By then, Gregory had become a great scholar of the Undead, writing down many theories of blood drinkers and how they changed over time. The changes in himself, both great and small, he chronicled meticulously, and he observed also the sometime pain and alienation of his companions, their reasons for wandering, or drifting away for a spell, and the reasons why they always came home. Why did the ancient ones so avoid the company of other ancient ones and seek to learn from the much-younger children of different eras, and why did a creature such as himself not set out to find those he remembered from those grim times when he knew that surely some of them had persevered? These questions obsessed him. He filled leather-covered journals with his thoughts.

The Vampire Chronicles and the happenings in the vampire world from 1985 when Lestat woke Queen Akasha until now had deeply fascinated Gregory, and he had pored over the pages of the books, forever interested in the deep current of psychological observation that united these works. Never in all these centuries had he encountered poetic souls among the Undead such as Louis de Pointe du Lac and Lestat de Lioncourt, or even Marius whose own memoir reeked of the same profound romanticism and melancholy as their works. Patrician Roman he might have been, Gregory mused, but he was certainly the embodiment of the Romantic Man of Sensibility now finding solace in his inner strength and attachment to his own values.

Of course this thing called romanticism was nothing new, but Gregory thought he understood why the world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had defined and explored it so thoroughly, thereby shaping generations of sensitive human beings to believe quite fully in themselves in a way no human or vampire had before.

But Gregory had existed since the beginning of recorded human history and he knew full well that “romantic souls” had always existed as well and were but one kind of soul among many. In sum, there have always been romantics, poets, outsiders, outcasts, those who sang of alienation whether they had a clever word for it or not.

What had really given birth to the Romantic Movement in the history of human ideas was affluence—an increase in the number of people who had plenty enough to eat, enough education to read and write, and time to ruminate on their own personal emotions.

Why others did not see this, Gregory could not quite grasp.