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Manon Lescaut and Her Representation in
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MANON LESCAUT AND HER REPRESENTATION IN
NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE, CRITICISM AND OPERA

By

Dina Grundemann Foster

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of Romance and Classical Languages

1998

ABSTRACT

‘ - MANON LESCAUT AND HER REPRESENTATION IN
NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE, CRITICISM AND OPERA

By

Dina Grundemann Foster

The abbé Prévost's haunting narrative, Manon Lescaut, first
published in 1733, has fascinated readers for more than two-
hundred-and-fifty years. Throughout the nineteenth century in
particular, the novel enjoyed a remarkable popularity. Dozens of
new editions were published, fourteen theatrical and operatic
adaptations were staged, and a half dozen variants plus five
continuations of the tale were penned. Among the published new
editions of Manon Lescaut, seventeen included an original preface or
introduction. The variety of approaches embodied in these essays,
the numerous rewritings of the tale and its representation in opera
suggest the possibility of an interdisciplinary study of the novel's
reception in nineteenth-century France.

In this study, the depiction of the abbé Prévost's eighteenth-
century heroine is compared with the figure altered and cherished in
five nineteenth-century variants, if not rewritings, of the tale:
Alexandre Dumas fils's La Dame aux camélias (novel and play),
Prosper Merimée's Carmen, Théophile Gautier's ”La Morte
amoureuse," and George Sand's Leone Leoni. These comparisons
highlight the significance of other authors' variations on the familiar

topos of disastrous passion. Massenet's opera, Manon, provides the

basis of an examination of the novel's transposition into musical
drama. An analysis of the social, historical, cultural and artistic
currents reflected in these works helps explain how and why
reception and representation of Prévost's eighteenth-century novel
and its eponymous heroine underwent a series of transformations
during the succeeding century. Intertextual analysis illuminates
diverse and shifting artistic expressions of common experience, as
well as reveals how intertextual dialogue, across time, influences and
enriches the meaning of both the new work and the original to which
it alludes. This interdisciplinary study, while it nuances and deepens
our appreciation and understanding of Prévost's Manon-Des Grieux
story, provides an example of reception theory, central to which is
the alteration of readings of artistic works effected by cultural

change.

For the late Pauline Porter Grundemann who inspired me,
for Leon ElDean Grundemann who made this work possible, and
for Sky and Dawn Foster who made it worthwhile.

iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Dr. Herbert
Josephs, Dr. Laurence M. Porter and Dr. Marlies Kronegger for their
constant support and encouragement. Dr. Josephs' tireless efforts to
challenge my thinking, along with the tact and wisdom of his
suggestions for rewriting, have been invaluable. Dr. Kronegger's
inspiration and Dr. Porter's insightful suggestions have been deeply
appreciated. Finally, I am indebted to the Michigan State University
College of Arts and Letters for the financial support that helped
make this study possible. A College Research Abroad Fellowship in
1996 and a College Merit Fellowship in 1997 allowed me to pursue
my research in France and then devote my undivided attention to

interpreting the results.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1
Chapter 1

INTRODUCTIONS TO NINETEENTH-CENTURY EDITIONS

OF MANON LESCA U 71 ................................................................................................ 15
Chapter 2

VARIATIONS ON THE MANON-DES GRIEUX STORY ...................................... 4 9
Chapter 3

MARGUERITE GAUTIER, A COURTESAN REDEEMED BY LOVE ................... 78
Chapter 4

THE VOICE OF ENCHANTMENT IN MASSENET'S MANON ......................... 109
Chapter 5

THE BIRTH OF A STORYTELLER IN MANONLESCAUT. ............................. 144
CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................... 184
APPENDIX .................................................................................................................... 187
BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................................... 188

vi

INTRODUCTION

Manon! Sphinx étonnant! veritable siréne
Alfred de Musset, Namouna

The Chevalier des Grieux's haunting narrative of his
ignominious affair with Manon Lescaut, a fille de joie, has captivated
readers for more than 250 years. Nineteenth-century readers in
particular were fascinated by the Abbe Prévost's novel and its
eponymous heroine. Dozens of new editions of Manon Lescaut were
published, including seventeen with an original preface or
introduction penned by writers such as Alexandre Dumas fils and
Guy de Maupassant. Fourteen theatrical and operatic adaptations
were staged, and five continuations plus a half dozen rewritings or
variants of the tale were penned in the nineteenth century (Gilroy
141-144), not to mention the poetry inspired by the figure of
Manon--most notably, stanzas LVII-LX of Musset's Namouna.

Since the Histoire du Chevalier des Griewr et de Manon Lescaut
was first published in France in 1733, numerous new editions have
appeared. According to the Catalogue general des livres imprimés:
auteurs (imprimé), 81 editions of the novel were published in the
nineteenth century, compared to 22 in the eighteenth and 44
between 1900 and 1960 (787-803). Citing different sources, Jean
Sgard declares that it is the most frequently reprinted novel in
France and reports 32 editions printed in the eighteenth century, 72

in the nineteenth, and 130 in the twentieth (221-223).

A prolific writer, Prévost authored numerous works in a
variety of genres. Many of his contemporaries considered Cleveland
his best work. Nor do all modern scholars consider Manon Lescaut
his greatest achievement. Jean Sgard, for example, rates Cleveland
and the Histoire d'une Grecque moderne among Prévost's best
literary creations (233-34). Manon Lescaut, nonetheless, is the only
one of his works to enjoy continuing popularity and a place in the
canon. Today, among Prévost's other novels, only the Histoire d'une
Grecque moderne attracts an occasional reader.

Manon Lescaut was originally published in Amsterdam in
1731, as volume VII of the novel Mémoires et aventures d'un
homme de qualité qui s'est retire du monde. In volumes I-VI, the
aging Marquis de Renoncour unsuccessfully seeks to resolve the
conflict between the traditional codes of gallantry and religion. Like
Des Grieux, he questions the nature of passion and happiness. Having
loved and lost, Renoncour believes that passion, which by its very
nature cannot last, is a curse inextricably linked to suffering. Thus,
he concludes, it is best avoided. Sparing the young Marquis de
Rosemont the pain of an unhappy love becomes Renoncour‘s mission
in life. Although interpreting his memoirs is beyond the scope of this
study, putting Des Grieux's narrative at the end of his adventures
does appear to negate the disdain for passion the Marquis has so
carefully constructed. The ambiguity created is typical of the moral
ambivalence found in Manon Lescaut. Renoncour and Des Grieux
share an inability to reconcile reason with feelings, and like Prévost,
each oscillates between living in the world and seeking retreat from

it.

As in Racinian tragedy, love drives the plot of Manon Lescaut
and leads to disaster, but Prévost‘s masterpiece about a young
aristocrat's fatal passion for a girl of common birth, set in early
eighteenth-century France,1 represented a break with Classicism and
appealed to. a broad range of readers. Although Des Grieux and
Manon turn to traditional notions of virtue and duty in the New
World, that final episode offers but weak refutation of the self-
centered values of their personal quest for happiness and pleasure
felt so profoundly throughout the rest of the work. Important to the
development of the European novel, Manon Lescaut was ”a seminal
work in the development of the Romantic literary sensibility which
infused all the writers of the nineteenth century” (Gilroy 140).2

The work has also been cited as a precursor to realism.
Eighteenth-century France saw a dramatic increase in the number of
novels published (Coulet 287), but critics viewed the genre with
skepticism as they debated the proper subject matter for literature.
Often confusing moral with aesthetic issues, they attacked novels
both for lacking verisimilitude and for painting a portrait of vice that
was too realistic and often too enticing. By the end of the century,
the movement to maintain classicism's idealized aristocratic values
will have given way to the reality of a bourgeois society.

From 1715 to 1760, critics still judged novels according to

classical criteria for drama: vraisemblance and morality (Coulet 353).

 

1 Though referred to as a Regency narrative by nineteenth- and most
twentieth-century critics, chapter 4 will argue that the story takes place at the
end of the reign of Louis XIV.

2 The Marquis de Sade praises the novel as perhaps France's best,

concluding that without Manon Lescaut there might never have been a Julie
(29).

