Name: Louis de Pointe du Lac
Date of Birth: 1766
Place of Birth: New Orleans, Louisiana
Date Brought into Darkness: 1791 at the age of 25
Place Brought into Darkness: New Orleans, Louisiana
Maker: Lestat de Lioncourt
Chronicled Appearances: Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, Queen of the Damned, Tale of the Body Thief, Memnoch the Devil, mentioned in The Vampire Armand
Fledglings: Madeline, aided with Claudia's making
Description: Louis is twenty-five years old when he becomes a vampire in 1791. A plantation owner in New Orleans, he owned seven other pieces of Louisiana property. He had made himself vulnerable to the vampire Lestat while he was deep in grief over the death of his brother Paul. Louis felt responsible because his brother had taken a fatal fall after Louis had refused his request to sell the plantation and use the money for religious work. Lestat had fallen in love with Louis' air of despair and offered immortality which Louis accepted, although at first he had begged merely to be killed.
Although Louis soon despises Lestat and mourns his decision to become a vampire, he finds a new purpose when he helps Lestat to make Claudia, a 5-year-old child into a vampire. She comes to mean everything to him, and he attempts to keep her a child, despite the evidence that inside her tiny body she has matured into a woman. After attempting to kill Lestat, Louis accompanies Claudia to Europe and when she is destroyed, his world changes dramatically. Louis clings to Claudia's memory and resists the approach of another vampire, Armand, who is strongly attracted to him and who manipulated Claudia's destruction in order to obtain Louis' exclusive companionship. By the end of his story, Louis seems cynical; he is unable to appreciate what a gift he has in immortality.
When he is later reunited with Lestat, they are as lovers rejoined. Nevertheless, Louis never quite gets over his horror at being a vampire and when Lestat comes to him in a mortal form in Tale of the Body Thief and asks for his help in becoming a vampire again, Louis refuses. He will not willingly pass on the Dark Gift to anybody every again. Louis is also one of the surviving vampires in Queen of the Damned; Akasha spared him because Lestat loves him. He moves through the novel passively, noticed by the others but saying little, although he does brave Akasha's anger by pointing out that she has no right to intervene in the human world. She responds that he is actually the most predatory of all the immortals.
After Akasha's demise, Louis goes in search of Claudia. He follows Jesse's lead that Claudia's ghost has appeared in New Orleans, and he makes his permanent home there, living in a shack behind a large but empty Victorian house. There he reads by candlelight and is seemingly unaware of all the broken windows. Lestat angrily torches this shack after Louis refuses to help him become a vampire again. Once Lestat gets his body back, however, he confronts Louis, then upon forgiving him, invites Louis to live with him again in the refurbished townhouse. Louis accepts.
Brad Pitt played the meloncholy Louis in the 1992 film Interview with the Vampire. Louis is one of the best loved characters within the Vampire Chronicles.
The rare Manga version of Interview with the Vampire is thought by fans to be the most faithful adaptation of the story. Visually the characters, like Louis above, are on target while the story itself remains quite faithful to the original text.
Ramsland, Katherine. The Vampire Companion: The Official Guide to Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles. Ballantine: New York. 1995. Pages 260-262.
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