Gabrielle asked.
He frowned, his head turning dismissively, but she pressed on.
“Your gift is for leading the coven, and your coven is still there.” He made a soft despairing sound.
“Nicolas is a fledgling,” she said. “He can teach them much about the world outside, but he cannot really lead them. The woman, Eleni, is amazingly clever, but she will make way for you.”
“What is it to me, their games?” he whispered.
“It is a way to exist,” she said. “And that is all that matters to you now.”
“The Theater of the Vampires! I should rather the fire.”
“Think of it,” she said. “There’s a perfection in it you can’t deny. We are illusions of what is mortal, and the stage is an illusion of what is real.”
“It’s an abomination,” he said. “What did Lestat call it? Petty?”
“That was to Nicolas because Nicolas would build fantastical philosophies upon it,” she said. “You must live now without fantastical philosophies, the way you did when you were Marius’s apprentice. Live to learn the age. And Lestat does not believe in the value of evil. But you do believe in it. I know that you do.”
“I am evil,” he said half smiling. He almost laughed. “It’s not a matter of belief, is it? But do you think I could go from the spiritual path I followed for three centuries to voluptuousness and debauchery such as that? We were the saints of evil,” he protested. “I will not be common evil. I will not.”
“Make it uncommon,” she said. She was getting too impatient. “If you are evil, how can voluptuousness and debauchery be your enemies? Don’t the world, the flesh, and the devil conspire equally against man?”
He shook his head, as if to say he did not care.
“You are more concerned with what is spiritual than with evil,” I interjected, watching him closely. “Is that not so?”
“Yes,” he said at once.
“But don’t you see, the color of wine in a crystal glass can be spiritual,” I continued. “The look in a face, the music of a violin. A Paris theater can be infused with the spiritual for all its solidity. There’s nothing in it that hasn’t been shaped by the power of those who possessed spiritual visions of what it could be.”
Something quickened in him, but he pushed it away.
“Seduce the public with voluptuousness,” Gabrielle said. “For God’s sake, and the devil’s, use the power of the theater as you will.”
“Weren’t the paintings of your master spiritual?” I asked. I could feel a warming in myself now at the thought of it. “Can anyone look on the great works of that time and not call them spiritual?”
“I have asked myself that question,” Armand answered, “many times. Was it spiritual or was it voluptuous? Was the angel painted on the triptych caught in the material, or was the material transformed?”
“No matter what they did to you after, you never doubted the beauty and the value of his work,” I said. “I know you didn’t. And it was the material transformed. It ceased to be paint and it became magic, just as in the kill the blood ceases to be blood and becomes life.”
His eyes misted, but no visions came from him. Whatever road he traveled back in his thoughts, he traveled alone.
“The carnal and the spiritual,” Gabrielle said, “come together in the theater as they do in the paintings. Sensual fiends we are by our very nature. Take this as your key.”
He closed his eyes for a moment as if he would shut us out.
“Go to them and listen to the music that Nicki makes,” she said. “Make art with them in the Theater of the Vampires. You have to pass away from what failed you into what can sustain you. Otherwise—there is no hope.”
I wished she had not said it so abruptly, brought it so to the point.
But he nodded and his lips pressed together in a bitter smile.
“The only thing really important for you,” she said slowly, “is that you go to an extreme.”
He stared at her blankly. He could not possibly understand what she meant by this. And I thought it too brutal a truth to say. But he didn’t resist it. His face became thoughtful and smooth and childlike again.
For a long time he looked at the fire. Then he spoke:
“But why must you go at all?” he asked. “No one is at war with you now. No one is trying to drive you out. Why can’t you build it with me, this little enterprise?”
Did