Consequently, Prévost's novel was often denounced for portraying
Manon's character flaws and dubious morality too realistically.
Georges May has demonstrated that one of the forces contributing to
the popularity of first-person narratives in the eighteenth century
was the public demand for literary realism coupled with a demand
for moral idealism. By composing a first person narrative, the author
could claim to be simply relating what the person who lived the
experience had actually reported. Then he would add a preface in
which he argued that, seeing how his protagonists suffered, no
reader would want to repeat their experiences. According to the
”Avis de l'auteur" introducing Des Grieux's first-person account of his
love affair with Manon, "[Le public] verra dans la conduite de M. des
Grieux, un exemple terrible de la force des passions" (43). ”On y
trouvera peu d'événements qui ne puissent servir a l’instruction des
moeurs" (5). As incongruous as it may be with the story that follows,
the "Avis" claims one can learn from others' experiences and that this
book is in fact ”un traité de morale, réduit agréablement en exercice”
(6). Of course, the ”Avis” is also a way of piquing reader curiosity
about illicit love while circumventing accusations of immorality. May
concludes, ”Les romanciers découvrirent les merveilles du réalisme
alors que leur but était de fuir les attaques des critiques" (247).
Critics have long debated whether or not Prévost really
intended to write a moral treatise, as he claimed. Des Grieux

adamantly argues that ”[1]'amour est une passion innocente” (72), and

 

3 All references to Manon Lescaut are parenthetical and refer to the
edition by Frederic Deloffre and Raymond Picard (Paris: Garnier 1965).

”les délices de l'amour sont ici-bas nos plus parfaites félicités" (93).
So it is difficult to know whether the author believes passion is a
pleasure to be enjoyed or a destructive force to be avoided at all
costs--if, in fact, one is free to make that choice. Both Renoncour, in
his preface to Des Grieux's narrative (4), and Tiberge, at Saint-Lazare
(90), claim that the young chevalier chooses to rush headlong into
misfortune. Des Grieux, however, contends that he is a victim of fate.
Herbert Josephs posits that even though the "Avis” may be a literary
convention, faced with the challenge of "finding a proper balance
between verisimilitude and an exalted spiritual purport," Prévost's
dilemma is more than just a question of literary technique. For the
"intellectual evasiveness” apparent in the preface of Manon Lescaut
is fundamental to the entire novel (Josephs 186). The difficulty of
defining Prévost's actual intent is typical of the novel's complexity.
As a precursor both of realism and romanticism, Prévost's
novel represented an unfamiliar aesthetic form capable of
challenging readers' expectations and confronting them with
questions that traditional values could not satisfactorily resolve.
Literature, as Hans Robert Jauss explains, has a ”socially formative
function that competes with other arts and social forces in the
emancipation of mankind from its natural, religious, and social
bonds” (45). That role, however, raises a controversy as critics
debate whether literature should support the moral order, stimulate
debate over the status quo, reflect reality, argue for a new social
order, or refrain from mixing morality and politics with aesthetics.
The only point on which all seem to agree is that the arts do

influence attitudes and behavior, just as reality influences artistic

5

production and representation. The nature and extent of that
influence are as controversial today as in times past-~only nowadays
the focus of the debate has shifted from literature to a battle for
control of the National Endowment for the Humanities and to
controversies over the influence wielded by television, movies and
modern music. As for Manon Lescaut, we will see in chapter 1 that it
challenged readers' expectations and social norms both in its own
time and in the following century.

According to Wolfgang Iser, ”The history of the novel as a
'genre' began in the eighteenth century, at a time when people had
become preoccupied with their own everyday lives. Like no art form
before it, the novel was concerned directly with social and historical
norms that applied to a particular environment" (Implied Reader xi).
”Norms are regulations.” When transposed into a novel, "they are set
in a new context which changes their function, insofar as they no
longer act as social regulations but as the subject of a discussion
which, more often than not, ends in a questioning rather than a
confirmation of their validity” (xii). Manon Lescaut is a case in point.

Riddled with ambiguity and ambivalence, the novel poses a
number of questions that remain unresolved. It is marked by moral
ambivalence. Des Grieux argues for a new nobility of the heart which
proves to have a destabilizing effect on the existing social order, as
do his often unflattering portraits of pillars of the patriarchal order.
Yet he is a class-conscious young aristocrat unable to thrive outside
the established order to which he repeatedly turns in times of

turmoil.

Des Grieux's representation of Manon's motives is equally
ambiguous. Recounting how things seemed to him and what he
wants to believe happened, he justifies her transgressions with an
idealized version of events. Except for a brief comment by the
homme de qualité, Des Grieux is our sole source of information about
Manon, and the portrait he paints reveals his ambivalence. On one
hand, she is a girl with common manners and dubious morals. A
frivolous, ungrateful, unfaithful, and even treacherous girl, she has a
”penchant au plaisir" which causes all of Des Grieux's misfortunes
(20). On the other hand, she is "une creature toute charmante, qui
eut occupé le premier trone du monde, si tous les hommes eussent eu
mes yeux et mon occur!" (79). A sweet angel who is ”droite et
naturelle dans tous ses sentiments" (190), she is the source of his
most perfect happiness.

The novel's inconclusive complexity easily lends itself to
multiple interpretations. In fact, the indeterminacies in Manon
Lescaut help account for its enduring popularity. By seizing on
whatever aspect of the novel suited their purposes, nineteenth-
century authors and critics were able to use the novel as a
springboard for discussing a broad range of issues and ideas.

The variety of approaches embodied in their introductory
essays, the numerous rewritings of the tale and its transposition into
musical drama suggest the possibility of a rich interdisciplinary
study of the novel's reception in nineteenth-century France. To
examine the ways in which Manon Lescaut was received and altered,
this study addresses two issues: 1) How was Manon Lescaut read

and interpreted in the nineteenth century, and how did reception of

7

the work evolve over time? 2) What artistic shifts and social,
historical and cultural changes explain Manon Lescaut's popularity
and the changing attitudes toward the novel and its heroine? What
is the significance of these developments?

Reception usually evolves slowly in subtly nuanced shades of
meaning, not in a dramatic or linearly progressive fashion.
lnevitably it is linked to issues of intertextuality. Throughout this
study, textual analysis will illuminate diverse and shifting artistic
expressions of a common experience, as well as reveal how
intertextual dialogue, across time, influences and enriches the
meaning of both the new work and the original to which it alludes.
In Dumas fils' La Dame aux camélias, for example, Prévost’s novel
plays a significant role in the plot. It is an explicit intertextual
allusion that informs interpretation of La Dame aux camélias. Our
understanding of La Dame aux camélias, in turn, nuances our reading
of Manon Lescaut.

Just as borrowings, echoes and adaptations of Manon Lescaut
suggest the presence of the figure of Manon in many nineteenth-
century works, Prévost's novel draws inspiration from its
predecessors. The notion of a fatal love which gives rise to the
mysterious and destructive force of passion finds its origins in the
Tristan legend. In the course of this study, we will see that Des
Grieux draws heavily from classical--and especially Racinian--
tragedy. Frederic Deloffre cites Robert Challes' Les Illustres
Francoises (1713) as the most direct source of Manon Lescaut. There
are similarities of plot, theme, names, titles and vocabulary. In

Challes' work a moral is drawn from each of the seven tales

recounted. Deloffre posits that this may have given Prévost ”l'idée
de s'appuyer sur «l'expérience» et «l'exemple» pour presenter lui-
méme, dans un «ouvrage entier», un «traité de moral, réduit
agréablement en exercice »" (Deloffre LXXVII).

Most of all, according to Deloffre, Prévost finds a literary genre
in Les Illustres Francoises, the histoire, a genre that can be traced
back to Boccaccio's Decameron and Marguerite de Navarre's
Heptaméron. From this genre Prévost draws many of the elements
used so effectively in Manon Lescaut: a frame narrator, a first—person
narrative, and an oral--and relatively familiar-i-style. Based on the
oral tradition, the histoire is shorter than a roman. It features
several middle-class characters and is set in the recent past, unlike
classical novels about noble characters in a distant era. Naming real
places and events and presenting financial matters with authentic
detail are just a few of the realistic elements found in Manon Lescaut
(Deloffre LXXIV-XCIII) but inspired by its predecessors.

Literary theorists have used intertextuality--a term coined by
Julia Kristeva to express the idea that each text is an intersection of
texts past and future that continually absorb and transform one
another--to describe a variety of phenomena. In this study it will be
used as a broad term denoting explicit and implicit allusion to and
literary exploitation of another text. Allan Pasco argues that a
successful intertextual literary allusion must suggest something
”different from either of the component texts" (6), and "it must be
recognized before it can add to the effect of the story" (9). In

chapter 4, for example, we will examine Massenet's adaptation of

verses from Musset's Namouna to evoke a new complex of metaphors
for the figure of Manon.

While those are the richer and more interesting intertextual
allusions, intertexts can serve practical purposes as well. By
composing an opera based on a popular novel, Massenet generated
interest in his new musical drama. In his Manon, the plot must
necessarily be condensed to meet the demands of the lyric stage. For
opera-goers familiar with the novel, allusions to the novel fill in the
resultant gaps in plot and character development. Both the new
work and the original benefit from the intertextual allusions.

