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He had no co philosophy for me, the baby-faced deacon who had come forth out of the darkest prison, shorn of all belief, to put on the fashionable clothes of the age and walk once again on its high streets as I had done over three hundred years ago in Venice

And my followers, those fehon to the flames, how helplessly they blundered in their new freedoold from the pockets of their victis, and sit in e, the lustrous har actors

What was to be our fate, as with dazzled eyes weboulevards, fancy randly decorated ballrooms?

In satin-lined boudoirs we fed, and against the daht fine coffins for ourselves, full of fancy carvings and padded velvet, and were closeted for the night in gilded any-paneled cellars

What would have become of us, scattered, my children fearful of me, and I uncertain of when the fopperies and frenzy of the French City of Light ht drive them to rash or hideously destructive antics?

It was Lestat who gave eled sanity

Before leaving me stranded in the waste of my old ways, he bequeathed to me the very boulevard theater in which he had once been the young swain of the Co reaily painted backdrops and gilded prosceniu for a clae, so eager to hide behind the uised our polished white skin and fantastical grace and dexterity

Actors we becaether to perform cheerfully decadent pantomimes for mortal audiences who never suspected that hite-faced mummers were more monstrous than any edies

The Theatre des Vampires was born

And worthless shell that I was, dressed up like a human with less claim to that title than ever in all my years of failure, I became its mentor

It was the least I could do for iddy and happy as they were in a gaudy and Godless world on the verge of political revolution

Why I governed this palladian theater so long, why I re year with this Coven of sorts, I know not except that I needed it, needed it as surely as I'd ever needed Marius and our household in Venice, or Allesandra and the Coven beneath the Paris Cemetery of Les Innocents I needed a place to turn my steps before sunrise where I knew others of my kind were safely at rest

And I can say truthfully that my vampire followers needed me

They needed to believe in my leadership, and orst ca some restraint upon those careless iered us by public displays of supernatural power or extre with the arithmetical skill of an idiot savant our business affairs with the world