Antoine

• VAMPIRE •

Antoine first appears as a nameless musician who aids Lestat after Claudia attempts to murder her maker. Antoine’s character remains in obscurity for the next four decades until he is mentioned in the later Vampire Chronicles, when his character is recognized as an intregal part of Lestat’s life. He appears in Interview with the Vampire (1976), Prince Lestat (2014), Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis (2016), and Blood Communion (2018).

Born in France in the nineteenth century, Antoine is sent to Paris to study concert piano performance at the Conservatoire. In Paris’s magnificent culture, he attends the concerts of Bizet, Saint-Saëns, Berlioz, and Franz Liszt. When Antione is seventeen, his older brother fathers a child out of wedlock and accuses Antoine of the crime. The entire family is so ashamed of his alleged disgrace that they send him to Louisiana with enough money to start a new life, but he quickly squanders all his wealth on gambling, drinking, and prostitutes. In the bars he frequents, he leaps onto the piano and plays classical songs riotously, making his audiences both laugh with delight and shrug with confusion. His antics also draw the attention of the vampire Lestat.

Taking Antoine under his wing, Lestat pays for servants to care for him and clean his flat so that he can compose piano music on the magnificent Broadwood grand piano that had once been performed on by Frédéric Chopin, which Lestat purchased for him. Despite all the lavish gifts that Lestat bestows upon him, Antoine never realizes that Lestat is a vampire, only that he lives in a flat off Rue Royale with his companion, Louis de Pointe du Lac, and their ward, Claudia. Just as he once danced to Nicolas de Lenfent’s violin music, Lestat dances as Antoine plays original music composed in a twenty-four-hour dash of inspiration.

However, one night Lestat comes to Antoine looking horrific and stinking of the Louisiana swampland. Lestat turns Antoine into a vampire and shares with him through the Blood visions of how Claudia has betrayed him and attempted to murder him, and how Louis assisted her. Antoine plans to help Lestat avenge the crime committed against him. But in defending themselves, Louis and Claudia burn their flat and burn Lestat and Antoine along with it, yet they do not die. They return to Antoine’s flat until Lestat is well enough to leave for Europe and seek the assistance of Armand. Antoine feels too terrified to attempt the journey, so Lestat bids him adieu and leaves him a small fortune. Antoine remains horribly scarred and burned for the next thirty years, not quite knowing how to survive among mortals, hunting only the weakest in the crowded immigrant slums of the Irish parts of New Orleans. Throughout it all, he has two thoughts: music and pain.

Eventually, he leaves New Orleans for Saint Louis, sleeping in cemeteries the entire journey. Soon he is able to play piano again and takes up work playing at mortal gatherings. In time, the wounds from his burns heal, and he reenters society as a gentleman, with fine clothes and a small, albeit luxurious, apartment. Throughout it all, he feels loneliness nagging at him. Continuing to perform music, he travels to San Francisco where he makes a living as a pianist, first in dingy dives, then progressing up towards ornate concert halls, all the while his audience marveling at his dizzying ability to perform and improvise. He becomes quite popular in several circles of society until a Chinese blood drinker threatens to kill him. Antoine leaves San Francisco, but his popularity spreads. As he performs in various orchestral halls and theaters, he sees more vampires using their powers to advance in society. When he stays in one place too long, and when mortals start to observe his agelessness among his other vampire eccentricities, he moves away and seeks the company of other mortals. Finally, the nineteenth century becomes the twentieth, full of electricity and invention. Antoine realizes that he is growing quite strong. No more scars of the old burn wounds remain. When the Great War shakes the world, he goes to Boston, unsure how to make contact with this modern world, and goes underground and sleeps in a vampire torpor for the next fifty years.

It is only in the mideighties of the late twentieth century that he is awakened by the music of the rock band the Vampire Lestat. Too weak to make the journey to Lestat’s one and only concert, he plays for coins in New York subway stations and is overlooked by Akasha on her immolating rampage throughout the Great Burning of 1985. Still gaining back his strength, he spends years playing the violin, living in squalor, earning people’s pocket change, and sleeping in graveyards and in cellars. Similar to the previous century, Antoine makes his way slowly up the musical ladder, first performing music in bars, then in nightclubs, one-dollar bills becoming twenty-dollar bills, until he is able to make enough money to lease a home in the Chicago suburbs. He lives a middle-class American life. He thinks of Lestat often, especially when he reads the Vampire Chronicles, purchasing the books as soon as they are published. He learns of the vastness of the vampire family—of Akasha, Maharet, and Mekare, of Marius, Armand, and Khayman, and of all the others. He even finds himself briefly mentioned in Louis’s Interview with the Vampire, referred to simply as “the musician,” without any name.

Not long after the publication of The Tale of the Body Thief (1992), which Antoine reads feverishly, he is attacked by a coven of gangster vampires. At that moment, he realizes that he has the power of the Mind Gift, when he telekinetically shoves the vampires against walls and into the pavement, knocking them senseless. He takes their knives, cuts off their heads, and hides their bodies. But the vampire covens keep coming for him until they finally burn his suburban house to the ground.

Antoine moves back to Saint Louis, but he still cannot escape the vampire gangs that seek to destroy him. Another coven finally captures him and sets him on fire. As he burns, he runs faster than they do, escaping far enough to bury himself in the ground, putting out the flames, yet he is still badly wounded. He sleeps in the earth for two more decades, until he hears the radio broadcast of the vampire Benji Mahmoud in 2013. He rises and discovers that he is stronger than ever before, and his burn wounds are healed. A new Great Burning is occurring. Benji, along with the beautiful piano playing of his companion, Sybelle, is broadcasting how vampires are being immolated and slaughtered all over the world, and he is urging the elders to bring unification, order, and guidance, so that they might stop this latest disaster. Antoine acquires work as a piano player in a hotel. He gets a room in that hotel and composes music. All the while he tunes in to Benji’s radio broadcasts of the worldwide immolation of vampires.

Antoine heads to New York to seek Benji and Sybelle’s help. When he comes to Trinity Gate, their coven house on New York’s Upper East Side, the vampire Armand opens the door and welcomes him inside, promising Antoine that he will be well cared for. But he ultimately joins the Court of the Prince at Château de Lioncourt, where he serves as the music conductor of the vampire orchestra in the grand ballroom.

For more perspectives on Antoine’s character, read the Alphabettery entries Claudia, Lestat de Lioncourt, and Louis de Pointe du Lac.