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"And why call all this Satanic?" I asked. "Why not call it chaos? That is all it would be. "

"Because," she said, "that is what men would call it. They invented Satan, didn't they? Satanic is merely the name they give to the behavior of those who would disrupt the orderly way in which men want to live. "

"I don't see it. "

"Well, use your preternatural brain, my blue-eyed one," she answered, "my golden-haired son, my handsome wolfkiller. It is very possible that God made the world as Armand said. "

"This is what you discovered in the forest? You were told this by the leaves?"

She laughed at me.

"Of course, God is not necessarily anthropomorphic," she said. "Or what we would call, in our colossal egotism and sentimentality, `a decent person. ' But there is probably God. Satan, however, was man's invention, a name for the force that seeks to overthrow the civilized order of things. The first man who made laws -- be he Moses or some ancient Egyptian king Osiris -- that lawmaker created the devil. The devil meant the one who tempts you to break the laws. And we are truly Satanic in that we follow no law for man's protection. So why not truly disrupt? Why not make a blaze of evil to consume all the civilizations of the earth?"

I was too appalled t

o answer.

"Don't worry. " She laughed. "I won't do it. But I wonder what will happen in the decades to come. Will not somebody do it?"

"I hope not!" I said. "Or let me put it this way. If one of us tries, then there shall be war. "

"Why? Everyone will follow him. "

"I will not. I will make the war. "

"Oh, you are too amusing, Lestat," she said.

"It's petty," I said.

"Petty!" She had looked away, out into the courtyard, but she looked back and the color rose in her face. "To topple all the cities of the earth? I understood when you called the Theater of the Vampires petty, but now you are contradicting yourself. "

"It is petty to destroy anything merely for the sake of the destroying, don't you think?"

"You're impossible," she said. "Sometime in the far future there may be such a leader. He will reduce man to the nakedness and fear from which he came. And we shall feed upon him effortlessly as we have always done, and the Savage Garden, as you call it, will cover the world. "

"I almost hope someone does attempt it," I said. "Because I would rise up against him and do everything to defeat him. And possibly I could be saved, I could be good again in my own eyes, as I set out to save man from this. "

I was very angry. I'd left my chair and walked out into the courtyard.

She came right behind me.

"You have just given the oldest argument in Christendom for the existence of evil," she said. "It exists so that we may fight it and do good. "

"How dreary and stupid," I said.

"What I don't understand about you is this," she said. "You hold to your old belief in goodness with a tenacity that is virtually unshakable. Yet you are so good at being what you are! You hunt your victims like a dark angel. You kill ruthlessly. You feast all the night long on victims when you choose. "

"So?" I looked at her coldly. "I don't know how to be bad at being bad. "

She laughed.

"I was a good marksman when I was a young man," I said, "a good actor on the stage. And now I am a good vampire. So much for our understanding of the word `good. "'

After she had gone, I lay on my back on the flagstones in the courtyard and looked up at the stars, thinking of all the paintings and the sculptures that I had seen merely in the single city of Florence. I knew that I hated places where there are only towering trees, and the softest and sweetest music to me was the sound of human voices. But what did it matter really what I thought or felt?

But she didn't always bludgeon me with strange philosophy. Now and then when she appeared, she spoke of the practical things she'd learned. She was actually braver and more adventurous than I was. She taught me things.

We could sleep in the earth, she had ascertained that before we ever left France. Coffins and graves did not matter. And she would find herself rising naturally out of the earth at sunset even before she was awake.