Perfide Manon and Abbe Prevost. She was the classic coquette, he the classic dupe; first the Abbe wrote his famous story, and then he set out to live it…
While most of the noble and the good are forgotten, naughty Manon Lescaust lives in our minds, accompanied by faint strains from Massenet and Puccinni. Perfide Manon! She could remain faithful to her Chevalier only twelve days; yet she is the symbol of love all-compelling. She is Venus Libertina, the goddess of pleasure; she is also Kali, the bloodsucker, the goddess of destruction.
—Manon Lescaut is one of those literary figures, like Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Carmen, Madame Bovary… that transcend the works in which they appear and take their place in a pantheon of characteristic types. Manon’s love is never in doubt, but she cares more for luxury than for fidelity. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes contains a similar type, played in the film by Marilyn Monroe.
Is Manon simply a practical young woman whose contribution to the family budget is well beyond her lover’s earning capacity? Or is her taste for luxury a kind of perversion? Is her crime to sell her favors, or to deceive her beloved?—click image for source…
Her creator is known in literary history simply as Abbe Prevost. His life has been explored by a number of acute researchers, of whom two of the better were Claire-Elaine Engel and Professor Frederic Deloffre of the Sorbonne. The author was born Antoine Francois Prevost, in Hesdin, northern France, on All Fools’ Day, 1697, by one of fates’s little jokes. His forebears were well-to-do government officials with pretensions to gentility. He was educated in a good Jesuit school, but quitted it at sixteen to join the French army.
Four years later, he reappears, to enter the Jesuit order as a novice. Although his seminary record was excdeelent, he changed his mind and left his studies to rejoin the army with an officer’s commission. Again he shifted course. What he discreetly terms “the unhappy conclusion of a too tender relationship” made him seek anew the consolations of the religious life. In November 1721, he took his vows in the Benedictine monastery of Jumieges. Shortly after, he was transferred to the famous Paris abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, and later, was ordained.
The monks of Saint-Germain were chiefly devoted to scholarship, at that monent to the production of a gigantic history of the French church, the Gallia Christiana. The labors pleased the author that cohabited with the soldier and the monk in Prevost’s spirit. But there was another occupant, lusty and wanton, who could not forget the “too tender relationship” and the soldier’s easy pleasures. ( to be continued)…
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