The Tale of the Body Thief (1992) / Interview With The Vampire (2022)

Lestat, Claudia and their relationship in the books

She was simply unlike Lestat and me to such an extent I couldn’t comprehend her; for little child she was, but also fierce killer now capable of the ruthless pursuit of blood with all a child’s demanding. And though Lestat still threatened me with danger to her, he did not threaten her at all but was loving to her, proud of her beauty, anxious to teach her that we must kill to live and that we ourselves could never die. - Interview WIth The Vampire

Lestat played with her as if she were a magnificent doll, and I played with her as if she were a magnificent doll; and it was her pleading that forced me to give up my rusty black for dandy jackets and silk ties and soft gray coats and gloves and black capes. Lestat thought the best color at all times for vampires was black, possibly the only aesthetic principle he steadfastly maintained, but he wasn’t opposed to anything which smacked of style and excess. He loved the great figure we cut, the three of us in our box at the new French Opera House or the Theatre d'Orleans, to which we went as often as possible, Lestat having a passion for Shakespeare which surprised me, though he often dozed through the operas and woke just in time to invite some lovely lady to midnight supper, where he would use all his skill to make her love him totally, then dispatch her violently to heaven or hell and come home with her diamond ring to give to Claudia. - Interview With The Vampire

And I cannot say even now that I regret Claudia, that I wish I had never seen her, nor held her, nor whispered secrets to her, nor heard her laughter echoing through the shadowy gaslighted rooms of that all too human town house in which we moved amid the lacquered furniture and the darkening oil paintings and the brass flowerpots as living beings should. Claudia was my dark child, my love, evil of my evil. Claudia broke my heart. - The Vampire Lestat

Of course, he gave me a doll as usual, the replica of me, which as always wears a duplicate of my newest dress. To France he sends for these dolls, he wants me to know. And what should I do with it? Play with it as if I were really a child?

“Is there a message here, my beloved father?” I asked him this evening. “That I shall be a doll forever myself?” He has given me thirty such dolls over the years if recollection serves me. And recollection never does anything else. Each doll has been exactly like the rest. They would crowd me out of my bedroom if I kept them. But I do not keep them. I burn them, sooner or later. I smash their china faces with the poker. I watch the fire eat their hair. I can’t say that I like doing this. After all, the dolls are beautiful. And they do resemble me. Yet, it becomes the appropriate gesture. The doll expects it. So do I.

And now he has brought me another, and he stands in my doorway staring at me afterwards, as if my question cut him. And the expression on his face is so dark suddenly, I think, this cannot be my Lestat.

I wish that I could hate him. I wish that I could hate them both. But they defeat me not with their strength but with their weakness. They are so loving! And so pleasing to look at. Mon Dieu, how the women go after them!

As he stood there watching me, watching me examine this doll he had given me, I asked him sharply:

“Do you like what you see?”

“You don’t want them anymore, do you?” he whispered.

“Would you want them,” I asked, “if you were me?”

The expression on his face grew even darker. Never have I seen him the way he looked. A scorching heat came into his face, and it seemed he blinked to clear his vision. His perfect vision. He left me and went into the parlor. I went after him. In truth, I couldn’t bear to see him the way he was, yet I pursued him. “Would you like them,” I asked, “if you were me?” - Excerpt from Claudia’s diary, The Queen of the Damned

“Well, of course, you pick the voices that scold you. You always have, in the same manner in which you pick those who will turn on you and stick the knife right into your heart.”

He meant Claudia, but he couldn’t bear to speak her name. I knew I could hurt him if I said it, like flinging a curse in his face. I wanted to say, You had a hand in it! You were there when I made her, and there when she lifted the knife! - The Tale of the Body Thief

“You’re not sorry! You’ve never been sorry! Say it. Say the truth! You deserved the knife when I put it through your heart, and you know it, you’ve always known it!”

“No!”

Something in me broke as I stared down at her, at the exquisite face in its frame of finespun hair. I lifted her, and rose, placing her in the chair before me and I dropped to my knees at her feet.

“Claudia, listen to me. I didn’t begin it. I didn’t make the world! It was always there, this evil. It was in the shadows, and it caught me, and made me part of it, and I did what I felt I must. Don’t laugh at me, please, don’t turn your head away. I didn’t make evil! I didn’t make myself!”

How perplexed she was, staring at me, watching me, and then her small full mouth spread beautifully in a smile.

“It wasn’t all anguish,” I said, my fingers digging into her little shoulders. “It wasn’t hell. Tell me it wasn’t. Tell me there was happiness. Can devils be happy? Dear God, I don’t understand.”

“You don’t understand, but you always do something, don’t you?”

“Yes, and I’m not sorry. I’m not. I would roar it from the rooftops right up into the dome of heaven. Claudia, I would do it again!”

A great sigh passed out of me. I repeated the words, my voice growing louder. “I would do it again!”

