Lestat gives up his beautifying, instead reaching to grab up the nearest bottle of liquor. "La diva," he says. "Le diva."

'That's new.' Nothing too dire or so serious in this observation, only making it. 'New' is likely relative when his reference point are the prostitutes and muscle that Louis was friendly with literally one hundred years ago, but wHaT's tImE to a wAmpiye, and so on. He tests out a smile at Ramiz, just to see what happens.

"I refer, of course," meanwhile, to Louis, as he refills his glass, "to my future adoring audience. The collective music taste of this era, determined not by virtuoso or his friends in the newspapers, but teenagers and twenty-somethings with TikToks."

C'est la vie, a shrug.