Louis de Pointe du Lac

Louis de Pointe du Lac
The Vampire Chronicles character

Brad Pitt as Louis (1994)
First appearance Interview with the Vampire (1976)
Created by Anne Rice
Portrayed by Brad Pitt (Interview with the Vampire)
Information
Nickname(s) Merciful Death
Dark Angel
Beautiful One
Species Vampire
Gender Male
Family Frances father, mother, younger sister, and brother-in-law
Paul (younger brother)
Significant other(s) Lestat de Lioncourt (maker/lover)
Armand (lover)
Madeleine (fledgling)
Children Claudia (adoptive daughter)
Religion Catholic (as a human)
Nationality American (Louisiana Creole)
French (born in France and emigrated to America)

Louis de Pointe du Lac is a fictional character in Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles series. He begins his life as a mortal man, and later becomes a vampire. He is the protagonist of Interview with the Vampire (the first book of The Vampire Chronicles). He also features in The Vampire Lestat, The Queen of the Damned, The Tale of the Body Thief, Memnoch The Devil, The Vampire Armand and Merrick.

Mortal

Louis de Pointe du Lac is born in France on October 4, 1766, to a Roman Catholic family who immigrated to North America when he was very young. His mother, sister and brother, Paul, live just outside New Orleans on one of their two indigo plantations, named Pointe du Lac after the family. Louis's brother, who insists that he has religious visions, dies after a terrible quarrel with Louis. Louis blames himself for his brother's death, becoming self-destructive, cynical, and desperate. He longs for the release of death, but lacks the courage to commit suicide. He takes to frequenting taverns and other places of ill repute, instigating fights and duels in order that someone might kill him.

Vampire

During a tavern brawl, Louis catches the eye of the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt. Lestat appears to Louis as an angel and offers him an alternative to his desperate, meaningless life. Lestat, upon seeing for the first time Louis's "fine black hair" and deep green eyes, and sensing his passion, is seduced not only by Louis's beauty, but also by his tragedy and human heart; "He seduced the tenderness in me." Lestat makes Louis into a vampire, his immortal companion in 1791, and lives with Louis for nearly a century.

However, Lestat is damaged from his experiences in France and the Old World. He is not as gentle a tutor or as much of a friend as Louis would like, one of the central themes in Interview with the Vampire. An example of this is an anguished comment recalled by Louis in his memoir, where he muses: "I was thinking how sublime friendship between Lestat and me might have been; how few impediments to it there would have been, and how much to be shared."

While Louis and Lestat are often at odds with one another, they eventually form an uneasy truce, with Lestat coming to regard Louis as a kind of soulmate, albeit one who resists his "teachings" on killing and living life as a vampire. There is an element of sexual attraction implicit in their relationship; in the books after Interview with the Vampire, Lestat refers to Louis as his lover.

Interview with the Vampire details an ersatz familial relationship between Louis, Lestat and a third vampire, Claudia. Louis, in a moment of weakness, feeds from a five-year-old orphan he finds in an abandoned house within the plague-ridden section of New Orleans. Lestat contrives to make her into a vampire to, in his own words, "bind Louis to [him]." In giving Louis Claudia to love and look after, he curses Claudia by condemning her to the form of a little girl.

Louis accepts his "family", taking the "maternal" role with Claudia and finding contentment in their townhouse at Rue Royale. Claudia however, matures psychologically but remains in her child form. After decades of being trapped in the form of a small child, she comes to hate both of her "parents" for giving her immortality. She rebels against Lestat, poisoning him and setting their home ablaze with Lestat inside in 1860. She escapes with Louis to eastern Europe to look for other vampires. After years of searching and becoming disillusioned, they travel to Paris.

In Paris, they find fifteen vampires who have disguised themselves as human mummers at the Théâtre des Vampires. However, in the eyes of these vampires, Louis and Claudia are criminals. They find out that both attempted to kill their maker, Lestat, and believe they ought to pay for their crime with their lives since killing fellow vampires is against the rules of the vampiric lifestyle. Louis escapes death after Lestat pleads for his life. Claudia is exposed to the sun and destroyed.

Louis burns down the Théâtre as revenge for Claudia's death and drifts through the world with the Theatre's leader, Armand, whom he had fallen in love with. They separate very late in the 19th century in New Orleans.

In the early 1920s, Louis claims to have discovered Lestat in New Orleans, lost in a catatonic state. Louis turns his back on him in pity and disgust. (This may be a fabrication by Louis to lead Daniel to Lestat's haunt, on which Lestat remarks in his memoir, "Louis [...] had all but drawn a map and placed an X on the very spot in New Orleans where I slumbered [...] and what his intentions were, were not clear." Lestat also mentions, in The Tale of the Body Thief, that Louis "made up" this scene. In The Vampire Lestat, Lestat does not mention meeting Louis again in New Orleans before undertaking his long sleep.)

Louis and Lestat are reunited at the end of the novel The Vampire Lestat in 1985 when Lestat is a rock superstar. In the events of The Queen Of The Damned, Louis and other vampires come together at Maharet's house in the Sonoma Compound to fight against Akasha.

Louis is one of the only vampires to refuse the powerful blood offered by Maharet and Lestat, preferring to gain strength with age. However at the end of Merrick, one of the Vampire Chronicles, Louis puts himself into the sun after making Merrick a vampire. Lestat, David Talbot, and Merrick then give Louis some of their blood (Lestat and David's containing the power of some of the oldest and most powerful vampires in the world) to save Louis's life. It is noted by David Talbot that with this transfusion of blood Louis may have lost some of his humanity and become more vampiric in nature and has become almost equal to Lestat in power.

Fledglings

Appearances in other media

In Neil Jordan's 1994 film adaptation of Interview with the Vampire, Louis is portrayed by Brad Pitt.

Louis appeared as a character in the short-lived Broadway show Lestat: The Musical composed by Elton John and Bernie Taupin, and was played by Jim Stanek.[1]

References

  1. ↑ "Jim Stanek to Play Louis in Broadway-Bound Lestat Musical " Cara Jo, June 28, 2005
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