Abbé Prévost

French · 1697 to 1763

Born Antoine François Prévost on April 1, 1697, in Hesdin in the province of Artois, the son of Liévin Prévost, a lawyer, and one of several brothers from a family in which the church was a respected profession, the future novelist lost his mother and a younger favourite sister when he was fourteen and his childhood ended at a stroke. He was educated by the Jesuits at Hesdin and entered their novitiate in Paris in 1713. He left the order at the end of 1716 to join the army, tired of soldiering, returned to Paris in 1719 thinking of resuming his vows, and is said, after the unlucky termination of a love affair, to have taken refuge with the Benedictines of Saint Maur, where he made his profession at Jumièges in 1721 and was ordained priest in 1726. From the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés he applied to Rome for transfer to the easier rule of Cluny; tired of waiting, he left the abbey without leave in 1728 and, learning his superiors had obtained a lettre de cachet against him, fled to England. The seventh volume of his Mémoires et aventures d'un homme de qualité (1731), separately published in Paris as Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut, was the famous Manon Lescaut, a one-hundred-page novel of doomed love between a young chevalier and a beautiful, mercenary girl who is finally deported to Louisiana. The book was banned in France and devoured in pirated copies. He continued to write, translate Richardson into French, and edit a literary weekly modelled on Addison's Spectator. He died of a ruptured aneurysm on November 25, 1763, while walking in the woods near Chantilly, aged sixty-six.