Right now I'm thinking about the snow all over those mountains and the wolves that were frightening the villagers and stealing my sheep. Two times in my life I'd tried to escape this life, only to be brought back with my wings broken. But then again he didn't have to lift his gun. The richest of the bourgeois couldn't lift his gun in my forests. Of course this was a noble occupation, hunting one's ancestral lands, and we alone had the right to do it. It had become my life by this time - and one I shared with no one else - and it was a very good thing that I'd taken it up, because there were years when we might have actually starved to death. I brought in the pheasant, the venison, and the trout from the mountain streams - whatever was needed and could be got - to feed the family. History had no meaning for me.īut in this dim and old-fashioned world, I had become the hunter. I wouldn't sit by the fire and talk of old wars and the days of the Sun King. And I'd been born restless - the dreamer, the angry one, the complainer.

My father's castle, his estate, and the village nearby were my entire universe. My eldest brother, Augustin, who was the rightful heir to all we possessed, had spent his wife's small dowry as soon as he married her. Even in a rich family, it might have been that way for a younger boy, but our wealth had been used up long ago. I had no claim to the title or the land, and no prospects. My father was the Marquis, and I was the seventh son and the youngest of the three who had lived to manhood. It was the worst winter that I could remember, and the wolves were stealing the sheep from our peasants and even running at night through the streets of the village. This was on my father's land in the Auvergne in France, and these were the last decades before the French Revolution. In the winter of my twenty-first year, I went out alone on horseback to kill a pack of wolves.

The vampire lestat graphic novel