47 pages • 1 hour read
Abbe PrevostManon Lescaut
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1731A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Pages 11-22Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 11-17 Summary
This section transitions from Renoncour’s perspective to Des Grieux’s. His story begins when he was just a teenager, studying “philosophy at Amiens” (11). He was well known for “leading a life so prudent and well ordered that [his] teachers held [him] up as an example to the entire college,” though he acknowledges that this is his “nature” and not because of any “strenuous effort” on his part (11). He is destined for the church, “a career in the Order of Malta” (148), a religious order whose members took vows of obedience, poverty, and chastity. Des Grieux uses the title “Chevalier Des Grieux” in anticipation of his membership with the order. Most members, including Des Grieux, are also members of the nobility.
Right before returning home for the holidays, Des Grieux encounters Manon for the first time while walking with his good friend, Tiberge. She is being sent to a convent against her will, and Des Grieux is so overcome by her beauty, “inflamed all of a sudden to the point of rapture” (13), that he vows to rescue her and “devote [his] life to delivering her from her parents’ tyranny, and to making her happy” (14). Pretending that he is her cousin, Des Grieux arranges for a carriage to whisk them away to Paris in the middle of the night, “where [they] would be married as soon as [they] arrived” (15). Despite interference from Tiberge, who senses how overcome Des Grieux is, he manages to spirit Manon away. They stop to rest in Saint-Denis, about 10 miles outside of Paris. Des Grieux explains that they “defrauded the Church of its rights, and found [them]selves man and wife without giving the matter a moment’s thought” (17).
Pages 18-22 Summary
Once in Paris, Des Grieux and Manon take up residence “near the house of M. de B…, the well-known tax-farmer,” or tax collector (18). Des Grieux and Manon are blissfully happy for three weeks, and Des Grieux decides to reconcile with his father in hopes of getting his blessing to marry Manon, having discovered that he needs parental permission to marry. Manon does not think this plan will work and fears that his family will force Des Grieux to leave her. She claims that they have enough money to live on for the moment, and when they run out, “she would appeal to some of her relations in the provinces” (18).
Des Grieux notices soon after, but does not understand, that they seem to have more money than they did before: They have better food, and Manon “allowed herself several new and expensive sets of clothes” (19). Des Grieux discovers the source of this revenue is Manon’s affair with the tax-farmer, though Des Grieux initially convinces himself that Manon’s relatives are using the tax-farmer to send her money. Before he can discuss the situation with her, he is abducted by his father’s servants and, accompanied by his brother, taken to Saint-Denis and then to his home. On the way, Des Grieux wonders who could have so “cruelly betrayed” him, Tiberge or Manon, but he once again refuses to consider that Manon could do anything so cruel. He decides that he “must have been seen in the streets of Paris by some people who knew [him], and who had then informed [his] father” (22).
Pages 11-22 Analysis
Once Des Grieux begins narrating his story, things move very quickly. However, he does take the time to explain what a wonderful, moral, and upright person he was before he met Manon. Only 17 and studying philosophy at a Jesuit college in Amiens, he led “a life so prudent and well ordered that [his] teachers held [him] up as an example to the entire college” (11). Furthermore, he was naturally inclined to study and had “a natural aversion to vice” (11). Indeed, his noble birth, his “scholastic successes,” and his “agreeable appearance had won [him] the acquaintance and respect of everyone of any consequence in the town” (11). He was destined for the Order of Malta, a religious and military order, a fate so seemingly obvious and inescapable that he is already called by the title “Chevalier.”
Des Grieux continues to assert his natural goodness as he describes his first sight of Manon, who was “so enchanting that” he, “who had never thought about the difference between the sexes nor looked at a girl with any attention […] whose wisdom and restraint were admired by all—found [him]self inflamed all of a sudden to the point of rapture” (13), despite her “humble birth” (15). Des Grieux does not see his behavior after meeting Manon—lying to Tiberge and Manon’s servant, running away from his school and family, abandoning his commitment to the church—as evidence that he does not, in fact, have “a natural aversion to vice.” Instead, he blames his actions on the power and seduction of love, on fate, on his “evil star already in its ascendant and drawing [him] to his ruin” (14), and on Manon herself, who, though younger, was nonetheless “much more experienced” (13).
This is seemingly borne out by the events in Paris, when Manon begins an affair with the tax-farmer, M. de B…. It is possible that Manon was merely trying to secure financial security in the only way available to a young woman in 18th-century France. Manon knows that Des Grieux’s belief that his father will approve their marriage is ludicrous; as a member of “one of the best families in P…” (11), Des Grieux’s father will never permit his son to marry Manon and will do everything in his power to separate them.
