Rice Anne The Vampire Lestat [en]

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said immediately. "I would really like to know. Did you go to the
university? Did you really study with Mozart? What do people in
Paris do? What do they talk about? What do they think? " He laughed
softly at the barrage of questions. I had to laugh myself. I signaled for
another glass and pushed the bottle towards him.
"Tell me, " I said, "did you go to the theaters in Paris? Did you see
the Comedie-Francaise? "
"Many times, " he answered a little dismissively. "But listen, the
diligence will be coming in any minute. There'll be too much noise.
Allow me the honor of providing your supper in a private room
upstairs. I should so like to do it- " And before I could make a
gentlemanly protest, he was ordering everything. We were shown up
to a crude but comfortable little chamber. I was almost never in small
wooden rooms, and I loved it immediately. The table was laid for the
meal that would come later on, the fire was truly warming the place,
unlike the roaring blazes in our castle, and the thick glass of the
window was clean enough to see the blue winter sky over the snow-
covered mountains.
"Now, I shall tell you everything you want to know about Paris, " he
said agreeably, waiting for me to sit first. "Yes, I did go to the
university. " He made a little sneer as if it had all been contemptible.
"And I did study with Mozart, who would have told me I was hopeless
if he hadn't needed pupils. Now where do you want me to begin? The
stench of the city, or the infernal noise of it? The hungry crowds that
surround you everywhere? The thieves in every alley ready to cut your
throat? " I waved all that away. His smile was very different from his
tone, his manner open and appealing.
"A really big Paris theater... " I said. "Describe it to me . . . what is it
like? " I think we stayed in that room for four solid hours and all we
did was drink and talk. He drew plans of the theaters on the tabletop
with a wet finger, described the plays he had seen, the famous actors,
the little houses of the boulevards. Soon he was describing all of Paris
and he'd forgotten to be cynical, my curiosity firing him as he talked of
the Ile de la Cite, and the Latin Quarter, the Sorbonne, the Louvre.
We went on to more abstract things, how the newspapers reported
events, how his student cronies gathered in cafes to argue. He told me
men were restless and out of love with the monarchy. That they
wanted a change in government and wouldn't sit still for very long.
31
He told me about the philosophers, Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau. I
couldn't understand everything he said. But in rapid, sometimes
sarcastic speech he gave me a marvelously complete picture of what
was going on. Of course, it didn't surprise me to hear that educated
people didn't believe in God, that they were infinitely more interested
in science, that the aristocracy was much in ill favor, and so was the
Church. These were times of reason, not superstition, and the more
he talked the more I understood. Soon he was outlining the
Encyclopedie, the great compilation of knowledge supervised by
Diderot. And then it was the salons he'd gone to, the drinking bouts,
his evenings with actresses. He described the public balls at the Palms
Royal, where Marie Antoinette appeared right along with the common
people.
"I'll tell you, " he said finally, "it all sounds a hell of a lot better in this
room than it really is. "
"I don't believe you, " I said gently. I didn't want him to stop talking.
I wanted it to go on and on.
"It's a secular age, Monsieur, " he said, filling our glasses from the
new bottle of wine. "Very dangerous. "
"Why dangerous? " I whispered. "An end to superstition? What
could be better than that? "
"Spoken like a true eighteenth-century man, Monsieur, " he said with
a faint melancholy to his smile. "But no one values anything anymore.
Fashion is everything. Even atheism is a fashion. " I had always had a
secular mind, but not for any philosophical reason. No one in my
family much believed in God or ever had. Of course they said they
did, and we went to mass. But this was duty. Real religion had long
ago died out in our family, as it had perhaps in the families of
thousands of aristocrats. Even at the monastery I had not believed in
God. I had believed in the monks around me. I tried to explain this in
simple language that would not give offense to Nicolas, because for his
family it was different. Even his miserable money-grubbing father
(whom I secretly admired) was fervently religious. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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