We will see that when a reader infers a literary allusion, the
effect is the same whether or not the writer consciously intended
one. For that matter, a writer's conscious intent is often impossible
to ascertain. On that basis, I will argue that Théophile Gautier's ”La
Morte amoureuse" (1836) is the Manon-Des Grieux story turned
inward. Prévost's emphasis on Manon's bipolar nature and Des
Grieux's confusion between the real world and the dream world leads
inevitably to this fantastic retelling of Manon Lescaut. It
problematizes the relationship between reality and representation in
a tale that appeals to the Romantics' fascination with the macabre by
exploiting Manon's demonic and divine duality.

In his important study entitled The Romantic Manon and Des
Grieux: Images of Prévost's Heroine and Hero in Nineteenth-Century
French Literature, James Gilroy provides a comprehensive survey of

nineteenth-century ficitional, dramatic and operatic adaptations and

10

continuations of Prévos't novel.4 He concludes that writers such as
Prosper Mérimée, George Sand, and Alexandre Dumas fils, "actually
rewrote the story of Prévost's lovers in order to make of it a vehicle
for the expression of their particular vision of things" (140). Manon
and Des Grieux had become well-known ambiguous types with
sufficiently fixed significance that the mere mention of their names
"evoked a special body of ideas, yet open and fluid enough so that
each commentator could recreate them, so to speak, in his own
image” (140).

In Leone Leoni (1834), the first rewriting of Prévost's novel
examined in chapter 2, Sand challenges gender stereotypes by
reversing the male and female roles. Merimée shapes a new reading
in Carmen (1845), developing the motif of charmes as the source of
the femme fatale's ability to ensnare the hero in a fatal passion.
Alexandre Dumas fils' La Dame aux camélias (novel 1848, play 1852),
the only variant with explicit references to Manon Lescaut, focuses
largely on the popular theme, analyzed in chapter 3, of the courtesan
redeemed by love. Each of these variants plays a significant role in
Manon Lescaut's continuing appeal because a literary work gains
stature and continuing influence only if there are still readers who
respond to it and ”authors who want to imitate, outdo, or refute it"

(J auss 22).

 

4 Explaining differences and similarities in plot and character, Gilroy
presents a wealth of information about these adaptations and continuations
and documents a broad range of nineteenth-century commentary on Prévost's
novel. He engages, however, in limited critical commentary on the material
he presents.

11

The best-known nineteenth-century French opera inspired by
Prévost's novel is Massenet's Manon (1884). This transposition of
the work to the lyric stage is the subject of chapter 4.5 Finally, in
chapter 5, a new reading of Manon Lescaut will incorporate insights
drawn from this study. As Jauss observes, our interpretation and
evaluation of a literary work is more than just the accumulated
judgments of past readers. It "is the successive unfolding of the
potential for meaning that is embedded in a work and actualized in
the stages of its historical reception as it discloses itself to
understanding judgment” (30).

Deloffre claims that all objective criticism of Manon Lescaut
was written in the eighteenth century. After that, critics just used
the novel as a vehicle for espousing their own world view. But even
if that were so, it would confirm the masterpiece's power to
challenge conventional thinking. While Deloffre concedes that a
study of what nineteenth-century writers had to say about Manon
Lescaut would be fascinating, he claims that their essays belong more
properly to the purview of psychology and sociology than to literary
criticism. In the end, according to Deloffre, these critics prove but
one thing about Prévost's masterpiece, its essential ambiguity
(CLXXV-CLXXVI). But ambiguity is, as he admits, an essential
element in the novel's appeal. Critics respond to that ambiguity from

within their cultural, social, and historical contexts.

 

5 Since this study is limited to French representations of Manon, it does
not treat Puccini's popular 1893 Italian opera, Manon Lescaut.

12

Of course, that does not mean that just any interpretation is
valid. Interpretations are derived from the semantic potential of the
text, and responses vary, in part, according to the element of the
novel the reader privileges. lser refers to this as foregrounding. As
readers read, they foreground or focus on certain elements of the
literary work and let others recede into the background of their
consciousness (Act of Reading 92-99). Critics and authors are first of
all readers. The critic who sees men devoured by an avaricious
femme fatale will have a different reaction to Manon Lescaut than
the one who is intrigued by the loving and repentant heroine in the
New World.

Ideally, critical judgments encompass a work in its entirety, yet
the themes or narrative elements that most fascinate the critic will
drive his6 reading. Moral issues will capture one critic's attention
and social issues another's, while yet a third is captivated by the
aesthetic rapture of the reading experience. Each of the diverse
critical stances reflected in the introductions to Manon Lescaut tells
us something about the novel, as well as about the critics and the
times in which they lived. Their focus depends on their social,
cultural and historical reality and on the literary conventions with
which they are familiar. For example, critical reaction in the second
half of the century often reflects growing fears that the sexual
freedom pervading Paris threatens the bourgeoisie.

This study will begin, then, with an analysis of the original

nineteenth-century introductions to Manon Lescaut. Because art and

 

5 All the new nineteenth-century prefaces and introductions were
written by men.

13

society have an interdependent relationship, literature, as well as
other art forms, both reflects and influences social and aesthetic
values. In turn, social and aesthetic values informed by historical
contexts affect readers' interpretation of a literary work. This study
will demonstrate reception theory at work—-or how culture alters

readings.

14

Chapter 1

NINETEENTH-CENTURY EDITIONS OF MANON LESCAUT

La figure de Manon Lescaut hant[e] notre dme.
Guy de Maupassant

Eighteen editions of Manon Lescaut were published during the
first half of the nineteenth century and 63 during the second half.
Twenty—two of those editions appeared in the 18605,7 the decade
following Esprit Auber's popular 1856 opera, Manon Lescaut - Opera-
Comique and Alexandre Dumas fils‘ successful 1852 play La Dame aux
camélias. Both generated interest in Prévost's novel. Auber's opera,
in particular, contributed to Manon Lescaut's increasing popularity
just as a film based on a novel often boosts book sales today.
Massenet's 1884 Manon and Puccini's 1893 Manon Lescaut further
expanded the novel's audience later in the century and capped
Manon's assimilation into the mass culture.

The novel was published both individually and in several series
of French masterpieces. Interrelated literary, social and political
factors account for the the novel's remarkable popularity. The novel
as a genre gained critical respectability and mass popularity. Literacy
rates were rising. The bourgeoisie thrived, as did works created to

appeal to this audience. Melodrama was a democratic genre born of

 

7 Broken down by decade, one edition was published in 1818, five in the
18208, six in the 30s, six in the 40s, eight in the 50s, 22 in the 60s, 12 in the 70s,
12 in the 80s and nine in the 18908. Source: Catalogue general des livres
imprimes : auteurs (imprime), pp. 787-803.

15

this era in which the population of Paris doubled in just thirty years,
and literature written for the popular masses, particularly the urban
masses, flourished. The public's predilection for melodrama
contributed to Manon Lescaut's success, explains Jules Janin, because
the novel is "un de ces chefs-d'oeuvre remplis de passion, de douleur,
et d'amour" (ix).

Guy de Maupassant emphasizes that Manon Lescaut cannot be
limited to a particular literary movement. That is part of its appeal.
Its popularity endures because it has "la force de la sincérité” and an
”éclatante vraisemblance des personnages” (xv). Furthermore, it
depicts the condition of men's souls at a particular point in French
history and thus is part of the history of a people. The Marquis de
Sade would agree. In the late eighteenth century, in Idée sur les
romans, he argued that novels ”servent a vous peindre tels que vous
étes Le roman étant le tableau des moeurs séculaires [sic] est
aussi essentiel que l'histoire, au philosophe qui veut conna‘r‘tre
l'homme" (34). For nineteenth-century critics, Manon Lescaut was
both a product and a symbol of Regency France.

Publication of Glady Freres' 1875 edition came at a particularly
propitious moment in French history, according to Alexandre Dumas
fils. Following a century of instability wrought by shifting political
regimes and the 1870 debacle with Prussia, a movement to revive
national pride and restore France's glory swept the country during

the Third Republic.8 ”Des monuments a tout ce qui fait la gloire de la

 

8 Although the 1860s saw the the greatest number of new editions
published, the 1870s produced the most editions with an original introduction:
five.

16

France" (Dumas XXI) were raised. Manon Lescaut, a literary
masterpiece and forerunner of nineteenth-century Romanticism and
realism, was "Ie chef de l'ecole francaise" (XXI). It belongs to Glady
Freres' 1875. "collection comprenant tous les chefs-d'oeuvre de
l'esprit humain commentée par les plus grands critiques de notre
temps" (cover pages). The editors declare, ”Nous élevons a la gloire
des immortels représentants de l'esprit humain un monument
typographique, enrichi de tout ce que l'art des livres recele de plus
exquis et de plus parfait, quels que soient le point de vue et les
exigences du bibliophile le plus consommé” (X1).

