Abbé Prévost, Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut

Our Reading Journey

Des Grieux is seventeen, weeks from entering the Order of Malta like the younger sons of his family before him, when he sees Manon Lescaut step off the Arras coach in Amiens. He abandons the path chosen for him within hours, and the two leave for Paris together. Money runs out fast, and when a wealthy protector takes an interest in Manon, Des Grieux's own father intervenes, sending his son home and, eventually, toward a very different future: the seminary of Saint-Sulpice. He is a year into this new life, urged on by his old friend Tiberge, when Manon finds him again.

Des Grieux narrates his story years later, to a stranger he met by chance on the road, and the book never lets the reader forget that everything arrives through his eyes. He casts himself as a man swept into ruin by a passion he could not resist, and the group kept returning to the gap between how he explains a theft or a lie in the moment and how a more skeptical reader might see the same scene. Manon herself stays just out of reach. We hear her speak only in the lines that Des Grieux chooses to remember, and the group could never quite settle whether she loves him in her own way or drifts toward whoever can support her that week; the novel refuses to resolve it by ever giving her a chapter of her own. A comic register runs close beneath the tragic one, too: an old suitor duped by a young woman and her practical accomplices belongs to the same family as Molière's L'Avare. Whether Des Grieux is the wronged lover he insists he is, or Manon is simply as unreadable to him as she is to us, the novel leaves for each reader to decide.

About the Author

Antoine François Prévost, born in 1697, spent his twenties moving between the Jesuits and the Benedictines before leaving his abbey without permission in 1728 and fleeing to England, the same year he began publishing the Mémoires et aventures d'un homme de qualité. Manon Lescaut appeared in 1731 as the seventh and final volume of that series, was banned in France almost immediately, and circulated for years afterward in pirated copies. Prévost wrote ten novels between 1728 and 1760, translating Samuel Richardson's Clarissa as Lettres angloises. He died in 1763.