Stillness in the room.

Her calm remained unbroken. Was she enraged? Surprised? Impossible to know as I looked into her expressionless eyes.“Oh you are evil, my father,” she said in a soft voice. “How can you abide it?” - The Tale of the Body Thief

We were in the hotel room again in old New Orleans, and Claudia sat quietly on the chair. Outside, the little city winked here and there with its dull lamps. How dark and heavy the sky overhead, with no hint of the great aurora of the cities to come.

“I told you I would do it again,” I said to Claudia.

“Why do you bother to explain to me,” she asked. “You know perfectly well that I never asked you any questions about it. I’ve been dead for years and years.” - The Tale of the Body Thief

[,,,] when they first set up their studios, it was not for us.“

"For us?”

“David, it had to be done in daylight, don’t you see? The first photographs belonged to mortals alone.”

“Of course, I didn’t even think of it.”

“She hated it,” he said. He looked again at the image. “And one night, unbeknownst to me, she broke the lock of one of the new studios—and there were many of them—and she stole all the pictures she could find. She broke them, smashed them in a fury. She said it was ghastly that we couldn’t have our pictures made. ‘Yes, we see ourselves in mirrors, and old tales would have it not,’ she screamed at me. 'But what about this mirror? Is this not some threat of judgment?’ I told her absolutely it was not.

"I remember Lestat laughed at her. He said she was greedy and foolish and ought to be happy with what she had. She was past all tolerance of him, and didn’t even answer him. That’s when he had the miniature painted of her for his locket, the locket you found for him in a Talamasca vault.”

“I see,” I answered. “Lestat never told me such a story.”

“Lestat forgets many things,” he said thoughtfully and without judgment. “He had other portraits of her painted after that. There was a large one here, very beautiful. We took it with us to Europe. We took trunks of our belongings, but that time I don’t want to remember. I don’t want to remember how she tried to hurt Lestat.” - Merrick

“Louis will do as I wish, even unto the very destruction of Lestat, which I plan in every detail. Whereas Lestat would never cooperate with my designs upon Louis. So there my loyalty lies, under the guise of love even in my own heart.

"What mysteries we are, human, vampire, monster, mortal, that we can love and hate simultaneously, and that emotions of all sorts might not parade for what they are not. I look at Louis and I despise him totally for the making of me, and yet I do love him. But then I love Lestat every bit as well.

"Perhaps in the court of my heart, I hold Louis far more accountable for my present state than ever I could blame my impulsive and simple Lestat. The fact is, one must die for this or the pain in me will never be scaled off, and immortality is but a monstrous measurement of what I shall suffer till the world revolves to its ultimate end. One must die so that the other will become ever more dependent upon me, ever more completely my slave. I would travel the world afterwards; I would travel the world afterwards; I would have my way; I cannot endure either one of them unless that one becomes my servant in thought, word, and deed.- Claudia’s diary, Merrick

Louis was sitting there. Calm, and collected, as they say, arms folded on his chest, very much clear of the sticky marble table, and his mellow green eyes fixed on me. 

“Now why the Hell do you want me, of all people,” he asked, “to come with you to France?”

[…]“You know why,” I said turning my head and looking at the nearby crowds. Street performers were out there, dancing, singing, bringing big soft explosions of approval from the crowds. “You know damned good and well why. Because you were there when I was just Born to Darkness. You were there when I stumbled onto these shores and sought to find a companion, and found you; and you were there when we lived all those decades together, you and me and Claudia, and you are the only one living who remembers the sound of her happy voice, her young voice, or the ring of her laugh.

And you were there when I almost died at her hands, and when the pair of you fought me again and left me in the flames. And you were there when I was humiliated and ruined at the Théâtre des Vampires, and they murdered her due to my crimes, my weakness, my blunder, my ignorance, my failure to steer one fragile little bark in the right direction […]

You were there when all these streets ran with mud and river water, and when you and I went to see Macbeth onstage, and I couldn’t stop dancing under the streetlamps afterwards reciting the words, ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,’ and Claudia thought I was so handsome and so witty and so clever, and we would all of us always be safe, you were there.” - Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis

“My coffin,” I said, “put me in my coffin!” When had I said those words before. “Put me in my coffin!” And Louis had not done it, and Claudia had not done it. In came the knife. - Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis

So this is the Court to which I returned, in which some six hundred blood drinkers were lodging, and a place in which I felt at home as I’d never felt anywhere in my entire existence except perhaps, perhaps, in my old flat in the Rue Royale in the nineteenth century, when Louis sat in an armchair by the fire reading the French newspapers and Claudia, in her puff-sleeved dress of white gauze, played the sprightly joyful music of Mozart on the pianoforte. - Blood Communion

A Vile Hunger for Your Hammering Heart (1x05)
The Thing Lay Still (1x07)