Manon Lescaut

Francois Prevost Antoine

Description

When the young nobleman Des Grieux lays eyes on the beautiful and charming Manon Lescaut, he immediately falls in love with her, and they elope to Paris, incurring the wrath of his family and forfeiting his inheritance. However, he struggles to satisfy her taste for luxury, frittering away the little he has left, and his domestic bliss finally disintegrates when he finds out that Manon has betrayed him for a rich lover.Alma Classics is committed to make available the widest range of literature from around the globe. All the titles are provided with an extensive critical apparatus, extra reading material including a section of photographs and notes. The texts are based on the most authoritative edition (or collated from the most authoritative editions or manuscripts) and edited using a fresh, intelligent editorial approach. With an emphasis on the production, editorial and typographical values of a book, Alma Classics aspires to revitalize the whole experience of reading the classics.

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Informations

• Publié par: Alma Books
• Date de parution: 28 octobre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 6
• EAN13: 9780714549910
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Manon Lescaut
Antoine François Prévost
Translated by Andrew Brown


ALMA CLASSICS


Alma Classics an imprint of
alma books ltd 3 Castle Yard Richmond Surrey TW10 6TF United Kingdom www.almaclassics.com
Manon Lescaut first published in French as L’Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut in 1731 This translation first published by Hesperus Press Limited in 2004 This revised translation first published by Alma Classics in 2019
Translation, Introduction and Notes © Andrew Brown, 2019
Cover design by Will Dady
Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
isbn : 978-1-84749-814-4
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.


Contents
Introduction
Manon Lescaut
Author’s Preface
Part One
Part Two
Note on the Text
Notes


