And behind me, I heard my brother Augustin say: "Now he will really be impossible!"

I felt my face colour. Outrageous that he should say this in the presence of these men, but when I glanced to Nicolas de Lenfent I saw the most affectionate expression on his face.

"I too am impossible, Monsieur," he whispered as I gave him the parting kiss. "Someday, will you let me come to talk to you and tell me how you killed them all? Only the impossible can do the impossible."

~

"Get your violin!" I said. "Play a song about going to Paris, we're on our way. We're going in the morning!"

"And how are we going to feed ourselves in Paris?" he sang out as he made with his empty hands to play an invisible violin. "Are you going to shoot rats for our supper?"

"Don't ask what we'll do when we get there!" I said. "The important thing is just to get there."

~

Nicolas ~ Dany & Dany ©2000

I didn't answer. I wanted him to go on.

"And when we decided to go to Paris, I thought we would starve in Paris, that we would go down and down and down. It was what I wanted, rather than what they wanted, that I, the favored son, should rise for them. I thought we would go down! We were supposed to go down."

"Oh, Nicki..." I whispered.

"But you didn't go down, Lestat," he said, his eyebrows rising. "The hunger, the cold - none of it stopped you. You were a triumph!" The rage thickened his voice again. "You didn't drink yourself to death in the gutter. You turned everything upside down! And for every aspect of our proposed damnation you found exuberance, and there was no end to your enthusiasm and the passion coming out of you - and the light, always the light. And in exact proportion to the light coming out of you, there was the darkness in me! Every exuberance piercing me and creating its exact proportion of darkness and despair! And then, the magic, when you got the magic, irony of ironies, you protect me from it! And what did you do with it but use your Satanic powers to stimulate the actions of a good man!"

The Vampire Lestat ~ Anne Rice

The merchant's son, also known as Nicki, who befriends Lestat after Lestat kills the wolves. He invites Lestat to tell him about the battle, and the resulting dialogue forms a bond between the two young men.

Lestat expresses his curiosity about Nicolas's schooling in Paris, and they quickly develop grand ideas of running off together to that city. Both of them feel that they fail to fit in with others' expectations, and as outsiders they share a secret loneliness. Nicolas wants to be a violinist, having studied with Mozart, and Lestat wants to be an actor. Although their friendship grows, they soon discover that their opposing philosophies start to alienate them from each other. Nicolas is full of cynicism and dark despair, while Lestat firmly believes in goodness. His moral light often overwhelms Nicolas (although Lestat is unaware of this until after he makes Nicolas a vampire).

Lestat's mother gives them money to go to Paris, and they both find work in a small theatre. After Magnus abducts Lestat and makes him a vampire, Lestat avoids Nicolas but sends him gifts, including a Stradivarius violin, while revealing nothing of what has happened to him. Lestat does visit the theatre one night and Nicki embraces him, but Lestat hungers for his blood and must push him away. Once Nicolas sees Lestat survive a bullet, he is sure Lestat knows sorcery and is holding something back from him. He grows bitter about the deception and goes about drunk in the streets.

But Armand's coven knows what Nicolas means to Lestat and uses him to lure Lestat to them. Lestat rescues Nicolas, who then begs for the Dark Gift. Gabrielle warns Lestat not to do the transformation, but Lestat does it anyway. This new level of intimacy only serves to distance Nicolas and Lestat further, and makes Nicolas more despondent and cynical. It gets to the point that Lestat can no longer stand his former friend, and he brings Nicki his violin in the hope that playing it will restore their bond. However, Nicolas plays an intense and chaotic music that reflects his state of mind. He then confesses that he had wanted both himself and Lestat to come to ruin in Paris; he hates Lestat's exuberance and ability to triumph in the face of adversity.

Rice did not like Nicolas as a character, although she created the love between him and Lestat. "I meant him to be someone enormously attractive to Lestat, but Lestat couldn't save him. His view was too dark. When he was made a vampire, the darkness in him just erupted. So much of his life was based on rebelling against authoritarian principles and crazy bourgeois delusions that he just didn't have strength. Once he had maximum possibility and maximum nihilism, he couldn't handle it. Lestat was infinitely bigger and stronger, and tried to protect him, but Nicki was doomed."

Nicolas goes on to write plays for the coven who run the Theatre of the Vampires. He views the Dark Gift as conformation of pure evil. As a vampire, he is sloppy, scandalous, and difficult to control. He tries to make other vampires, so Armand, his caretaker, must restrain him. Eventually Armand imprisons him and cuts off his hands to keep him from playing his violin. Nicolas goes into the fire to destroy himself, requesting that Eleni send his Stradivarius on to Lestat.

When Lestat sees Louis years later, he recognizes in him the echo of Nicolas - grim, intense, and filled with despair. This is partly the reason he falls in love with Louis, and partly the reason he later despairs of their relationship; Louis is as dark and melancholy as Nicolas had been.

Violin

Nicolas's playing of the violin entrances Lestat. He thinks the sound is powerfully affected and extremely human, although he is aware that the finest players have been accused of being possessed by the Devil because their music had such magic. Nicolas studied with Mozart, ignoring his father's insistence that he go into the family business. When he and Lestat go to Paris, Nicolas plays in Renaud's theatre and on the boulevards to make money, expecting that he and Lestat will soon fail in their venture and be swallowed by darkness and ruin. He intends his playing, which speaks of his own inner emptiness and despair, to hurt others. However, Lestat's talents lead them instead to triumph.

After Lestat becomes a vampire, he sends Nicolas a Stradivarius and spies on him one night. Nicolas senses his presence and tries to lure him with the violin. Lestat resists, while perceiving that Nicki's music shows the depths of his despair. Nevertheless, once Nicki is a vampire and fails to respond to anything, Lestat gives him the violin, hoping it will wake him form his stupor and make him vital again.

Nicolas then plays forcefully, in a manner that tells the story of what has happened to him. He shows his rebellion agains all things, and that the music is the darkness of his soul. His playing draws out the surviving members of Armand's coven, who dance as marionettes, and Nicolas proclaims the start of the Theatre of the Vampires.

When Nicolas deliberately goes into the fire, Eleni returns his violin to Lestat. He carries it with him, and when he joins Marius, he finds the violin in the guest room, as if Marius understands its significance to him. One night Lestat decides to try to awaken Akasha; he believes that the violin's music has the power to do it. He imitates what he remembers from Nicolas's playing and before long, Akasha sings a high note that threatens to shatter his eardrums. She rises up and steps on the violin. Although it is crushed, it has achieved its end. The playing of it prefigures what Lestat will do two centuries later with his rock music.

Rice herself was once obsessed with the violin. "I wanted to be a great violinist," she claims. When that did not seem probable, she gave up her lessons. She had wanted to develop a skill that would ensure that her life would not be one of mediocrity. She tells a fictionalised version of this story in the first draft of IV: Louis describes how he once saw a little girl crying. She wanted to play the violin, but her mother would not pay for the lessons and denigrated the girl's ambition. Her parents tried to convince her that mediocrity is her only hope in life. That attitude, Louis claims, is the essence of egotism: the refusal to believe that greatness can occur in our midst.

The Vampire Companion ~ Katherine Ramsland