Manon Lescaut (Signet Classics, CP96)

This novel was originally presented as an autobiographical novel, but certain elements do not seem true to life. --The hero falls in love at first sight, and the two continue to remember each other until the bitter end. --The heroine arouses the passion of 6 men through no effort on her own part. --The hero and heroine live an irresponsible lifestyle without ever putting in a single day of hard work, yet their friends continue to support them without a word of complaint. --The hero and heroine escape to a sandy wasteland within hiking distance of New Orleans. The novelist could never have been there because there is no such place. This novel aroused operatic settings by 3 composers. How, I don't know. It's not the translator's fault. She provides a helpful introduction and helpful footnotes.

Great book. The best of what French literature has to offer. A story of deceit, love, devotion and dedication.

The Abbe Prevost was the first translator of Richardson's novels in France, as well as a precursor of the Romantic movement. This tale was the inspiration for two famous operas (Massenet and Puccini) as well as a forerunner of many formulaic love stories that came after. One has to remember that this was written in the earlry part of the 18th Century, and there was not any formula before it, at least in terms of the heroine. Manon is the anti-heroine, the woman-in-red, the Eve that gives her partner over to the fates as a result of her easily-compromised sensibility. She can't turn down her creature comforts, even when it means sacrificing her "true love," her Romeo, for an older, but more solvent, lover, in instance after instance. Manon is one of the first unsympathetic heroines in literature (let's forget about Eve if we can) , a precursor of Emma Bovary in many respects. Let's also remember that she appears in during the , "golden age" of sentimental fiction in France and Europe generally (the ealry 1700s) . Women are depicted in this era as archetypically virtuous and angelic, or unambiguously sexual (thinking particularly of the late Restoration English stage). What we have in Manon is an amalgam, neither entirely saint, nor entirely sinner. She is the Madonna and the Magdaleine, part angel, part succubus, but an entirely new persona on the European literary stage. This is the reason that she had such an impression on the European artistic imagination. She represents a new dichotomy, a new figure that represents what Henry Adams would have suggested as a representation of the sacred and the profane, the mud and the cathedral.