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  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  MANON LESCAUT

  Antoine-François Prévost was born in Artois in 1697, the son of a provincial official. Educated by the Jesuits, he entered the army, later returning to the Jesuits. He then rejoined the army, only to abandon a military career for a life of austerity as a Benedictine monk with the congregation of Saint-Maur. However, his taste for a worldly life and his doubts about his vocation led him, in 1728, to flee the cloister. He spent the next six years in exile in Holland and England, returning to France in 1734. His arduous literary career began in 1728 with his first romance, Mémoires d’un homme de qualité, followed in 1731–9 by Le Philosophe anglais ou les mémoires de M. Cleveland, a romance of love and adventure, which showed in germ some of the ideas later found in Rousseau’s political philosophy. His greatest work is undoubtedly Manon Lescaut, the publication of which in 1731 caused a sensation and it was ordered to be seized. Despite this it was an enormous success. Prévost spent the next twenty years occupied with several novels, vast compilations, such as an Histoire générale des voyages, and with translations of Richardson’s novels. These translations helped to promote the knowledge of English literature in France. Prévost died in 1763, of an attack of apoplexy.

  Leonard Tancock spent most of his life in or near London, apart from a year as a student in Paris, most of the Second World War in Wales and three periods in American universities as visiting professor. Until his death in 1986, he was a Fellow of University College, London, and was formerly Reader in French at the University. He prepared his first Penguin Classic in 1949 and, from that time, was extremely interested in the problems of translation, about which he wrote, lectured and gave broadcasts. His numerous translations for the Penguin Classics include Zola’s Germinal, Thérèse Raquin, The Débâcle, L’Assommoir and La Bête Humaine; Diderot’s The Nun, Rameau’s Nephew and D’Alembert’s Dream; Maupassant’s Pierre and Jean; Marivaux’s Up from the Country; Constant’s Adolphe; La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims; Voltaire’s Letters on England; and Madame de Sévigné’s Selected Letters.

  Jean Sgard is Professor of French Literature at the Stendhal University in Grenoble. He studied in Paris and has held various positions at the universities of Göteborg (in Sweden), Paris and Lyon. He has written several works on Prévost, Prévost romancier (1968 and 1989), Le Pour et Contre de Prévost (1972) and L’Abbé Prévost: les labyrinthes de la mémoire (1984), and is General Editor of the definitive edition of the works of Prévost (eight volumes, University of Grenoble Press). He has also written numerous articles on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and is the General Editor of Dictionnaire de la presse (1600–1789).

  ABBÉ PRÉVOST

  Manon Lescaut

  Translated by

  LEONARD TANCOCK

  with a new Introduction and Notes by

  JEAN SGARD

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in Penguin Books 1949

  Second edition, with Introduction and Notes by Jean Sgard, 1991

  Reprinted with corrections and a Chronology 2004

  17

  Copyright 1949 by Leonard Tancock

  Introduction, notes and Chronology copyright © Jean Sgard 1991, 2004

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-195877-4

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  Manon Lescaut

  PREFACE

  PART I

  PART II

  NOTES

  CHRONOLOGY

  INTRODUCTION

  Amsterdam 1731

  This short novel, which was to create such a stir, was probably written in the course of a few weeks in an Amsterdam inn at the beginning of 1731. No evidence has survived as to its genesis and publication. We know that Prévost returned from England in October 1730 and that in November, in Amsterdam, he was anxious to secure his future by signing several publishing contracts – notably for Cleveland, a somewhat ambitious novel, two volumes of which he had already completed and which he was trying hard to finish off quickly by the end of the year. His Dutch publishers, on the other hand, were hoping for a sequel to the Mémoires et aventures d’un homme de qualité, four volumes of which had appeared in 1728–9 with resounding success.

  Three new editions of this work were competing for the market in 1730 (published respectively by Roguet, van der Kloot and Libraires d’Amsterdam), and whoever secured the contract for two or three further volumes would be assured of an excellent business deal. The Compagnie des Libraires d’Amsterdam, which had just brought out its own reprint in August 1730, won the contract. This involved at least three further instalments, since volumes V, VI and VII appeared simultaneously in May 1731: the Gazette d’Amsterdam announced their publication on 22 May. Prévost took three or four months at most to write these, from January to mid-April; and Manon Lescaut seems to have cost him less than two month’s work, around March and April. Volume V, devoted to his stay in England, was clearly written at speed, and volume VI completed the sequence of adventures of the Man of Quality. We must simply assume that Prévost subsequently devoted a little more time to perfecting the short novella which was to secure his fame. The care with which he set it apart – by means of a preface and preamble – from the stories and anecdotes assembled in volume VI of the Mémoires et aventures indicates the importance he attached to the short narrative which epitomized his art as a storyteller in 1731.