According to Dumas, the strong market for new editions of
Manon Lescaut was not due to book buyers who had any intention of
reading the novel. Rather, the nouveaux riches purchased the novel
because a fine book collection, like fine wines, exquisite furniture,
elegant attire, luxury coaches, and a beautiful mistress, bestowed a
”noblesse de l'argent" (XXVI) on the owner. The purchase of these
elegant editions was a new form of luxury (XVIII), a speculative
investment for some, an expression of vanity for others. Other
publishers concluded that if readers paid for used copies, there must
be a market for inexpensive new copies. Their editions targeted the
newly-developing middle class audience and were frequently

published in inexpensive installments.

Of the 81 editions of the novel published in France in the
nineteenth century, seventeen include an original preface or
introduction by a well-known author or critic. Criticism, of course,

does not occur in a vacuum. It is influenced by the critic's literary

l7

and life experiences, by the times in which he lives, and by previous
readers' reactions.

One of the earliest articles on the Histoire du Chevalier des
Grieux et de Manon Lescaut, written by La Barre de Beaumarchais,
appeared in Lettres sérieuses et badines in 1731. Interesting for
several reasons, the essay demonstrates that from the beginning
there were readers more intrigued by the figure of Manon than by
Des Grieux. Although eighteenth-century critics frequently judged
novels in terms of their moral value, many were responsive to Des
Grieux's pleas for pity for "cette pauvre fille" (179). He knows ”les
principes de son coeur” (190). She intends no harm. According to Des
Grieux, Manon "peche sans malice...; elle est legere et imprudente,
mais elle est droite et sincere" (148). La Barre refers to Manon as
"une personne qui déshonore de la sorte son sexe.”9 Nonetheless, he
continues, it is impossible not to pity her because Prévost had
”l'adresse de la faire paraitre plus vertueuse et plus malheureuse que
criminelle" (qtd. by Deloffre CLIX-CLX). This juxtaposing of moral
indictments with sympathetic indulgence will be echoed throughout
the nineteenth century.

Without crediting his source, La Barre borrows lines from
Prévost's ”Avis” to describe Des Grieux: ”Enfin un caractere ambigu,
un mélange de vertus et de vices, un contraste perpétuel de bons
sentiments et d'actions mauvaises" (qtd. by Deloffre CLIX; Prévost,
page 5). Because regulation of literary privilege was not enforced

with the same vigor that copyright laws are today, criticism often was

 

9 Cf. Lescaut's comment about "sa soeur ayant une fois violé les lois de
son sexe" (55).

18

not original. The history of La Barre's article demonstrates that
plagiarism persisted well into the nineteenth century, and poses a
challenge for those who wish to analyze evolving critical reaction.

In 1734 La Barre's essay was incorporated into an article that
appeared in Prévost's journal, Le Pour et contre, without attributing
the material to him. According to Deloffre, Prévost had nothing to do
with the preparation of this issue, which was written and edited by
Desfontaines and the abbé Granet (CLXV). Readers, however, have
assumed that the journal article was written by Prévost. Arsene
Houssaye quotes from it in his 1874 introduction to Manon Lescaut
and attributes the citation to Prévost. To complicate matters further,
the entire essay from Le Pour et contre appears verbatim in Glady
freres' 1875 edition of Manon Lescaut under the title "Avis de
l'auteur." Placed right after Prévost's10 ”Avis de l'auteur," it gives the
impression that he is the author. Indeed, it seems to be written by an
author eager to refute charges of immorality, noting for example that
”l'Auteur, en représentant le vice, ne l'enseigne point cet ouvrage
decouvre tous les dangers du dereglement. Il n'y a point de jeune
homme, point de jeune fille, qui voult‘tt ressembler au Chevalier et a
sa Mai‘tresse." Confusion over authorship of this article persists. As
recently as 1980, Gilroy, for example, attributes the passage to
Prévost (117). In fact, Prévost never commented directly on Manon
Lescaut.

Although La Barre did not term Prevost's novel immoral,

censors did. In the eighteenth century, the novel as a genre had an

 

10 Of course the ”Avis" is ostensibly written by Renoncour.

19

equivocal literary status linked to concerns about its moral status,
and novels were commonly condemned as immoral. In 1733, copies
of the Mémoires d'un homme de qual-ité, including Manon Lescaut,
were seized, and in 1735 the book was banned because "1e vice et le
débordement y sont peints avec des traits qui n'en donnent pas assez
d'horreur. " 11
Critics' however, generally expressed compassion for Prévost's
protagonists and recognized that the novel's success was due to his
skill as a novelist in arousing readers' compassion, not to his having
exemplified the classical criteria of verisimilitude and morality. Even
a critic who condemned the novel for immorality praised Prévost's
style: "Cet ex-bénédictin est un fou qui vient de faire un livre
abominable qu'on appelle l'histoire de Manon Lescaut [sic] on aurait
d0 brfiler le livre et l'auteur, qui a pourtant du style."12 Critics, in
other words, were beginning to distinguish literary merit from moral
concerns.
One of the most often cited judgments is Montesquieu's (1734):
Je ne suis pas etonné que ce roman, dont le héros est un
fripon et l'hero‘ine une catin qui est menée a la
Salpétriere, plaise, parce que toutes les actions du héros,
le chevalier des Grieux, ont pour motif l'amour, qui est
toujours un motif noble, quoique la conduite soit basse.
Manon aime aussi, ce qui lui fait pardonner 1e reste de son

caractere. (qtd. by Deloffre CLXIII-CLXIV)

 

11 Journal de la Cour et de Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, Ms. Fr. 25 000,
page 229, cited by Deloffre, CLXII.

12 Mathieu Marais, Bibliothéque Nationale, Ms. Fr. 24414, f0 483. Cited by
Deloffre CLXIII.

20

Nineteenth-century critics such as Jules Janin and Houssaye concur
that love is a noble motive. They forgive Manon because Des Grieux
does and because they share the chevalier’s conviction that she loves
him.

A 1767 article by Palissot articulates another argument
developed by critics in the century to follow. He credits Prévost for
'l'étude approfondie qu'il avait faite du langage des passions" and for
his ability to elicit sympathy from ”les ames les plus honnétes" for
”un jeune libertin et une fille nee seulement pour le plaisir et pour
l‘amour” (qtd. by Deloffre CLXIX-CLXX). The article marks a new
stage in criticism of Manon Lescaut. While earlier critics often failed
to distinguish the style of Manon Lescaut from that of Memoires et
aventures d'un homme de qualité, Palissot draws a clear distinction
between Manon Lescaut and Prévost's other works and discusses
Prévost's place in the development of the novel (Deloffre CLXVIII).
Two years later La Dixmetrie concurs that Prévost's strength and
originality lie in his ability to depict great passions and to arouse
interest in his immoral protagonists. The writer's art alone is
responsible for that success (Deloffre CLXX-CLXXI).

An anonymous eighteenth-century critic perceptively
comments on Prévost's talent as a writer. The novelist seduces the
reader, lulls him--for neither Prévost nor the critic seems to envision
a female reader13--into moral oblivion by having the reader see
Manon only through Des Grieux's eyes and encouraging him to

identify with the chevalier. The narrator-—i.e., Des Grieux—-portrays

 

13 For more on this subject, see Naomi Segal's The Unintended Reader.

21

both protagonists as victims of destiny's unfair persecution. The critic
remarks that "on ne peut presque pas accuser [Des Grieux] plus qu'il
ne s'accuse lui-meme, tant nous nous portons aisément dans les
moeurs et les habitudes de ceux dont nous lisons l'histoire” (qtd. by
Deloffre CLXXIV). ”Ce n'est pas a sa Manon que nous nous
intéressons, c'est a l'objet de cette passion si tendre" (CLXXV).
Although critics tended early on to term the novel Manon's story,
some, like this anonymous writer, realized that it is Des Grieux's story
as well and that the heroine‘s destiny as an individual interests us
less than her role as the object of Des Grieux's desire, a motif to be

developed in chapter 5.

Nineteenth-century critics echo most of the themes expressed
by eighteenth-century writers: the style in which Manon Lescaut is
written renders it a masterpiece and distinguishes it from Prévost's
other works. Des Grieux and Manon can be forgiven for their
transgressions because they are young, beautiful and in love. It is
difficult to accuse Des Grieux when he heaps so much shame on
himself. Manon is the novel's focal point. She was born for pleasure
and love. She genuinely loves Des Grieux. For the most part, critics
empathize with the chevalier, respond to his appeal for compassion,
and pardon Manon because Des Grieux does.

