Manon Lescaut Reading Order

Manon Lescaut (1731) by Abbé Antoine François Prévost — full title L'Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut — is the founding text of the French novel of fatal desire, and one of the most influential short novels in the French tradition: the story of the Chevalier des Grieux, a young nobleman, who falls in love with the beautiful and morally unreliable Manon Lescaut at first sight, abandons his ecclesiastical career, follows her into a life of debt and deception, is ruined by her unfaithfulness and her love of luxury, is imprisoned and deported to Louisiana, watches her die in the desert, and narrates the entire catastrophe with full self-awareness of how irrational and compulsive his love has always been. The novel belongs formally to the tradition of the mémoire — the confessional first-person narrative in which a narrator recounts past events from a position of retrospective judgment — and Prévost's achievement is the gap between the narrator's retrospective claim of understanding and his evident failure to have escaped the compulsion he understands. Manon herself is the most mysterious character in the French tradition: presented entirely through des Grieux's eyes, she is charming, unfaithful, genuinely loving in her way, and entirely unable to choose love over material security — a character so suggestive that she has generated a century and a half of artistic responses (Massenet's opera, Puccini's opera, Abbé Prévost's own uncertainty about whether she is simply amoral or genuinely self-divided).