  Nine years later, in one of the stories written for Pour et Contre, Prévost was to evoke briefly the climate in which he had composed Manon Lescaut, ‘in a hostelry on the Ness’: ‘… the sad situation of Amsterdam being in no way compensated for by the beauty of her canals and buildings, nothing can induce a man to retire there except in order to hide from the world, and make for himself a kind of sepulchre’. The anecdote in Pour et Contre about the life of foreigners in Amsterdam, which Prévost relates to this period of his life, recalls the atmosphere of mourning and mystery which at that time permeated his imagination. This is the ‘sepulchre’ (a highly Prévostian expression) or retreat to which we owe volume VII of the Mémoires d’un homme de qualité, subtitled: Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut.

  From Cleveland to Manon

  In 1731, Antoine-François Prévost d’Exiles was thirty-four years old and still at the beginning of his career. Since joining the Benedictines in 1720 he had found in literature a source of distraction; in 1722 he had written Les Aventures de Pomponius, a short libertine novel about the Regency, and probably began writing the Mémoires d’un homme de qualité. In 1728 he
had caused a scandal by fleeing to England, and in the same year achieved a great succés d’émotion with the first volume of the Mémoires d’un homme de qualité. In 1730 he embarked on Le Philosophe anglais, ou Histoire de Monsieur Cleveland, a long epic novel in which he attempted to express the essence of his dreams and his vision of the world. The hero, a bastard son of Cromwell, tries to shake off this curse by hiding away in the Devonshire caves, then by travelling through the New World, tireless in pursuit of Happiness and Truth. Then, at the point where Prévost decided to wind up the novel, he leads his hero into the midst of Appalachian savages and makes him suffer appalling catastrophes: his army has been decimated, his daughter abducted by cannibals and his wife is about to die in the wilds of Louisiana. Prévost was attempting to paint on a huge canvas what he described in the Mémoires et aventures as the ‘extremes of evil’.

  It seems clear that he interrupted this huge narrative in order to condense into a very classical novella the ‘mass of unhappy life’ which lay at the heart of Cleveland’s story: in a few pages of Manon Lescaut he was to evoke the dream of happiness, the betrayal, the flight into the desert and the death of the loved one, whereas he will reserve several future volumes for Cleveland’s religious and intellectual quest. Far from thinking of the Histoire du chevalier des Grieux as a kind of miracle in the novelistic career of Prévost, we should see it as the outcome of a long inquiry into the impossibility of happiness, the pervasiveness of evil and the misfortune attaching to the passions. The Mémoires d’un homme de qualité already focused on the death of the loved one and on a mourning that was without end; it already depicted half-mad lovers, fleeing their persecutors through the (new) world. In volume VI, the story of the misfortunes of John Law – the famous adventurer and financier of the Regent – foreshadows accurately enough the misfortunes of des Grieux. The great interrupted novel, Cleveland, also gives prominence to the misfortunes of love, to bereavement and to wanderings in the desert. If we consider Prévost’s fiction as a whole, in other words the dozen novels written between 1722 and 1760, on either side of the unparalleled achievement of Manon Lescaut, it becomes clear that the themes of betrayed love, impossible happiness and mourning without end are the kernel of the Prévostian novel. What makes the story of des Grieux exceptional is its density, its tragic intensity together with a degree of verisimilitude to which Prévost had never before aspired.

  From Novel to Novella

  The distinction between the ‘novel’ and the ‘novella’ dates from the period of French classicism: the ‘novel’ refers to a poetic form, close to epic, in which descriptions, portraits, psychological developments, sudden transformations – everything, in fact, that we may call ‘ornament’ – occupy a central place; the ‘novella’ is a short narrative, based around a dramatic plot, which preserves a close relation to historical or social reality. Sometimes the ‘novella’ enters the domain of the long novel in the guise of a detached story: a character can rapidly narrate the history of his misfortunes, often centring upon misunderstood or betrayed love. This device is found in the novels of La Calprenède or Mme de Scudéry, Prévost’s favourite authors.

  In his two full-length novels, Mémoires et aventures and Cleveland, Prévost constantly resorted to the convention of the detached story. But the writer who gave to this type of story its autonomy and its conventions is Robert Challe, author of the Illustres Françaises (1713). In this sequence of novellas with suggestive titles – Histoire de Monsieur Des Prez et de Mademoiselle de l’Espine, Histoire de Monsieur Des Frans et de Sylvie and so on – we can clearly trace the dual aesthetic of Manon Lescaut, whose combination of tragic grandeur and social realism can still astonish us today. Prévost had discovered in England (in Dryden’s All for Love and in Lillo’s The London Merchant) a new tragic formula, more brutal and more direct than Racinian tragedy; he had also encountered in the novels of Defoe and in the English press an unprecedented social realism. And later on he seems to have responded equally to Hogarth’s satirical sequences, The Harlot’s Progress and The Rake’s Progress. All of this constituted for Prévost ‘le gout anglais’, to which from 1733 he was to devote part of his literary journal, Pour et Contre. But this taste, which seemed to him untranslatable or largely incompatible with French taste, required that he find a literary equivalent in French culture, and for him this equivalent was undoubtedly Les Illustres Françaises. It is difficult today to comprehend the profoundly scandalous nature of the tale narrated by Prévost in Manon Lescaut, ‘this novel whose hero is a rogue and whose heroine a trollop who is led off to the Salpêtrière’ (Montesquieu, in Mes Pensées). The shocking aspect of a novel which bordered on the libertine – in which a defrocked priest falls in love with a mercenary courtesan, agrees for her sake to cheat at cards, to murder and then flee to America – required an elegant, haughty and melancholic narrative to render it acceptable. Prévost’s project seems to have been to pass off a social realism of the most brutal kind by virtue of an immaculate style.

