Petit Lard
- Nosferatu -x- League of the Night -x- Quebec City -x- Paris
Sobriquet: Petit Lard is her nickname, as her mortal name has been lost to history. It was given to her decades after the Embrace, a reference to her as a true daughter to the sire that made her, Margaux Latour whose sobriquet was lard, the French term for bacon. So she was called in Paris for centuries...the little bacon.
Appearance: Petit Lard was already an old woman when she was offered immortality, as such her hide is a leathery mass of wrinkles. She is completely bald, without so much as eyebrows, but she more than makes up for that with a fine collection of warts and liver-spots. Her life must have been hard before undeath as there isn't an ounce of fat on her emaciated frame, she is all sinew, and old bones. She often cackles to tell the story of her Embrace, as she was quite toothless, forced to gum her food for decades, and then with the curse she had a new set of shiny teeth with which to devour her meals. She wears heavy perfumes to try and mask the smell of rancid old cheese that waifs from her and her breath stinks of rotten infected gums. Primarily she dressed as a rich old woman would, wearing the finest silken gowns, expensive animal furs, and house slippers.
Behavior: Petit Lard is the very definition of the crotchety old lady. Churlish in the extreme, she complains endlessly about the pain in her bones, bad back and aching feet. She expects the best behavior from younger Kindred while using every dirty trick in the book to get what she wants and then she will condescend to acknowledge whatever efforts her current guests went to arranging a meeting with her or what lengths they might have gone to in order to keep faith with her. To her, that is just what is expected of younger vampires and should they fail to live up to her expectations, she can be most crotchety indeed.
At the moment Petit Lard is the oldest vampire in Quebec City and literally everyone deals with her on these terms if they want her favors or secrets. Like most extremely old people, Petit Lard likes to talk about the past, so as a precursor to any business that might be negotiated she expects her guests to sit through a recitation of some past exploit or fond memory, any interruption either immediately ends the session or increases the price of her favors. Lest this quirk drive away potential guests, she is gracious in allowing rude young people to make up for their errors by performing small but personal services for her like: fetching her slippers, rubbing her back, fluffing a pillow or getting her something to drink.
Those young people nice enough to perform such services in the first place and who manage to avoid any missteps with her become her favorites. While she has the ugly tendency to compare her favorites to one another, she rarely pits them against one another, perhaps for fear of losing one or more of them to some unfortunate accident. Petit Lard can be surprisingly egalitarian with regard to those not of her clan, often treating a non-clan favorite better than a Nosferatu or her own ungrateful get.
Petit Lard is quite religious however, a devout protestant of Huguenot extraction she won't tolerated immoral or irreligious behavior like taking the lord's name in vain, trying to do business on a religious holiday or god forbid acting against the faithful. Predictably, her favorite prey are sinners as she says they are easier to hunt and they taste better...
History: Due mostly to her own storytelling, Petit Lard's past is fairly well known. She was born in the Isle de France at the end of the Hundred Years War. She grew up a serf to the local lord, first working the fields with her family, then later in the lord's household when her womanhood blossomed. Originally a scullery girl, she quickly rose to become a maid in service to the lady of the house. Then the Wars of Religion erupted and her lord's lands became the battleground as she and her family fled to Paris for safety. There she worked all manner of jobs to help feed her family, though beautiful she never sold her virtue and married a godly man who gave her many children and only beat her on the rare occasion that he drank. Though the details of the stories do seem to change from one recitation to the next, this could be because Petit Lard herself has forgotten the specifics at her advanced age or because as an extremely long lived mortal woman there was more than one husband or perhaps both. Regardless in her advanced age one of her ungrateful descendants threw her out into the street and she was forced to beg to feed herself and the other unfortunates with whom she was forced to take shelter. When the Edict of Nantes was signed, it opened the door to religious equality in France and she was taken as the childe of Margaux Latour, a obese Catholic nun and Nosferatu as a peace offering to to the protestant Nosferatu of Paris. Her embrace ended decades of religious warfare between the Nosferatu of Paris and forging a lasting peace between the two two religious factions and uniting the Nosferatu once again. For centuries thereafter, she faithfully served her sire in all things, eventually embracing her own ungrateful hedonistic agnostic childe at the end of the 19th century. Eventually, her loyalty and fine service earned her the opportunity to become one of the primogen of Quebec City and she dragged her wretch of a childe, Lilianne along with her in the hopes of finally saving her soul.
Recent Events: The current political arrangement has denied Petit Lard her rightful place in Quebec City's night society. Her own childe no longer supports her and they are estranged. Undeserved titles and authority have been placed in the hands of a neonate whelp named Samuel Faucheux who fails to acknowledge her wisdom and authority, while she is scoffed at or ignored. Petit Lard is not likely to take anything like violent action, but then she is far more dangerous as an agent provocateur and as an elder with centuries of guile, a surprising degree of patience (when she chooses to exercise it) and nothing but time on her hands, liely there will be trouble. Though the powers that be within the League of the Night know this, they really don't have the resources to root her out and destroy her. In any event, such an action would likely alienate the other Nosferatu and create a far more volatile political incident, they reason that it is better to wait and quietly eliminate her later, than take action now. The only question is whether their plans or her plans will reach fruition sooner.
