Louis de Pointe du Lac

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Louis de Pointe du Lac is a character in The Vampire Chronicles novels written by Anne Rice. He began his life as a mortal man, and later became a vampire. He is the protagonist and antihero of Interview with the Vampire, the first of the The Vampire Chronicles. He also features in The Vampire Lestat, The Queen Of The Damned, The Tale of the Body Thief, Memnoch The Devil all written by Lestat and Merrick by David Talbot.

[edit] Mortal

Louis de Pointe du Lac was born in France in 1766, to a Roman Catholic family who emigrated to North America when he was very young. His mother, sister and brother, Paul, lived just outside New Orleans on one of their two indigo plantations, named Pointe du Lac after the family. This was the place where Louis' brother died, after a terrible quarrel with Louis. Louis had always thought that he was to blame and never got over the guilt of his brother's death. He became self-destructive, cynical and desperate, and longed for the release of death, but lacked the courage to commit suicide. He took to frequenting taverns and getting into duels in order that someone might make the decision for him and kill him to end his misery.

[edit] Vampire

It was one of these nights, in a tavern brawl, that he caught the eye of the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt, who, "fatally in love" with the tragic Creole planter, appeared to him as an angel and offered him an alternative to his desperate life. Lestat, upon seeing for the first time Louis' "fine black hair" and deep green eyes, was completely and immediately seduced not only by Louis's beauty, but also by his seeming lack of regard for life; "He seduced the tenderness in me." Lestat made Louis into a vampire, his immortal companion in 1791, and it was with Louis whom he would live, love, and kill with for nearly a century to come.

However, Lestat was damaged from his own experiences in France and the Old World. He was not as gentle a tutor or as much of a friend as Louis would have liked, 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 were often at odds with one another, they did eventually form an uneasy sort of truce, with Lestat gradually coming to regard his friend as a kind of soulmate, albeit one who resisted his "teachings" on killing and living life as a vampire. There was a certain element of sexual attraction implicit in their relationship, but whether it was actually consummated is a matter of debate.

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 the six year old orphan, and Lestat contrives to make her into a vampire to, in his own words, "bind Louis to [him]". In saving Louis' life by giving him Claudia to love and look after, he destroyed Claudia by forever condemning her to the form of a six-year-old child.

Louis finally found a sort of peace with his "family," he taking the "maternal" role with Claudia, Lestat the paternal, and finding contentment in their family home at Rue Royale. Claudia, however, gradually matured in mind (if not body) and came to hate both of her "parents" for giving her immortality, in her own words, "this hopeless guise, this helpless form". She rebelled against Lestat, attempting to kill him in 1860 and escaped with Louis to the Old World to look for other vampires.

In Paris, the "father" and "daughter" finally found what they were looking for: fifteen vampires who disguised themselves as humans mummers at the Theatre des Vampires. However, in the eyes of these vampires, Louis and Claudia are criminals. They had both attempted to kill their maker, Lestat and therefore ought to pay for their crime with their lives. Louis managed to escape death, however, as Lestat who appeared suddenly at the Theatre pleaded for his life.

Louis burned down the Theatre in a rage after Claudia's death and drifted through the world and time with the Theatre's leader, Armand, whom he was in awe of and loved. They separated very late in the 20th century in New Orleans.

In the early 1970s, Louis later claimed to have discovered Lestat in New Orleans, lost in a catatonic state. Louis turned his back on him in pity and disgust. {This was 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.")

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

At the end of Merrick, one of the Vampire Chronicles, Lestat gave Louis some of his immensely powerful blood (containing the power of some of the oldest and most powerful vampires in the world) to save Louis' life.

The Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice
Interview with the Vampire | The Vampire Lestat | The Queen of the Damned | The Tale of the Body Thief | Memnoch the Devil The Vampire Armand | Merrick | Blood and Gold | Blackwood Farm | Blood Canticle
New Tales of the Vampires
Pandora | Vittorio the Vampire
Characters
Lestat | Gabrielle | Louis | Claudia | Armand | Magnus | Those Who Must Be Kept | Maharet and Mekare | Marius | Pandora Bianca | David | Jesse | Khayman | Daniel | Mael