  Manon in the Age of Louis XIV

  As is necessary in a novella, Prévost creates a very precise historical setting. It has long been thought that this referred to the Regency and to Paris in the period of Law’s System (1715–22) – the world of pleasure, money and corruption which Prévost knew so well in his youth. But this is by no means the case, and the text informs us explicitly that the action takes place before the death of Louis XIV. The narrator (Monsieur de Renoncour, hero of the Mémoires d’un homme de qualité) offers us in the first line of the narrative proper a clearly restrictive chronological reference: ‘I must take you back to the time when I first met the Chevalier des Grieux. It was about six months before I left for Spain.’ Now Renoncour’s voyage to Spain coincided exactly with the death of Louis XIV in the novel, which would have been familiar to contemporary readers, volume III having appeared in 1729. The departure of the protagonists to America therefore takes place at the very beginning of 1715, and their life in Paris, which lasts two and a half years, unfolds in its entirety between 1712 and 1715. The Regency has no place whatsoever in the action of Manon Lescaut, whose world is not that of speculation and paper money but of counting out one’s louis d’or, of calculating fortunes according to an entirely traditional hierarchy of value, and of making money by the age-old means of prostitution and theft. The only dateable episode, that which takes place in the Hôtel de Transylvanie – at the time when the Prince of R… was living at Clagny – refers to the year 1714.

  It is worth noting that had Prévost set his story during the Regency, its theme of general corruption would basically have been a commonplace; set in the reign of Louis XIV it becomes frankly subversive. Prévost describes a stable and hierarchical society, fundamentally moral and Christian, overtly hypocritical, in which the behaviour of the Chevalier must appear all the more scandalous. The inner torment of the Chevalier is correspondingly deeper: raised by Jesuits, respectful of religion and the social order, desirous to be reconciled with the authorities and to retain the friendship of Tiberge, there is nothing of the cynic or rebel about him. He dreams of a ‘wise and ordered life’, of a single and life-long passion consecrated by marriage. In no way does he resemble the characters of Crébillon. Manon herself is equally unfamiliar with Crébillonesque ‘aberrations of the heart’; she makes a clear distinction between her pleasures or amusements and what is for her simply a resource or means of existence. As in the majority of his novels, Prévost brings adventurers, rebels and marginal characters into conflict with a traditional society. But he also conjures up a world that is disappearing, already in disintegration beneath a respectable façade. Thus the King has handed over power to commoner financiers; the Prince de Transylvanie retires to a monastery, yet lives off the proceeds of a gambling house; dukes and marquesses equally live by trickery. The nobility, like the Chevalier’s father or the Lieutenant of Police, and the wealthy, like old M. de G. M., conspire in the end to preserve the semblances of moral order and deport Manon. In New O
rleans society will behave similarly: the almoner and the governor conspire to prevent the lovers from marrying. But the old hierarchical, absolutist and Catholic world of Louis XIV is on the point of foundering; soon the dream of individual happiness and freedom will be able to express itself openly.

  The Law of Money

  The social order is constantly underlined, and the importance of money in this short novel is without analogy in eighteenth-century fiction. Money (or its absence) makes social distinctions visible at every turn; the ladder of income ruthlessly establishes these impassable frontiers. At the bottom there are the servants, who live on more or less nothing (less than 100 francs per year, probably, which is roughly equivalent to £1000 today). Even with their meagre incomes, des Grieux and Manon can each afford their servant. Coachmen argue over a franc, Marcel is bought for a louis d’or (24 francs), to him an enormous sum. One level above this there is Manon, whose parents send her to the convent with 300 francs. This is very little: in La Religieuse, Diderot’s nun, who comes of good family, will speak of 3000 francs for a convent dowry. Manon, who knows the value of money, understands instantly that her 300 francs added to the 50 écus (150 francs) of her lover will not take them very far. To live modestly but comfortably, a single person like Tiberge needs an allowance of 3000 francs a year: that is what constitutes a bourgeois income in this novel. Des Grieux and Manon, enriched by the spoils extracted from M. de B., calculate that the ‘respectable but simple’ income necessary for them is 6000 francs per year. But given that they anticipate spending three-quarters of this on coaches, theatres and gambling, their budget turns out to be rather less than ‘simple’. Between these expenses allowed as reasonable and those of the seriously rich people with whom the lovers consort, the gap is immense. M. de B. gives Manon 30,000 francs spending money per year, which would correspond to one-tenth of his income if we confine our calculation to the average revenues of a Farmer General of the time. Old M. de G. M. offers her nearly 10,000 francs in the first days of their acquaintance; as for his son, the young G. M. spends 40,000 francs a year on amusements and offers half of this to Manon. With such an income she can afford a liveried carriage, horses and servants, the prestige of which dazzles both herself and des Grieux.