Introduction
Buñuel’s last film, That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), depicts the infatuation of an ageing bourgeois, Mathieu, for a young woman from the lower classes, Conchita, whom he first encounters working as a maid in the elegant Parisian home of his lawyer friend. Mathieu follows Conchita to her home in a poor district of the city, where she lives with her devout widowed Spanish mother.
Conchita earns a precarious and nonchalant living by picking up odd jobs, which she abandons in equally desultory fashion: her mother, though constantly lamenting their poverty, spends most of her time in church praying for the soul of her dead husband. As Mathieu’s passion for Conchita deepens, the relationship between them settles into an uneasy pattern: she responds to his advances, and then, just when he seems on the point of gaining his desire, she rebuffs him and disappears, only to reappear in another place, doing another dead-end job, to continue the teasing flirtation to the point where she promises that this time she will give herself to him – or this evening, or the day after… His frustration increases as he encounters what to him appear to be a series of unpredictable and utterly bewildering mood swings: sometimes Conchita is sensual, alluring, come-hitherish, amorous, only to become, the next moment, cold, disdainful and rejecting. So radical is the disparity between the two Conchitas that they seem, at times, to be two different women.
If you haven’t yet seen this great, sombre film, I urge you to do so – and to look away from the rest of this introduction. The fact of the matter (in so far as there is ever any such thing in the world of the cinema) is that the two Conchitas in the film really are two different women: partly due to casting problems, Conchita is played by two actresses, the French Carole Bouquet and the Spanish Angela Molina. It is striking that many people seeing the film for the first time do not realize this (I certainly didn’t). The narrative form of the love story, in which just one person is the object of an all-devouring passion, is so great as to override the most elementary etiquette of cinematic observation. The single name “Conchita”, which covers two radically different sets of behavioural phenomena, the fact that Mathieu (whose own identity is never questioned so dramatically) surely cannot be madly in love with two different women, and the logic of the story, which means that Conchita-Molina apparently picks up where Conchita-Bouquet left off, all lure us into fusing the two actresses into one. And this is despite the fact that the film, oscillating between Seville and Paris, is essentially about split identities: Buñuel a Spanish director whose late career was spent in France, Fernando Rey the Spanish hidalgo here also Frenchified (he is both “Don Mateo” and “Mathieu”). As for Conchita, she sometimes seems to invite gifts from her wealthy suitor, while at times spurning any offer of money, indignantly denying that she is for sale.
And these, in essence, are the main themes of Manon Lescaut : sex, money and split identity. More precisely, perhaps, the novel is about the way in which sex and money, and the jagged and abrasive friction between them, actually create the sense of a split identity. In Prévost’s novel, an innocent young man of good family, Des Grieux, falls in love at first sight with a lower-class woman, Manon, who is being taken to a convent where her already active appetite for the pleasures of life will – her parents hope – be stifled. He, also destined for a career in the Church, decamps with her, and the narrative follows their picaresque wanderings through Paris and beyond. But it is not long before he starts to suspect that Manon, who is ostensibly passionate about him, is earning money from an initially discreet bestowal of her favours on other men. This sets the pattern of their relationship: they need money (she in particular is devoted to life’s little luxuries); the easiest way for her to earn cash is by selling herself to aristocratic roués; but when confronted by Des Grieux, she claims that she is doing it at least as much for him as for herself. After a stormy scene, he forgives her, and their relationship is resumed; thanks to his underhand gambling activities, they can keep going; but soon poverty threatens again, and she is off with a new and generous beau.
Manon does not present Des Grieux with two such violently opposed faces, welcoming versus hostile, as Conchita did to Mathieu; her words to him are always the clichés of romantic love. And whereas, in the film, Mathieu never “possesses” Conchita, Manon and Des Grieux consummate their love soon after meeting. But Manon does present Des Grieux with a split identity. There is the Manon with whom he is romantically in love, and from whom he therefore expects sexual fidelity, and there is the Manon who preserves their union as financially viable by self-prostitution. The latter Manon can behave in ways that, even within this recognizable context, are bizarre. Yielding to the embraces of the younger G *** M *** , and consequently standing up Des Grieux, she sends him both a curt note and a young girl who, she kindly suggests, can make up for her own absence, as if Des Grieux’s pent-up desires could discharge themselves into any moderately pretty vessel. The note is signed “Your faithful mistress, Manon Lescaut ”. Irony? Not necessarily: when Des Grieux catches up with Manon and berates her for this act of sadistic faithlessness, she is quite genuinely surprised. Or is she putting on an act? We cannot tell, not least because everything we know of Manon is filtered through Des Grieux’s account. (He is narrating his story, as the opening of the novel makes clear, to the “man of quality” Renoncour, into whose memoirs this whole tale is thus subsumed.) She is constructed as an obscure object of desire. Of whose desire? That of Des Grieux, that of Renoncour, who is attracted to cette belle fille as soon as he sees her; that of the reader? Or that, in some more speculative or fanciful sense, of the text itself? But desire does not belong to anyone or come from any single source – hence a good deal of its mystery (the very phrase “that obscure object of desire” is a pleonasm). Des Grieux never seems to know Manon: she is Madonna and whore, a self-sacrificing self-indulger, a princess of the salons and a denizen of dark dungeons, a self-assured and resourceful dunner of rich rakes and a penitent, weeping Magdalene.
Other “readers” of Manon apart from Des Grieux have shared his bafflement. Alfred de Musset apostrophized her as an “amazing sphinx, a veritable siren”, a “Cleopatra in petticoats” with a “thrice-feminine heart”. Maupassant thought she was “woman entire, as she always was, always is and always will be”, noting that, for all her “entirety”, she combined the apparently contradictory features of being “nice”, “alluring” and “vile”, a figure “full of seduction and instinctive treachery” (my italics). She has even hijacked the novel’s title, discreetly shouldering her lover off what was originally a double billing – The Story of the Chevalier des Grieux and Manon Lescaut .
Des Grieux himself is just as complex a character: a wimp capable of cold-blooded murder, a possessive prude who nonetheless tolerates, albeit unwillingly, a quite unusual degree of infidelity in his mistress, a crybaby who becomes an adept of the Paris underworld of whoring, gambling and street-brawling. But he is the narrator, and we are forced to see through his eyes, and so it is Manon whose opacity constitutes the dark heart of the text. He may think she is split (hence the wobbles in his language: she is sometimes “the sweetest and most lovable creature that ever was”, while at other times he denounces her as “treacherous”, “fickle” and “cowardly”), but this may reflect his own inability to follow her astute grasp of what their situation requires once their love has transgressed the dividing lines of social class and led to Des Grieux’s exile from his own caste. Manon may be perfectly “entire”, and his sense of her being radically split may be an optical illusion. Or is Manon split more objectively “in herself”?
One of the more haunting titles in psychoanalysis is that of Freud’s unfinished paper, published posthumously in the grim year 1940, on the ‘Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence’. At times of maximum conflict between a powerful instinctual demand and an unyielding reality, a person may try to solve the problem by rejecting reality and its prohibitions while simultaneously developing symptoms which show that, in so