Manon Lescaut

One of the most scandalous novels of the eighteenth century, Manon Lescaut remains utterly modern in its ambiguities. When the young Chevalier des Grieux encounters Manon being escorted to a convent, he is undone by her beauty and spirit. He steals her away, and the two embark on a life together outside marriage, setting in motion a chain of events that will lead them from Parisian gaming houses to prison, from desperate gambles to exile in the treeless wastes of Louisiana. But here is the novel's enduring riddle: des Grieux tells this story. His account of Manon shifts and contradicts itself. Is she a thief and a courtesan? A victim of the forces that shaped her? Or a thoroughly modern woman, navigatng a world that offers her no honest path? Prévost refused to resolve these questions, and in doing so created something more unsettling than any simple moral tale: a confession that implicates its narrator, a love story that raises questions about who is telling it and why. This is the novel that made French literature safe for realism, for transgressive passion, and for the radical possibility that the reader might not believe a word of what they're being told.