In the Library
Manon Lescaut
Abbé Prévost, 1731
- Form
- Form Novella
- Reading time
- Reading time 4.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 13
- Length
- Length 62k words
£1.99
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About the book
At an inn in Amiens, a girl gets down from a carriage on her way to a convent she never chose, and a seventeen-year-old bound for the Church decides, before she crosses the yard, that his life belongs to her instead. That single glance is the whole of the Chevalier des Grieux's undoing. He gives up his studies, then the ordination waiting at the end of them, because Manon Lescaut keeps leaving him for richer men and coming back whenever their money runs out. Soon the boy who once meant to take holy orders is cheating at cards, posing as Manon's brother to swindle a rich protector, and standing over a man he believes he has just killed for her. Abbé Prévost is not writing a cautionary tale. He is asking how far love can outrun reason before it turns into ruin, and whether des Grieux, telling his own story without a word of regret, has ever answered that. By the time the two of them have nowhere left to run, all he has left to give her is everything.