Histoire du chevalier Des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut Reading Order

Histoire du chevalier Des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut (Manon Lescaut, 1731) by the Abbé Prévost is the most famous French novel of the first half of the eighteenth century and one of the most influential in the European tradition: a young nobleman, Des Grieux, tells the story of his total enslavement to Manon, a beautiful girl of low birth who cannot be faithful to him and who dies in his arms in the Louisiana wilderness. The novel is compact — barely 150 pages — and builds its power through the absolute clarity of Des Grieux's obsession: he knows Manon is unfaithful, he knows she ruins him repeatedly, he knows she will always choose money over him when necessary, and he loves her anyway with a complete disregard for reason, morality, or his own welfare. Manon herself is one of literature's great ambiguous figures: she is not a villain (she always returns to Des Grieux, always prefers him in her heart), but she is also incapable of the constancy that would save them both. Prévost was himself an abbé who had escaped two monasteries and lived a peripatetic life across Europe; the novel's conflicted attitude toward pleasure, virtue, and the impossibility of resisting one's nature reflects his own impossible position. The novel had enormous influence: on Balzac's Père Goriot (the motif of the older or wealthier patron sacrificed to a beautiful young woman), on the opera (Puccini's Manon Lescaut, Massenet's Manon), and on the whole European literary tradition of the man destroyed by love for a woman who is not worth it.