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Taxes, tickets, handbills, heating fuel, foot laed it all

And now and then, I took exquisite pride and pleasure in it

With the seasons we grew, as did our audiences, crude benches giving way to velvet seats, and penny pantomimes to more poetical productions

Many a night as I took entlee, with fitted waistcoat of printed silk and close-cut coat of bright wool, my hair combed back beneath a black ribbon or finally triht upon those lost centuries of rancid ritual and de painful illness in a lightless room amid bitter medicines and pointless incantations It could not have been real, all that, the ragged plague of predatory paupers that ere, singing of Satan in the riloom

And all the lives I'd lived, and worlds I'd known, seemed even less substantial

What lurked beneatheyes? Who was I? Had I no relow to my faint smile at those who asked it of me? I remembered no one who had ever lived and breathed withinforin on a prayer book page or ar remnants of a coarse, unfathomable tiold, or blazedaltar

I knew nothing of such things The crosses snatched fros And rosaries cast aside with other paste as thieving fingers, mine, tore off a victim's diamond buttons

I developed in those eight decades of the Theatre des Va resiliency, the public claly frivolous andafter the theatre was gone, into the late twentieth century a silent, concealed nature, letting my childlike face deceive my adversaries, my would-be enemies (I rarely took them seriously) and my vampire slaves

I was the worst of leaders, that is, the indifferent cold leader who strikes fear in the hearts of everyone but bothers to love no one, and I maintained the Theatre des Vampires, as we called it well into the 1870s, when Lestat's child Louis ca the anshich his cocky insolent e-old questions: Where do we vampires come from? Who made us and for what?

Ah, but before I discourse on the co of the famous and irresistible vampire Louis, and his small exquisite paramour, the vampire Claudia, let me relate one tiny incident that happened to me in the earlier years of the nineteenth century

It ; or perhaps it is the betrayal of another's secret existence I don't know I relate it only because it touches fancifully, if not certainly, upon one who has played a dramatic role in my tale

I cannot mark the year of this little event Let me say only that Chopin's lovely, dreamy piano e Sand were the rage, and that woowns of the Ee heavy-skirted, small-waisted taffeta dresses in which they appear so often in old shining daguerreotypes

The theatre was booer, having grown tired of its perforht in the wooded land just beyond the glow of Paris, not far fro chandeliers

It was there that I came upon another vampire

I knew her irace hich shecape and abundant skirt with shted and beckoning s