Review

Manon Lescaut

By Antoine François Prévost

Published by Hesperus Press

The Chevalier des Grieux is still a young man, but life and bitter experience have already taken their toll.

The kindness of a stranger persuades him to reveal his troubles; and so unfolds the story of his helpless and ill-starred love for Manon, and their mutually destructive affair – which has given him, in turn, the joy of sexual love, and the misery of betrayal and moral degradation.

Des Grieux confides how as an innocent young man of a good family, he fell passionately in love with Manon, a lower-class girl who was being taken to a convent where her already active appetite for the pleasures of life would – her parents hoped – be stifled.

His burgeoning career in the Church forgotten, he became so infatuated with her that they eloped to begin a new life together.

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Translator: Andrew Brown