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will have your two notebooks for you, even if they are completely empty or only contain a better explanation of why I can’t retrieve my lost life. I won’t disappoint you. But expect nothing, except that I will come and I will put these books in your hands.”
    “Two nights,” you said, “and we meet here again.”
    In silence I watched you leave the Café.
    And now you see it has begun, David.
    And now you see, David, I have made our meeting the introduction to the story you asked me to tell.

2
PANDORA’S STORY
    I was born in Rome, during the reign of Augustus Caesar, in the year that you now reckon to have been 15 B.C., or fifteen years “before Christ.” All the Roman history and Roman names I give here are accurate; I have not falsified them or made up stories or created false political events. Everything bears upon my ultimate fate and the fate of Marius. Nothing is included for love of the past.
    I have omitted my family name. I did this because my family has a history, and I cannot bring myself to connect their ancient reputations, deeds, epitaphs to this tale. Also Marius, when he confided in Lestat, did not give the full name of his Roman family. And I respect this and that also is not revealed.
    Augustus had been Emperor for over ten years, and it was a marvelous time to be an educated woman in Rome, women had immense freedom, and I had a rich Senator for a father, five prosperous brothers, and grew up Motherless but cherished byteams of Greek tutors and nurses who gave me everything I wanted.
    Now, if I really wanted to make this difficult for you, David, I’d write it in classical Latin. But I won’t. And I must tell you that, unlike you, I came by my education in English haphazardly, and certainly I never learnt it from Shakespeare’s plays.
    Indeed I have passed through many stages of the English language in my wanderings and in my reading, but the great majority of my true acquaintance with it has been in this century, and I am writing for you in colloquial English.
    There’s another reason for this, which I’m sure you’ll understand if you’ve read the modern translation of Petronius’s
Satyricon
or Juvenal’s satires. Very modern English is a really true equivalent to the Latin of my time.
    The formal letters of Imperial Rome won’t tell you this. But the graffiti scratched on the walls of Pompeii will make it obvious. We had a sophisticated tongue, countless clever verbal shortcuts and common expressions.
    I’m going to write, therefore, in the English which feels equivalent and natural to me.
    Let me say here quickly—while the action is at a halt—that I was never, as Marius said, a Greek Courtesan. I was living with such a pretense when Marius gave me the Dark Gift, and perhaps out of consideration for old mortal secrets he so described me. Or maybe it was contemptuous of him to style me this way. I don’t know.
    But Marius knew all about my Roman family, that it was a Senatorial family, as purely aristocratic and privileged as his own mortal family, and that my people dated back to the time of Romulus and Remus, the same as Marius’s mortal line. Marius did not succumb to me because I had “beautiful arms,” as he indicated to Lestat. This trivialization was perhaps provocative.
    I don’t hold anything against either of them, Marius or Lestat. I don’t know who got what wrong.
    My feeling for my Father is so great to this very night, as I sit in the café, writing for you, David, that I am astonished at the power of writing—of putting words to paper and bringing back so vividly to myself my Father’s loving face.
    My Father was to meet a terrible end. He did not deserve what happened to him. But some of our kinsmen survived and re-established our family in later times.
    My Father was rich, one of the true millionaires of that age, and his capital was invested widely. He was a soldier more often than required of him, a Senator, a thoughtful and quiet man by disposition. And