Though influenced by their predecessors, nineteenth-century
critics significantly expand the range of issues addressed by literary
critics. They react to Manon Lescaut in biographical, moral,
sociological and aesthetic terms. Five motifs stand out: the

protagonists' historical models, Manon's redemption, Manon as

22

symbol of Regency France, Manon as metaphor for the social ills
besieging contemporary France, and Manon as muse. Most striking
are the critics' strident misogyny, their deep-seated conflict vis-a-vis
the figure of Manon, their persistent quest to link the novel to
Prévost's lived experience, and their preoccupation with the social ills
attendant upon the rapid urbanization of Paris.

Manon Lescaut, they agree, is an ”admirable histoire du coeur
humain” (Janin i), a triumph of truth and passion. Because they
believe an author, especially one whose other works show none of the
same flair, could write such a deeply-felt tale only if he had lived it,
these writers are intensely interested in Prévost's life. Reflecting
nineteenth-century and Romantic preoccupation with historical
authors, eight prefaces14 are largely devoted to reporting the little
that is known about Prévost's life and to speculating on the rest.

Houssaye's 1874 study takes the biographical approach a step
further. He wonders whether Des Grieux in the novel's opening scene
isn't the author Prévost, arriving in Le Havre too late to save his real
life Manon. Thus begins a fictional biography, Houssaye's imagined
account of Prévost's life. Throughout his long introduction, he blurs
the distinction between author and character. Describing Prévost as
having ”plus de coeur que de téte, plus de poesie que de raison, plus
de réves que de réflexions" (iv), Houssaye could just as easily be

describing Des Grieux. Indeed, argues Houssaye, Prévost bases two of

 

14They are written by L.P., anonymous (1827 and 1875), Janin, Sainte-
Beuve, Heilly, Montaiglon, and France. Sainte-Beuve's and Montaiglon's
articles are included in editions that also contain essays on the novel by
Planche and Dumas fils respectively.

23

his characters on himself. "Des Grieux, c'est lui, c'est sa passion;
Tiberge, c'est lui encore, c'est sa conscience” (vi).

Pierre de Lescure (1879) testifies to nineteenth-century
interest in Prévost's life, as well as the popularity of the novel, by
commenting on the challenge of composing an original introduction
when so many have already been published: "Le lecteur [de
l'introduction de Lescure] n'a pas a redouter de nous une nouvelle
biographie de l'abbe Prévost, une nouvelle critique de ses Oeuvres"
(l). "Tout a été dit avant nous sur la vie et les oeuvres de l'abbé
Prévost" (2). Nonetheless, Lescure assures us, he has found an
original approach: an attempt to link the novel to historical events,
people and places. The abbé Prévost "n'a fait que preter ses propres
aventures" (7) to Des Grieux. Lescure suggests other historical figures
as possible models for various characters but emphasizes that he
could easily be mistaken.

Above all, his introduction provides an interesting socio—
historical commentary on the Regency. Assuming that the story takes
place during this period, he declares, "Sous Ia Régence, le desordre des
moeurs monta a son comble" (44). Demonstrating to what extent
Prévost's novel reflects the times in which it was written, Lescure's
preface relates Regency decadence and corruption to the aristocratic
moeurs portrayed in the novel, to the treatment of women at
Salpétriere, and to the efforts to populate France's colonies in the New
World. In Manon Lescaut, aristocrats are expected to have
mistresses. They summarily send Manon to jail and into exile. Des
Grieux is sequestered, jailed and released according to patriarchal

whim, not as the result of any legal proceeding. The chevalier cheats

24

at the gaming tables and even kills a servant. All is acceptable
aristocratic behavior under the Regency, according to Lescure.

One of Lescure's anecdotes claims that Manon Lescaut
influenced actual historical events. La Motte-Valois, a famous
countess incarcerated at the H6pital general, escaped by dressing as a
man. According to Lescure, La Motte-Valois had read Prévost's novel
and copied Manon's example. Though in the end Lescure admits that
his attempt to link the novel to actual people and events is futile, his

approach exploits romanticism's interest in authors and history.

Nine prefaces discuss redemption.” Their authors declare that
because Manon and Des Grieux have loved and suffered, they deserve
our compassion and understanding. In other words, they have been
moved by Des Grieux's plea for compassion and persuaded by his
argument that suffering leads to redemption. Responding to his
constant direct appeals to the interlocutor, they identify with the
young hero. ”Votre coeur n'est pas insensible; vous vous seriez laissé
attendrir" (171), Des Grieux tells his father. Making a personal appeal
to the old G... M..., he pleads for compassion because he is young and
in love and because he suffers:

[L]a jeunesse m'a fait commettre de grandes fautes....
Mais, si vous connaissez la force de l'amour, si vous
pouvez juger de ce que souffre un malheureux jeune
homme a qui l'on enleve tout ce qu'il aime, vous me

trouverez peut-étre pardonnable. (155-56)

 

15L.P., Janin, Planche, Stephen, Heilly, Houssaye, Dumas fils,
Montaiglon, and France.

25

Although his argument does not convince G... M..., it does appear to
have persuaded readers and critics.

A mild tone marks the early essays. Echoing Des Grieux's
assessment of Manon, LP. (1825) calls her a ”fille bien légére,”15 Des
Grieux ”un mauvais sujet" (xv). Moved by their suffering and
repentance, he excuses their ”fautes" (xv). Jules Janin (1839), the
first to distinguish between the two protagonists, argues that youth
and beauty save Manon, love and devotion Des Grieux.

Because these writers identify with Des Grieux, all are reluctant
to hold him fully accountable for his actions. Preferring always to find
Manon the more guilty of the two lovers, they conveniently overlook
Des Grieux's complicity with Manon, as well as his own transgressions.
There is an unconscious collusion among these men who accept Des
Grieux's claim that Manon's "penchant au plaisir a cause tous ses
malheurs et les miens" (20).

Georges d'Heilly (1867) concurs that Manon is the more guilty
of the two but takes an opposite tack. "La force de l'amour et la
vérité de la passion réhabilitent en quelque sorte 1e vice lui-méme"
(xxi), and each protagonist transforms him/herself. Both are
regenerated ”par le malheur qui les accable, la constance qui les unit,
par l'attrait qui les entraine et les domine" (xxii).

Janin suggests that redemption requires more than just loving
and repenting. Mere suffering is not sufficient expiation. Death alone
sanctifies, bringing with it pity and pardon. Charles Stephen (1856)

and Heilly will argue that death expiates Manon and Des Grieux's sins.

 

16 Cf. Des Grieux's description: "elle est légére" (Prévost 148).

26

However, death does not want two victims, so it takes Manon because,
according to Heilly, morally speaking, she is the more guilty; she is
the cause of all Des Grieux's troubles. Like his predecessors, Heilly
absolves Des Grieux. Manon's touching death expiates the sins of
both, the sins she provoked. Thus, in Heilly's reading of the novel,
Manon becomes Des Grieux's downfall and his salvation. Cast as the
object of Des Grieux's desire, she absorbs the young aristocrat's
repressed sexual urges and then is sacrificed to restore the health and
balance of the social order.

Prévost's novel, of course, reflects eighteenth-century mores.
Troublesome women were simply eliminated. Like Manon, they were
deported to populate the colonies, many dying in the process. The
nineteenth-century introductions to Manon Lescaut reflect that
century's view that prostitution is a social problem to be resolved,
that desire is an illness to be cured in a soul that needs redeeming.
In chapter 3, we will see that Dumas fils' heroine, Marguerite Gautier,
is literally ill. To restore health to the social body, she must be cured
of desire and redeemed.

John Lemoinne (1860) posits the impossibility of redemption
through love and suffering. Despite the rigor of his judgment, he
nevertheless sketches a somewhat sympathetic portrayal of
grisettes--at least they fulfilled a social function. In the eighteenth
century, young men of good families formed youthful liaisons with
grisettes who never expected to marry these men and therefore
experienced no bitterness when abandoned, according to Lemoinne.
The 1789 Declaration of Rights theoretically did away with castes

and thus grisettes. By 1860, grisettes aspire to legitimacy, and every

27

man wants a virgin, not a woman "sortie des bras de son seigneur"
(v). Since the Revolution, character, not birth, has determined social
class (vi). There are no more venial sins for women. While falls may
be rarer, they are ”plus irréparables” (vi).

