HE SCRIPTED HIS OWN DESTINY
Call it balladeering of the part-time priest.A man caught in all the intensities and entanglements of being suspended somewhere between Demons and the call of Angels. First Abbe Prevost, a sometime cleric wrote his famous story, then set out to live it. It poses the question whether individual lives are scripts which we set out to act upon. The individual as actor, method actor in this world in which the persona assumed is merely a role established to which we fulfill its calling and duty. Perfide Manon and Abbe Prevost is the classic case. ”Why did he love her? Curious fool, be still! Is human love the fruit of human will? ( Byron )
In 1730, Prevost produced his immortal Manon Lescault. He describes his own masterpiece as ”depicting the results of a violent passion which renders reason useless when unhappily one surrenders totally to it-a passion which, being incapable of completely stifling in the heart the sentiments of virtue, prevents one from practicing it”.
They finally settle down in New Orleans, where the Governor’s nephew, Synnelet sets his sights on Manon. In the duel that ensued, Des Grieux knocks the nephew unconscious, and thinking he had killed the man, the couple flee New Orleans. In the wilderness of Louisiana, Manon dies of exposure and exhaustion. Des Grieux returns to France to become a cleric after burying his beloved.
In the heat of creation he met a person who rendered reason useless, who prevented him from practicing the precepts of his virtue. Her name was Lenki Eckhardt. Prevost referred to her as a lady of merit and good birth who had suffered reverses of fortune. Others described her as a leech who bled white most of her lovers leaving them victims. She was the classic cocotte, and Prevost for all his literary sagacity, the classic dupe. Money seemed somehow to disappear into a back hole;Things went from worse to critical. He was forced to borrow and to beg his publishers for advances. He forged a sum of 50 pounds from the son of an English nobleman he taught only to be jailed in gatehouse prison on the complaint of Francis Eyles. The matter was serious since forgery was a hanging crime but the complaint was withdrawn and the Abbe was discharged.
Abbe Prevost reading Manon Lescaut 1856, Joseph Caraud
Prevost ventured back to France, and was there joined by Lenki, faithful in her fashion. He pulled what strings were within his grasp and obtained an apostolic brief that pardoned him for his misdeeds but directed him to another brasnch of the Benedictine order at Evraux. After three months of expiation he returned to Paris to edit a literary revue and cultivate the great who kept open house for the inteligentsia. He assumed the ”petit collet” , the clerical collar , and was appointed chaplain to the Prince de Conti,with room and board provided but no salary. However, he gained security against hounding creditors and made friends in he world of letters, among them Voltaire and Rousseau. We hear no more of Lenki, who left Paris and got married. From then onwards, Prevost prospered as literature and patronage secured excellent rewards. he died of stroke at age 66, after having written 112 volumes, 65 of them original.
Manon Lescaut; Opera of Giacomo Puccini. Operas of Manon Lescault were also written by Jules Massenat and Daniel Aubrey
Of all Prevost’s work, ”Manon lescault” stands apart and above. It is a tense and moving recital of doomed love. the hero, the Chevalier des grieux, is a slave of love who foresees his misfortunes but has not the strength to allay and forestall them.He thinks well but acts poorly in surrendering position, fortune and honor for his Manon. In doing so, he transforms himself into a thief, a blackmailer and a murderer. She loves in return, but loves pleasure and material comforts more. She is oblivious to morality but nonetheless retains something pure and maidenly which bestows something redeeming on her.
It was long supposed that the story was a transposition of the Abbe’s subjection to Lenki. However, academic investigators, the literature police, have proved that the book was written and in print before Prevost met Lenki. ”Manon” is therefore not a documentation but a forecasr, a prophecy of situations to arise. Prevost recognized the possibilities in his nature, and he turned them into fact. No doubt he aided his fate, accepting the foreseen direction and guiding it when choices, little or big, had to be made. He made his life fulfill his art.
Manon Lescaut; opera de Masenet
Possibilities in his nature? After shifting careers from Army officer to Monk, in 1721, he set about to aid in the writing of the 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 and was attached to his promiscuity and easy pleasures from his soldiering life Ostensibly writing a religious history, he instead wrote a novel of frenzied passion and bloodcurdling adventures which were published in four small volumes with notable success in the public at large , if not within monastery circles as well. Authorities investigated.
He fled and became a Protestant in England. There he used his letters and his charm to establish himself, principally as tutor to the son of Sir John Eyles, an eminent in the business and political world. The situation of two years ended when he conspired to marry Eyles only daughter after which Eyles bought him off and banished him from the realm.
While most of the noble, upstanding and good are forgotten, naughty Manon Lescaut lives on with an enduring legacy. 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 ; she is also Kali, the bloodsucker, the goddess of destruction. Pefide Manon, the faint strains of the Puccini and Masenet operas are about all that remains of the creation of her creator; with Puccini portrayed as a Sorceress and in the latter version as a naive virgin.
”Among the twelve girls, who were chained together by the waist in two rows, there was one, whose whole air and figure seemed so ill-suited to her present condition, that under other circumstances I should not have hesitated to pronounce her a person of high birth. Her excessive grief, and even the wretchedness of her attire, detracted so little from her surpassing beauty, that at first sight of her I was inspired with a mingled feeling of respect and pity.She tried, as well as the chain would permit her, to turn herself away, and hide her face from the rude gaze of the spectators. There was something so unaffected in the effort she made to escape observation, that it could but have sprung from natural and innate modesty alone.
As the six men who escorted the unhappy train were together in the room, I took the chief one aside and asked for information respecting this beautiful girl. All that he could supply was of the most vague kind. “We brought her,” he said, “from the Hospital, by order of the lieutenant-general of police. There is no reason to suppose that she was shut up there for good conduct.
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