The Vampire Armand

The sixth installment in Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles takes the form of an extended confession. The vampire Armand, frozen at seventeen for five centuries, dictates his life story to fellow vampire David Talbot inside a New Orleans convent where their companion Lestat lies in a mysterious coma. Lestat has been motionless on the chapel floor for months following his claimed journey to Heaven and Hell with a spirit called Memnoch the Devil. Armand arrives with two mortal companions: Benji, a spirited twelve-year-old Arab boy, and Sybelle, a twenty-five-year-old pianist. He entrusts them to Marius, the ancient Roman vampire who created him. David, a former leader of the Talamasca, a psychic-investigation order, who inhabits a younger man's body after a body-switching incident and was later made a vampire by Lestat against his will, persuades Armand to tell his story as a gift for Benji and Sybelle.

Armand's earliest memories are of Constantinople, where he is a slave boy stripped of language, identity, and homeland. Slave traders transport him by ship to Venice, where he ends up in a brothel. He refuses to eat, resolving to die. After days of starvation, Marius appears, a tall, blond figure of supernatural beauty in red velvet. Marius names the boy "Amadeo," meaning "beloved of God," and carries him away.

Marius establishes Amadeo as the favored member of his Venetian household, a group of apprentice boys whom the wealthy, reclusive painter educates and launches into professions. Amadeo studies Latin, Greek, and Italian, learns fencing and music, and frequents the house of the courtesan Bianca Solderini. The bond between Marius and Amadeo deepens through blood exchanges that produce ecstatic sensations, and Amadeo grows desperate to understand Marius's supernatural nature. He is periodically seized by disturbing reactions to old Byzantine art and recoils in terror when he glimpses a picture labeled "Kiev Rus," a place-name from his forgotten past. Marius counsels patience.

Marius reveals his vampiric nature by killing a man on the waterfront while Amadeo watches. He then confronts Bianca about murders she has committed on behalf of Florentine relatives, slaughters the bankers responsible, and departs to visit mysterious beings he calls "Those Who Must Be Kept." While Marius is away, the Earl of Harlech, an English nobleman with whom Amadeo had a brief liaison, invades the palazzo and wounds Amadeo with poisoned blades that cause progressive organ failure. As Amadeo hovers near death, nursed by Bianca, he experiences a near-death vision of unconditional love in which priests from his forgotten homeland tell him it is not his time. Marius returns and transforms the dying boy into a vampire.

During the transformation, Amadeo relives his mortal past. He is Andrei, a novice ikon painter in the Monastery of the Caves outside Kiev, where monks bury themselves alive in earthen cells to await God's will. His father Ivan had demanded that Andrei paint ikons rather than wall himself up. A Tatar raid during a journey through the grasslands separated Andrei from Ivan, leading to his enslavement and eventual arrival in Venice.

Marius instructs his fledgling that vampires must kill only the evildoer and teaches him to pass undetected among humans. He transports Amadeo to Florence to view the frescoes of Fra Angelico, a 15th-century monk-painter whose work synthesizes the severe Byzantine ikon style with warm Italian humanism. Marius then brings Amadeo to Kiev, where Amadeo enters his family's house in disguise and reunites with Ivan, who survived the Tatar raid but has been consumed by grief. Amadeo's mother presents him with the ikon he dropped during his capture and a painted Easter egg decorated with a golden star. He says goodbye, knowing he will never return.

After nine months of peace, a band of black-robed vampires called the Children of Darkness, led by Santino, invades the palazzo, overwhelms Marius with torches, and engulfs him in flames. Amadeo is captured and carried to Rome, where the apprentice boys are hurled alive into a bonfire. Amadeo is thrown in but pulled out by Santino, who demands his service. Locked in a cell and starved, Amadeo feeds ravenously on a victim only to discover it was Riccardo, his beloved friend from Marius's household, kept alive for this purpose. After months of indoctrination into the Coven's belief that vampires serve Satan as part of God's plan, Amadeo submits. The ancient female vampire Allesandra, a Coven elder, selects the new name Armand for him, since "Amadeo" contains the word for God.

For three hundred years, Armand enforces the Coven's rules in the catacombs beneath Paris. In the late 1700s, the Vampire Lestat demolishes the Coven's superstitions by entering Notre Dame Cathedral without divine retribution. Allesandra immolates herself. Lestat bequeaths Armand a boulevard theater, which Armand transforms into the Théâtre des Vampires, a company of immortal actors performing morbid pantomimes for unwitting audiences. He leads the theater for roughly a century until Louis de Pointe du Lac, Lestat's melancholy fledgling, arrives and Armand falls hopelessly in love with him. The child vampire Claudia, Louis's companion, is condemned for attempting to murder Lestat. Armand secretly attempts to save her by transplanting her head onto an adult vampire's body, but the surgery fails and Claudia is destroyed by sunlight. Louis burns the theater in revenge. Armand wanders with Louis until their love withers, then takes a mortal lover named Daniel Molloy, eventually making Daniel into a vampire, though that relationship also fails.

The narrative advances to the recent crisis. Lestat returns from his journey with Memnoch, horribly wounded, clutching Veronica's Veil, a cloth relic said to bear the imprint of Christ's face. When he unfolds it, Armand sees Christ's face blazing on the fabric and falls to his knees. Lestat's mortal protégée Dora snatches the Veil and runs to St. Patrick's Cathedral. As dawn approaches, Armand stands on the Cathedral steps and deliberately exposes himself to the rising sun, declaring himself a sinner dying for Christ. The sun ignites his blood and chars his flesh. In a vision, he celebrates Mass as a priest in a restored cathedral in Kiev, breaking bread that multiplies infinitely. The vision shatters, and he finds himself in a New York apartment where Sybelle plays Beethoven's Appassionata Sonata while her abusive brother beats her and Benji prays for a savior. Armand kills the brother and then crashes onto a rooftop, where snow and ice bury him.

For seven nights, Armand lies paralyzed in his burnt body, anchored to life by Sybelle's playing. When his healing progresses, Benji and Sybelle climb to the rooftop, free him from the ice, and carry him to Sybelle's apartment, where they lure a corrupt man so Armand can feed. For two months, Armand lives with Sybelle and Benji, recognizing this love as selfless in a way his previous relationships never were. He travels to New Orleans to see Lestat, arriving at the convent and beginning his dictation to David.

After completing his narrative, Armand lies beside Lestat in the chapel and bites into his throat. Through the blood, he sees Christ on the road to Calvary, staring at him with wide eyes. Christ's face grows immense with crushing force, and Armand is hurled across the chapel by an invisible power, his skull cracking against the wall. He lies weeping for an hour, interpreting the experience as a devastating rejection.

Following the sound of the Appassionata to Marius's nearby house, Armand realizes the playing is subtly different. Marius has transformed Sybelle and Benji into vampires without his consent. Armand beats Marius in anguish, but Sybelle and Benji embrace him, assuring him they chose this. Marius argues he has lost faith in human progress and transformed them because Armand would never have done it himself. Armand tells Marius he should have trusted them to have their mortal lives. Marius concedes that Armand loved them more selflessly than Marius ever loved him.

When asked what he truly saw in Christ, Armand explains that Christ was not any theological abstraction but "my brother," a human being who suffered for what he believed was good. The concept he grasps is Incarnation, God dwelling in flesh, which he finds profoundly real yet impossible to articulate. Around two hours before dawn, Lestat appears at the garden gate, tattered and limping, having risen from his coma. He whispers a single request: that Sybelle play the Appassionata. She sits down at the piano and begins to play.