Nineteen years later, Lescure (1879) rejects the possibility of
redemption for another reason. Manon is incapable of repentance, he
contends. Therefore, ”la redemption sociale [est] impossible” (58). His
conclusion, however, is less a moral judgment than a statement of
social reality. "On a querellé l'abbé Prévost sur cette poétique mort,
trouvée invraisemblable en se placant au point de vue du caractere
de Manon, dont l'incurable frivolité ne comportait qu'une fin étourdie,
et de l'indulgence, de la complaisance des moeurs du temps pour la
courtisane, qui ne se vit jamais réduite au désespoir ni au suicide”
(59).17 The novel, according to Lescure, is more faithful to moral than
to historical truth. Hence, "qu'importe que le XVIIIe siecle n'ait pas
connu une Manon Lescaut capable de l'expiation par Ie malheur, de la
transfiguration par l'agonie" (60).

Redemption is closely intertwined with the question of morality.
Manon agrees to run off with Des Grieux minutes after meeting him
and does not hesitate to begin an amorous relationship with him.
Within a few weeks she betrays him for a wealthy lover. Morally
indignant, Planche (1839), who intensifies the rhetoric initiated by
Janin, deals harshly with women who are easy conquests. On one
hand, his description of Des Grieux escaping from Saint-Lazare makes

Des Grieux sound like Manon's toy, much as the eighteenth-century

 

17 Lescure cites Edmond and Jules de Goncourt's La Femme au XVIII?
siecle, p. 263, as his source.

28

Anecdotes sur Mme la comtesse du Barry depicted Louis XV as
Madame Du Barry's toy. On the other hand, Planche envisions Manon
suffering and repenting each time she strays, and thus, he claims, she
deserves our compassion. Unable to effect a realistic reconciliation of
his (unacknowledged) conflicting images of Manon, Planche, like Des
Grieux and many of our conflicted critics, transforms her into a
sweeter, more loving and chastened figure than the novel suggests.

All except Lemoinne and Lescure, who take a more sober
sociological approach, accept unquestioningly the interpretation
affirming Manon's passionate love for Des Grieux and depict a
heroine repentant for the anguish she causes him, a portrait not at all
made certain by the novel--or at least not until the episode in the
New World. Although Des Grieux portrays a heroine who pleas for
pardon each time he reproaches her for infidelity, she does not
hesitate to betray him again when their funds run low. Even when
they first run off together, love is not her principal motivation.
Rather, she is proud to have attracted such a desirable young man
and eager to escape being confined to a convent. Critics, nonetheless,
relish titillating scenes of expiatory repetition that stimulate their
male fantasies.

Sympathizing with the hero, Planche goes to great lengths to
prove that Des Grieux's behavior is "vrai et logique.” Although
Planche denies it, he is clearly trying to justify Des Grieux, a young
man who obeys his feelings because he lacks the "faculté de se
gouverner" (284). Though Des Grieux loses our esteem, he maintains

our sympathy, contends Planche, who claims that Des Grieux is

29

Manon's saviour (281). Moral responsibility and the need for
rehabilitation seem, once again, to fall entirely on Manon.

When Janin remarks that passion might have saved Manon and
Des Grieux in a century governed by duty, he, in effect, attacks
Regency mores. Planche levels another criticism at Regency France,
suggesting it was possibly the spectacle of wealth, in other words, a
sociological cause, that led Manon astray (288). According to Pierre
Jannet, the novel "ne manque pas d'intérét pour l'étude des moeurs
du temps” (v). He then uses his comments on Manon Lescaut to
express anxiety about a contemporary social problem: prostitution.
The "HOpital general [était] La Salpétriere, ou l'on enfermait les
femmes de mauvaise vie.13 Le sort de ces femmes était entre les
mains de la police, qui les traitait durement en cas de récidive. 11 en
est un peu de meme aujourd'hui [i.e., 1867], et il ne peut guere en
etre autrement” (243). The anonymous author of an 1830 preface
criticizes both Regency and contemporary mores by remarking that
France has too long had a "gout de frivolité et la dépravation des
moeurs” (7).

The authors of these introductions to Manon Lescaut frequently
use their essays to rail against a decadent urban society. By
transforming Manon into a mythical creature redeemed by love or
by arguing that she is simply a product of her times, Regency France,
critics are able to use the novel as a springboard for discussing
contemporary concerns while holding the novel at arm's length. This

approach permits them to attack public morals without directly

 

18 According to Lescure, women--even virtuous women--were also
confined to La Salpétriere for indigence.

30

assailing, and thus antagonizing, their contemporaries and allows
them to protect literature against charges of inciting indecency.

Despite their eagerness to distance themselves historically from
Manon, their essays attest to her power to crystallize reaction to
contemporary social concerns. The romantics often saw themselves
entrusted with a social mission. After 1850 that led to criticism that
is largely sociological, and response to Manon Lescaut, especially in
the second half of the century, reflects growing public concern about
the social ills spawned by rapid urbanization and particularly by
prostitution.

Sainte-Beuve's reference to ”Manon et son Paris de vice et de
boue, ou toutes les ordures sont entassées" (xxv) links Manon to
prostitution and to an image in which the prostitute symbolizes the
underlying sexual ferment that contaminates the city. In Figures of
Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution19 in Nineteenth-Century France,
Charles Bernheimer argues that medical officials and police officers
responsible for regulating prostitution shared common fantasmatic
ground with ”creative artists committed to regulating the sexualized
female through the formalities of literature and painting" (2).
Growing fears of contamination are given medical justification by
theories of degenerate heredity and syphilitic infection as the
century progresses. They are reflected in literature through realism
and particularly through naturalism.

Sainte-Beuve's 1839 essay manifests the influence of

Alexandre Parent-Duchatelet, a well-known doctor and member of

 

19 Bernheimer frequently uses "prostitution” as a general term that
includes courtesans.

31

the Public Health Council. In 1836, he published "De la Prostitution
dans la ville de Paris," a famous study that led to the regulation of
venal trade in Paris. He viewed the work as a natural follow-up to
his earlier study of the disposal of human waste. By analyzing
behavior and examining bodies, he thought he could ”contain and
control the germs of degeneracy that threatened to infect and
decompose social structure” (Bernheimer 69). The similarity of tone
between Parent-Duchatelet and writers like Sainte-Beuve supports
Bernheimer's argument that sexual fantasies inform ideology just as
ideology influences the unconscious and that artistic production was
the product of science mixed with fantasy.

The Paris sewers were installed between 1852 and 1870, and
the putrefaction of prostitution and of human waste were linked
images in the public mind. Planche describes Manon as a dirty ”fille
perdue" (292) who "s'avilit [et] se degrade” (275). According to
Planche, Prévost does not try to hide ”les souillures et l'avilissement
de [Manon]" (274). Like Sainte-Beuve, Planche clearly associates
Manon with the physical and moral decay of a decadent urban
society. Yet I would observe that the only time Prévost depicts
Manon in sordid conditions is when she is in prison and on the road
to Le Havre, i.e. when she is under the control of public authorities.

Nineteenth-century critics do not envision a heroine with a
healthy normal sex drive, nor do they even envision that such a
woman exists. Rather they portray Manon as either a purified or
decadent heroine. In the novel, Des Grieux occasionally mentions
that he and Manon abandon themselves to delirious caresses.

Beyond that, explicit allusions to the erotic nature of their love are

32

discreetly avoided. Commenting on the novel, an anonymous
eighteenth-century critic writes, ”Les peintures de cet amour 1e
moins chaste, le moins légitime qu'on puisse imaginer, ne s'adressent
jamais qu'au coeur, sans qu'on y rencontre le moindre detail capable
de blesser l'imagination" (qtd. by Deloffre CLXXV). By also keeping
his heroine free from pregnancy and venereal disease, Prévost
endows her with a certain purity. This illusion of essential purity
prepares Manon for her transformation in the New World, as well as
the redemption envisioned by many of these writers.

Among nineteenth-century critics, Houssaye most explicitly
acknowledges Manon as a sexual being when he declares that she
”vivait dans l'orgie diurne et nocturne" (i). It is a decadent image of
degradation and delight. Often these writers describe Manon as ”me
fille née seulement pour le plaisir et pour l'amour."20 Planche
discusses women "qui se Iivrent pour le seul plaisir de se livrer"
(276). They seem to be reflecting their own fantasies and perhaps
confusing her with Challes' Silvie, one of her literary predecessors.
Silvie loves ”les plaisirs, surtout ceux de l'amour" (311). This image
of a sexually insatiable heroine is not found in Prévost's novel. His
Manon experiences passion for just one man--Des Grieux. For her,
”plaisirs" are entertainment and riches. Quite remarkably, she often
avoids compensating her lovers' prodigality with sexual favors.
Using love and pleasure as euphemisms for sex in these essays,
critics confound romantic love and a yearning for material comforts

with sexual enjoyment. Or perhaps it is simply male fantasy which

 

20 Found on page 10 of an anonymous 1830 preface and plagiarized from
Palissot's 1767 essay [op. cit.].

33

imagines that a courtesan takes lovers because she enjoys the work
as much as the fruits of her labor.

