Madeleine is Louis’s first true fledgling. He drains her of blood and feeds her his own so that she can be Claudia’s companion when he leaves her for Armand. Madeleine appears in Interview with the Vampire (1976).
Madeleine’s happy mortal existence as the mother of a six-year-old girl and as a popular doll maker in nineteenth-century Paris crumbles into madness when her daughter dies. Her madness is exacerbated when she begins coping with her great loss by employing her doll-making talent to create realistic likenesses of her deceased child and selling them in her shop. Her grieving madness also makes her receptive to the reality of vampires when the vampire Claudia walks into her shop. Madeleine listens with hopeful attention as Claudia explains how she and her vampire companion, Louis, have come to Paris from New Orleans, and how Louis has found another vampire companion in Armand. Claudia can see that Louis will leave her soon for Armand, and she is seeking a new companion in Madeleine. Because the sixty-five-year-old vampire Claudia is trapped in the body of a six-year-old girl, she does not have the power to turn Madeleine into a vampire; she needs Louis for that. But Louis has no desire to bring another soul into an existence that he loathes. So Claudia and Madeleine plot to entrap Louis into turning Madeleine into a vampire for Claudia.
Louis is furious at Claudia for asking this of him. She and he argue about it, but Claudia finally guilts Louis into turning Madeleine into her new vampire companion. One of Madeleine’s first impulses is to burn her doll shop to the ground and make Claudia her new doll. With a vampire’s speed and obsessive mania, Madeleine spends the next few nights refashioning the adult furniture in Claudia’s room to diminutive proportions: a child’s bed, a child’s chair, a child’s clothes. When Madeleine is not lavishing all her affection on Claudia, she is learning how to be a vampire and feeding on human blood with rapturous delight, so much so that Louis, on more than one occasion, must pull her away from her victims, like the way Claudia had been when he and Lestat first changed the six-year-old child into a blood drinker.
When Armand’s coven captures Louis and Claudia for attempting to kill their maker, Lestat, Madeleine is taken with them. Armand allows his coven to destroy Claudia for the crime because he secretly wants Louis to separate from her and be his companion. While Louis is locked in a coffin, Claudia and Madeleine are exposed to the sun and burned to ashes.
For more perspectives on Madeleine’s character, read the Alphabettery entries Armand, Children of Darkness, Claudia, Lestat de Lioncourt, and Louis de Pointe du Lac.