Prevost

Abbé Prevost is best remembered as the author of Manon Lescaut and of Histoire d'une Grecque Moderne, and as a translator of the works of Richardson. His eighteenth-century contemporaries valued him as much for his work as a journalist and a travel writer as for his multi-volumed novels. Manon Lescaut, the brief and compelling histoire loosely attached to the Memoires et Aventures d'un Homme de Qualité, is now acknowledged to be his masterpiece. If success is to be measured by an author's ability to provoke his readers into reacting with partiality to his characters, then Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut must be marked as the most successful novellas ever written, and indeed the slippage in the title is a marker for where the true interest of the book has been felt to lie. In his introduction to this edition, Patrick Byrne puts forward some perspectives on character which are rather different from those offered by the rather contrived viewpoint of the narrator. He reveals how the narrator's series of expedient arguments ultimately arouses strong sympathy for Manon precisely because it is so ineffective a piece of self-justification as well as explaining historical references and providing translations of unfamiliar phrases, the explanatory notes , which are an essential part of the interpretation pin point the complexities into the which Des Grieux's facilty for short term rhetoric leads him and help the reader to make sense of the Manon's often seemingly obscure motivation.