Parent-Duchatelet stressed social causes of prostitution:
poverty, unemployment and lack of education. By the 18703 and
18803, however, French authorities tended to view prostitution as
instinctual and innate, the result of "a lubricious temperament, an
inordinate love of pleasure, [and] a hereditary predisposition to
debauchery” (Bemheimer 210). Nineteenth-century critics' reading
of Manon Lescaut is a more accurate reflection of this contemporary

ideology than of Prévost's novel.

Eager to hold Manon at arm's length, to deny that courtesans
cross class barriers and upset the social order, or even more
worrisome, may contaminate France's bloodline, Janin terms the tale
a touching drama at the bottom of the social ladder. But Des Grieux
is a gentleman descended from aristocratic parents, and Manon, who
shows no signs of ever having been a lower-class laborer, is a
courtesan cavorting with rich aristocratic lovers, not a common
prostitute available to any man with a little cash. Lescure (1879)
studies Regency class differences and reasonably concludes that
Manon "devait étre de petite bourgeoisie” (14), a conclusion that
must have proved somewhat distressing for Lemoinne who had
decided otherwise.

For Lemoinne, Manon represents the lovable but incorrigible
weakness of her sex, the love of well-being (iii), and the overall
picture he paints of women and novels is negative. Very critical of

the effects of novels like Manon Lescaut on working-class women,

34

Lemoinne attacks the psychological and melodramatic bent of
nineteenth-century novels. ”Ce qui, dans ce [dix-neuvieme] siecle, a
perverti le plus de coeurs et perdu le plus d'imaginations, ce qui a
enfanté le plus de misere, le plus de vices, le plus de crimes, ce
sont les romans!” (ix). Novels used to depict the aristocracy but now
poeticize characters with whom the working class can identify. As a
result, these novels have popularized melancholy. But the working
class does not have time to dream or cry. Melancholy, which has
become an irresistible ”fatale et chere enchanteresse" (xii), is an
ailment for the idle rich. ”Ennoblissement moral” (viii), caused by
poeticizing, carries a heavy price because novels tempt women to
chase things beyond their reach.

As reflected in these essays, reaction to Manon Lescaut is
linked to issues of genre, gender, social turbulence, and literature's
role in society, as well as to nineteenth-century fantasy-ridden
notions about the nature of female sexuality. Critics' response to
Prévost's novel is the over-reaction of men in crisis, men
experiencing intense sexual and social anxiety. The introductions
written by Dumas fils and Maupassant merit special attention for
they most sharply exemplify critics' unresolvable inner conflict and
the ensuing tensions that Bernheimer argues stimulate artistic
strategies to contain, dispel, sublimate or metamorphize the

prostitute's threat to male mastery.

Functioning much like Renoncour, the frame narrator in Manon
Lescaut, Alexandre Dumas fils (1875) assures readers that no

”honnete homme” could help but feel compassion for Des Grieux, a

35

young man stricken by love (XXXIX). He stops short of saying that
Manon and Des Grieux are redeemed, but at least they merit
compassion and understanding. They are young and beautiful, a
couple who love intensely and suffer immensely.

In an essay riddled with ambivalence, Dumas, perhaps the
most conflicted of our critics, is torn between his fascination with the
figure of Manon and his posture as moralist. His barbed commentary
takes a dim view of both Regency and contemporary mores. All the
novel's characters, according to Dumas, are simply products of their
time, a period marked by moral and social decay. Not even Tiberge,
whom these writers generally cite as a model of virtue, escapes
unscathed. Lacking the moral force to refuse Des Grieux's appeal for
financial assistance, Tiberge aids and abets his descent into shame
and decadence. Dumas accuses him of having a "morale toujours
vide" and a "bourse toujours pleine" (XXXVIII). Ironically, the only
characters who receive even faint praise from Dumas are Manon and
Des Grieux. Linking passion to illness, Dumas describes Des Grieux as
one of ”ces malades" (XXXVI). He warrants our eternal pity because he
suffered eternally. He is an ungrateful son, a disloyal friend, a
swindler, and even a murderer (XXXVCIII-XXXIX). Yet one is inclined to
overlook a host of sins because Des Grieux is young, charming, and
gripped by an all-consuming passion.

Manon, according to Dumas, is more than just the portrait, even
the ideal (XXXVI), of Regency decadence transformed by love and
suffering. She embodies the archetypal temptress. She is youth,
sensuality, instinct, pleasure, and man's eternal temptation. She is

l'Amour meme, love that supersedes all else in life. "Qui ne t'a pas

36

aimée, Manon, n'est pas allé jusqu'au fond de l'amour; et c'est
abominable a constater, mais qui n'aime pas comme des Grieux, c'est-
a-dire, le cas echéant, jusqu'au crime et jusqu'au déshonneur, ne peut
pas dire qu'il aime” (XXXIX—XL). It is a conflict without resolution
permanently attached to the figure of Manon, a figure in which

rapture and ruin are inextricably bound.

She has loved, he tells her, "autant qu'une femme comme toi
pouvait aimer" (XXXVIII). ”Comme toi." A woman like Manon, a
courtesan, can never love as genuinely, as wholeheartedly as those of
good breeding. Certainly never as worthily as Des Grieux, who is
”mille fois mieux" (XL) than his beloved.

Manon is beautiful. Dumas lingers longingly on visualization.
Voyez ces grands yeux humides et a demi clos, ces joues a
fossettes, ce nez mutin, ces bras arrondis, ces mains
potelees et mignonnes, ces seins fermes et blancs, étoilés
d'un point rose semblable a un soleil qui se couche sur un
pic de neige, cette bouche frai‘che et brfilant.... (XLI)

It is the portrait of seductive childlike innocence, of a prostitute with
a child's mentality, which is how prostitutes were viewed in Dumas'
day. Before we become beguiled by Manon's charms, Dumas crudely
reminds us--and himself-~that she is only a courtesan with her
”petits pieds déchaussés, quelquefois plus haut que la tete“ (XLI).
Therefore, it will do no good to speak to her of morality or remorse
because ”elle n'y comprend rien" (XLII).

These descriptive details flow from Dumas' imagination, not the

novel. Des Grieux never offers a physical description of his beloved.

37

Gripped by an obsession he can neither condone nor overcome,
Dumas challenges Manon to explain herself and demands a response.
He puts words in her mouth--in the novel she says virtually nothing-
-and his preface becomes a fictional dialogue with the sultry siren.
His bitterness pours out. Youth and beauty fade, and man will have
his revenge, he hurls at her. "Ce qui l'attirait en toi, 1e repousse, ce
qui I'enivrait l'écoeure...; enfin, il te laisse crever a l'h6pital comme
une mendiante et pourrir a meme la terre comme un chien" (XLV-
XLVI).

Twenty-three years earlier in Dumas' play La Dame aux
camélias, M. Duval expresses the same idea less harshly to
Marguerite. ”[Que] restera-t-il [de votre passion] quand vous aurez
vieilli tous deux? Qui vous dit que les premieres rides de votre front
ne détacheront pas le voile [des] yeux [d'Armand], et que son illusion
ne s'evanouira pas avec votre jeunesse?" (300). The message is
nonetheless the same: women are valued for youth and beauty. Once
past her prime, a woman has little to offer.

In his 1848 novel of the same name, Dumas develops a similar
theme. Learning of Marguerite's death, the frame narrator claims
”une indulgence inepuisable pour les courtisanes" (30): ”Dieu avait
été clement pour elle, puisqu'il n'avait pas permis qu'elle en arrivat
au chatiment ordinaire, et qu'il l'avait laissée mourir dans son luxe et
sa beauté, avant le vieillesse...” (27). Manon, of course, continues to
fascinate us in part because she dies while still young and beautiful.
That is the poignant image that haunts men's souls.

In his novel, Dumas recounts the pathetic history of Louise,

whose mother, an aged prostitute, made her young daughter

38

prostitute herself to support them. Obeying her mother, Louise se
livrait sans volonté, sans passion, sans plaisir. [...] La vue de cette
surveillance scandaleuse m'inspirait le mépris et le dégofit” (28). One
day Louise learns that she is pregnant and joyfully runs to tell her
mother the happy news. The mother quickly crushes Louise's brief
glimpse of happiness by telling her that they do not even have
enough money to take care of the two of them, let alone a third
person. A baby would be useless, pregnancy wasted time. Forced to
have a backstreet abortion, Louise dies three months later. When he
first saw Louise plying her trade under her mother's watchful eye,
the frame narrator of Dumas' novel was "pret a accepter Ia facile
morale de [s]on siecle.” The scene filled him with "le mépris et le
dégout" (28), but Louise's sad plight changes his perspective. The
moral of his story is that we should not be so quick to judge such
women without knowing their story. The tone and manner in which
this story is told inclines the reader toward sympathy for Louise and
even toward aging courtesans. Such is not the case in Dumas fils'
introduction to Manon Lescaut written 27 years later.

