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But before I could start jumping up and down for joy, half the troup materialized around us. And Luchina, one of the actresses, immediately spoke up.
"Oh no, you'll not let him go on regularly" she said. "He's the handsomest actor on the boulevard du Temple and you'll hire him outright for it, and pay him outright for it, and he doesn't touch another broom or mop. " I was terrified. My career had just started and it was about to be over, but to my amazement Renaud agreed to all her terms.
Of course I was very flattered to be called handsome, and I understood as I had years ago that Lelio, the lover, is supposed to have considerable style. An aristocrat with any breeding whatsoever was perfect for the part.
But if I was going to make the Paris audiences really notice me, if I was going to have them talking about me at the Comedic-Francaise, I had to be more than some yellow-haired angel fallen out of a marquis's family onto the stage. I had to be a great actor, and that is exactly what I determined to be.
That night Nicolas and I celebrated with a colossal drunk. We had all the troupe up to our rooms for it, and I climbed out on the slippery rooftops and opened my arms to Paris and Nicolas played his violin in the window until we'd awakened the whole neighborhood.
The music was rapturous, yet people were snarling and screaming up the alleyways, and banging on pots and pans. We paid no attention. We were dancing and singing as we had in the witches' place. I almost fell off the window ledge.
The next day, bottle in hand, I dictated the whole story to the Italian letter writer in the stinking sunshine in les Innocents and saw that the letter went off to my mother at once. I wanted to embrace everybody I saw in the streets. I was Lelio. I was an actor.
By September I had my name on the handbills. And I sent those to my mother, too.
And we weren't doing the old commedia. We were performing a farce by a famous writer who, on account of a general playwrights' strike, couldn't get it performed at the Comedie-Francaise.
Of course we couldn't say his name, but everyone knew it was his work, and half the court was packing Renaud's House of Thesbians every night.
I wasn't the lead, but I was the young lover, a sort of Lelio again really, which was almost better than the lead, and I stole every scene in which I appeared. Nicolas had taught me the part, bawling me out constantly for not learning to read. And by the fourth performance, the playwright had written extra lines for me.
Nicki was having his own moment at the intermezzo, when his latest rendering of a frothy little Mozart sonata was keeping the house in its seats. Even his student friends were back. We were getting invitations to private balls. I went tearing off to les Innocents every few days to write to my mother, and finally I had a clipping from an English paper, The Spectator, to send her, which praised our little play and in particular the blond-haired rogue who steals the hearts of the ladies in the third and fourth acts. Of course I couldn't read this clipping. But the gentleman who'd brought it to me said it was complementary, and Nicolas swore it was too.
When the first chill nights of fall came on, I wore the fur lined red cloak on the stage. You could have seen it in the back row of the gallery even if you were almost blind. I had more skill now with the white makeup, shading it here and there to heighten the contours of my face, and though my eyes were ringed in black and my lips reddened a little, I looked both startling and human at the same time. I got love notes from the women in the crowd.
Nicolas was studying music in the mornings with an Italian maestro. Yet we had money enough for good food, wood, and coal. My mother's letters came twice a week and said her health had taken a turn for the better. She wasn't coughing as badly as last winter. She wasn't in pain. But our fathers had disowned us and would not acknowledge any mention of our names.
We were too happy to worry about that. But the dark dread, the "malady of mortality," was with me a lot when the cold weather came on.
The cold seemed worse in Paris. It wasn't clean as it had been in the mountains. The poor hovered in doorways, shivering and hungry, the crooked unpaved streets were thick with filthy slush. I saw barefoot children suffering before my very eyes, and more neglected corpses lying about then ever before. I was never so glad of the fur-lined cape as I was then. I wrapped it around Nicolas and held him close to me when we went out together, and we walked in a tight embrace through the snow and the rain.
Cold or no cold, I can't exaggerate the happiness of these days. Life was exactly what I thought it could be. And I knew I wouldn't be long in Renaud's theater. Everybody was saying so. I had visions of the big stages, of touring London and Italy and even America with a great troupe of actors. Yet there was no reason to hurry. My cup was full.
But in the month of October when Paris was already freezing, I commenced to see, quite regularly, a strange face in the audience that invariably distracted me. Sometimes it almost made me forget what I was doing, this face. And then it would be gone as if I'd imagined it. I must have seen it off and on for a fortnight before I finally mentioned it to Nicki.
I felt foolish and found it hard to put into words:
"There is someone out there watching me," I said.
"Everyone's watching you," Nicki said. "That's what you want. "
He was feeling a little sad that evening, and his answer was slightly sharp.
Earlier when he was making the fire, he had said he would never amount to much with the violin. In spite of his ear and his skill, there was too much he didn't know. And I would be a great actor, he was sure. I had said this was nonsense, but it was a shadow falling over my soul. I remembered my mother telling me that it was too late for him.
He wasn't envious, he said. He was just unhappy a litt
le, that's all.
I decided to drop the matter of the mysterious face. I tried to think of some way to encourage him. I reminded him that his playing produced profound emotions in people, that even the actors backstage stopped to listen when he played. He had an undeniable talent.
"But I want to be a great violinist," he said. "And I'm afraid it will never be. As long as we were at home, I could pretend that it was going to be. "
"You can't give up on it!" I said.
"Lestat, let me be frank with you," he said. "Things are easy for you. What you set your sights on you get for yourself. I know what you're thinking about all the years you were miserable at home. But even then, what you really set your mind to, you accomplished. And we left for Paris the very day that you decided to do it. "
"You don't regret coming to Paris, do you?" I asked.
