Resumo de Manon Lescaut - Prevost, L'Abbe

Translation by: femme/600/9 November 2005
The beautiful but overly frivolous Manon Lescaut, who has won the heaart of the young knight of the Grieux family, pays for her shallowness through prison, her deportation, and then death.
Born into a great family, the knight of Grieux is in the process of endng his studies when he meets a young unknown, Manon Lescaut, whom he passionately falls for. The two lovers live clandestinely in Paris. But giving in to the lure of luxury, Manon responds to the advances of a powerful farmer general. Overwhelmed by this infidelity, the young knight leaves for the seminary.
A year later, however, Manon conquers him again. The two lovers live by their wits, in a more or less honest way, so that they have a severe shortage of money.
Manon undertakes to seek out the farmer general's generosity, having the Knight of the Grieux pass for her brother. But the fraud is discovered and the two lovers are thrown into prison.
Barely out of prison, from which they have escaped, Manon and her lover take up their fraudulent activities once again, from then on in collusion with the farmer general's son. They are arrested again, as before, by the farmer general. And this time, after conniving with the young knight's father, Manon and Grieux find themselves in prison again. Thanks to his father's manipulations, the knight gets a reprieve while Manon has to be sent away to Louisiana along with some girls of ill repute.
As he is so very much in love with her, Grieux goes along with Manon like he always does, this time to Louisiana. But the respite will be brief for not long afterwards there will be a challenge from a new suitor of Manon's that will force the two lovers to flee into the desert where, overcome by exhaustion, Manon dies in Grieux's arms.
First and foremost, this chronicle tells us about the misadventures of a young knight and his frivolous mistress in a style that is very much that of other eighteenth century works. The narration takes a different turn when all their misfortunes pile up on the cursed lovers. And the pathetic ending that sees the young Manon die transfigures the narration and gves it the dimensions of a great love story.
One can easily imagine that this novel caused a scandal when it was published in 1731 (it was even seized by the authorities), above all if one recalls that the Abbot Prevost, who had been a Benedictine father and who was indeed defrocked when he wrote it, had partly drawn his inspiration for his masterpiece's subject matter from his own tumultuous life.

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