which in fact they really wanted to join.
I didn’t care if we ever saw Nicolas’s friends again. The actors didn’t know about my family, and in favor of the very simple Lestat de Valois, which meant nothing actually, I’d dropped my real name, de Lioncourt.
I was learning everything I could about the stage. I memorized, I mimicked. I asked endless questions. And only stopped my education long enough each night for that moment when Nicolas played his solo on the violin. He’d rise from his seat in the tiny orchestra, the spotlight would pick him out from the others, and he would rip into a little sonata, sweet enough and just short enough to bring down the house.
And all the while I dreamed of my own moment, when the old actors, whom I studied and pestered and imitated and waited upon like a lackey, would finally say: “All right, Lestat, tonight we need you as Lelio. Now you ought to know what to do.”
It came in late August at last.
Paris was at its warmest, and the nights were almost balmy and the house was full of a restless audience fanning itself with handkerchiefs and handbills. The thick white paint was melting on my face as I put it on.
I wore a pasteboard sword with Nicolas’s best velvet coat, and I was trembling before I stepped on the stage thinking, This is like waiting to be executed or something.
But as soon as I stepped out there, I turned and looked directly into the jam-packed hall and the strangest thing happened. The fear evaporated.
I beamed at the audience and very slowly I bowed. I stared at the lovely Flaminia as if I were seeing her for the first time. I had to win her. The romp began.
The stage belonged to me as it had years and years ago in that far-off country town. And as we pranced madly together across the boards—quarreling, embracing, clowning—laughter rocked the house.
I could feel the attention as if it were an embrace. Each gesture, each line brought a roar from the audience—it was too easy almost—and we could have worked it for another half hour if the other actors, eager to get into the next trick as they called it, hadn’t forced us finally towards the wings.
The crowd was standing up to applaud us. And it wasn’t that country audience under the open sky. These were Parisians shouting for Lelio and Flaminia to come back out.
In the shadows of the wings, I reeled. I almost collapsed. I could not see anything for the moment but the vision of the audience gazing up at me over the footlights. I wanted to go right back on stage. I grabbed Flaminia and kissed her and realized that she was kissing me back passionately.
Then Renaud, the old manager, pulled her away.
“All right, Lestat,” he said as if he were cross about something. “All right, you’ve done tolerably well, I’m going to let you go on regularly from now on.”
But before I could start jumping up and down for joy, half the troupe materialized around us. And Luchina, one of the actresses, immediately spoke up.
“Oh no, you’ll not let him