Manon Lescaut

What It's About

The story follows the young Chevalier des Grieux, a student destined for a respectable career, whose life is upended when he falls instantly and completely in love with Manon Lescaut, a beautiful young woman being sent to a convent against her will. Abandoning his studies and his family, des Grieux runs away with Manon to Paris, where the couple's happiness is repeatedly threatened by poverty, Manon's taste for luxury, and her wavering loyalty. As des Grieux is drawn deeper into debt, deception and disgrace to keep her, the novel traces the corrosive power of an all-consuming passion and the ruin it brings on everyone it touches.

Key Concepts

Manon Lescaut is often read as an unusually frank early study of sexual obsession, narrated from inside the mind of a man who recognises his own weakness even as he indulges it. The novel weighs passion against reason and social duty, and explores how love can persist alongside betrayal, jealousy and moral compromise. Its sympathetic treatment of a courtesan and its matter-of-fact depiction of gambling, deceit and imprisonment scandalised many contemporary readers, and the book was banned and revised more than once during Prévost's lifetime.

About the Author

Antoine François Prévost d'Exiles (1697–1763), known as the Abbé Prévost, was a French writer and cleric. Educated by Jesuits, he moved between religious life and the army as a young man before joining the Benedictine order, from which he later obtained leave to live independently. He spent periods of exile in England and Holland, where much of his most successful writing was produced, and eventually returned to France for the remainder of his life.