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 began his life as a mortal man, and later became 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 was born in France on October 4, 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 after insisting that he had religious visions. 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 after the death of his brother, Paul. He longed for the release of death, but lacked the courage to commit suicide. He took to frequenting taverns and other places of ill repute. He got into fights and duels in order that someone might make the decision for him and kill him to end his misery.

Vampire

It was in a tavern brawl that he caught the eye of the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt, who wanted his wealth, appeared to him as an angel and offered him an alternative to his desperate, meaningless life. Lestat, upon seeing for the first time Louis' "fine black hair" and deep green eyes, and sensing his passion, was completely and immediately seduced not only by Louis's beauty, but also by his tragedy and human heart; "He seduced the tenderness in me." Lestat made Louis into a vampire, his immortal companion in 1791, and it was Louis with whom he would live, love, and kill 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, 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 the six-year-old orphan, and 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 destroyed Claudia by forever condemning her to the form of a six-year-old child.

Louis finally accepted his "family," taking the "maternal" role with Claudia 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 human mummers at the Théâtre 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, as Lestat, who appeared suddenly at the Theatre, pleaded for his life. Claudia was not so fortunate.

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 loved. They separated very late in the 19th century in New Orleans.

In the early 1920s, 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 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 he undertook his long sleep.)

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.

Louis was 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 had put himself into the sun after making Merrick a vampire. Lestat, David Talbot, and Merrick then gave 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' life. It was 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 had become almost equal to Lestat in power. Whether this was in fact the case was not fully explored; later books did not focus on the character of Louis.

The novel and movie depict an arguable difference in Louis' relationships with Lestat and Armand. In the film, Louis had a rather resentful and bitter attitude towards the enigmatic Lestat, and merely reached a half-hearted understanding with Lestat by the end of the film. Louis had also coldly rejected Armand's offer of companionship due to Armand orchestrating his beloved Claudia's demise.

Fledglings

• Madeleine
• Merrick Marie Louise Mayfair

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

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Louis de Pointe du Lac

• Rice, Anne. Interview with the Vampire. Alfred A. Knopf, 1976. ISBN 0-394-49821-6
• Louis de Pointe du Lac at the Internet Movie Database
• Lestat: The Musical at the Internet Broadway Database
• Official website of Anne Rice