In this imaginary debate between Manon and the author, the
siren is not a hapless victim. She will not be silenced. ”Puisque tu
veux du plaisir, je t'en foumirai," she retorts; ”mais tu me 1e payeras
non-seulement de ta fortune, mais de tes muscles, de ta raison, de
ton sang, de ton honneur, de ton ame" (XLVII). It is the portrait of a
man-eating femme fatale who saps men's vitality and ruins them.
She is a much more menacing figure, much more like Zola's Nana

than Prévost's original.

39

Between Dumas' La Dame aux camélias and his introduction to
Prévost's novel, the ills of rapid urbanization had exploded. His
reading of Manon Lescaut was born of late nineteenth-century fears
about the uncontrolled sexual freedom that pervaded Paris,
threatening men and the bourgeoisie. In the burgeoning capitalist
society of the 1850s and 1860s, desire seemed limitless and sexual
relations became more commercialized. In 1871 prostitution was
linked to the violence of the Commune: 246 of the 1051 Communard
women arrested were prostitutes. Stories of their violent extremism
"contributed to the reactionary discourse of the 1870s that blamed
women's sexual derangement for what was perceived as a crisis in
the health of the national organism, a lesion in the unity of the body
politic" (Bernheimer 209-10). Clandestine prostitution was thought
to be at an all-time high in 18703 and 18803, arousing anxiety that
the very virility of France was at risk. In Les Origines de la France
Contemporaine (1878), Hippolyte Taine imagines ”modern France
infected by alcoholism, syphilis, and nervous depletion, all illnesses
fomented by female [especially lower class female] sexuality"
(Bernheimer 210). Syphilis, which was most rampant in 1879 and
1880, was thought to spread from the lower to upper classes (234-
235). In brief, the change in Dumas' tone between La Dame aux
camélias and his preface to Manon Lescaut reflects escalating fears of
degeneration, contamination and death associated with active female
sexuality.

Although Dumas' discourse is marked by contemporary
anxieties, he is first of all a writer bent on achieving literary success.

He contributes to the legend of Manon by integrating her into his

40

own work, La Dame aux came’lias, and then uses his introduction to
Manon Lescaut to immortalize his characters, Marguerite Gautier and
Armand Duval. After he tells Manon that men will soon turn from
her in disgust, the temptress responds, ”«Oui, oui, c'était ainsi mon
cher moraliste, quand je m'appelais Manon, et que j'étais assez sotte
pour tenir a des Grieux, quand je m'appelais Marguerite Gauthier
[sic] et que j'etais assez malade21 pour aimer Armand...»" (XLVI).
These intertextual references suggest a writer in conversation
with writers across the ages. In his invective against aging beauty,
Dumas declares to Manon, ”Pour qu'on t'immortalise, il faut que tu
meures jeune, en pleine beaute comme nous t'avons fait mourir,
comme nous qui t'avons chantée" (XLIV). He and other literary artists
have become "nous.” Their muse, Manon, the archetypal temptress

who encourages the arts (XLVIII), a theme Maupassant will develop.22

Guy de Maupassant (1885) launches the most virulent attack
against women but sidesteps moral issues. Dismissing all female
accomplishment with one fell swoop, Maupassant argues that the
ancient Greeks were wise in concluding that women are good for love
and motherhood alone. And those two roles are incompatible.
Women who fall into the first category are "les grandes courtisanes,
dont le devoir consist[e] a étre belles et séduisantes, a ravir les yeux,
a captiver l'esprit et a troubler les coeurs" (x). The latter are strong,

healthy women devoted to the holy and natural work of bearing and

 

21 The reader will note that love is once again equated with illness.

22 See chapter 3 for further discussion of Dumas fils' reading of Manon
Lescaut.

41

raising children. He links this diatribe to an attack on women's
career ambitions. Despite numerous attempts across the century,
contends Maupassant, no woman has proven herself capable of
artistic or scientific accomplishment. He opposes contemporary
efforts to train women doctors and politicians,23 and he uses his
introduction to Manon Lescaut to pronounce it a futile effort.

Shifting to an aesthetic approach, Maupassant agrees with
Dumas that Manon is the artist's muse. He posits that a few
select images of femininity, including Manon Lescaut, are the source
of the artistic impulse:

[L]'histoire de la pensee humaine, de la pensée artiste, est
éclairée par quelques images féminines revées par les
eerivains, dessinées par les peintres ou taillees dans le
marbre par les sculpteurs. Le corps de la Vénus de Milo,
la tete de la Joconde, la figure de Manon Lescaut hantent
notre ame et l'emeuvent, et vivront toujours dans le
coeur de l'homme, et troubleront toujours tous les
artistes, tous les songeurs, tous ceux qui désirent et
poursuivent une forme entrevue et insaisissable. (xii)
Manon stimulates artistic production because she is an elusive
mythical--or idealized--figure who troubles men's souls and
stimulates their fantasies. Because Des Grieux never describes her,
each reader can envision his own ideal enchantress.
In literature, claims Maupassant, there are only three or four

types of women who live in men's souls with such vividness and

 

23 Public secondary schools had been opened to women in 188]; higher
education for them soon followed.

42

intensity as to seem real: Dido, Juliette, Virginie, and "Manon
Lescaut, plus vraiment femme que toutes les autres, naivement
rouée, perfide, aimante, troublante, spirituelle, redoutable et
charmante" (xiii). She exercises a subtle, unhealthy charm. She
incarnates "tout ce qu'il y a de plus gentil, de plus entrainant et de
plus infame dans l'étre féminin" (xiii). She fascinates and enchants
us because she is both the Eve of the Garden of Eden and the Eve of
paradise lost.

The art work accompanying this edition of the novel presents
an interesting dichotomy. The black and white illustration preceding
the preface depicts Eve as the source of original sin, woman as the
sower of evil, woman in need of rehabilitation. With a come-hither
look, she is seated at the foot of the tree of good and evil in the
Garden of Eden, holding out an apple, the forbidden fruit. The
drawing at the end of the preface portrays a semi-nude muse
floating above a pile of books. One is open to the title page of the
Mémoires et aventures d'un homme de qualité qui s'est retire du
monde. In her hand, the muse holds a copy of Manon Lescaut.
Throughout Des Grieux's narrative, several smaller black and white
drawings depict archetypal characters in scenes that link love to
disaster and destruction.

Maurice Leloir's full-page watercolors also illustrate the novel.
They portray the youngest, freshest, and most innocent-looking
Manon of any of the editions. The watercolors allow him to give a
pinkish tint to her skin. He gives her young facial features and
typically wraps her in layers of modest clothing. Even in the arrest

scene, she is standing in a white cotton nightgown peering somewhat

43

timidly around the bed curtains at the men at the door. The contrast
between Leloir's watercolors and the black and white sketches
illustrates the difference between Prévost's and Maupassant's
Manon, between the individual and universal implications of the
story. Unlike the full-page illustrations, which are plot specific, the
small black and white sketches capture the archetypal aspect of
Manon Lescaut. Prévost's heroine is young, rather naturally
beguiling, and fairly harmless. Maupassant imagines a mythical
creature, the poet's muse, the archetypal femme fatale.

Maupassant is the only preface writer who explicitly describes
both protagonists in archetypal terms, Manon as the eternal feminine
and Des Grieux as the eternal masculine. Empathizing with Des
Grieux—~i.e., Adam, Maupassant admits, ”nous nous sentons faibles
devant cette image ravissante, devant cette unique evocation de la
creature d'amour" (xiii). Attracted and repulsed, yet powerless to
resist, he is haunted by fears of self-destruction when confronted by
her sexual magnetism. Maupassant depicts the eternal feminine as
the femme fatale no man could resist. Contaminated by Manon's
depraved nature, Des Grieux falls victim to her spell.

Despite being a strident misogynist and referring to the novel
as a ”nouvelle immorale" (xvi), Maupassant issues no moral
judgments about art. In fact, he seems to agree with Anatole France
that we love Manon precisely because she is immoral. In courtesans
like Manon, great men seek a nearly divine sensual and poetic
intoxication. But if they are enchanted with historical figures such as
Madame de Pompadour, they are even more enraptured by women

created in the poet's imagination. Recalling Villon's "Mais ou sont les

44

neiges d'antan?" Maupassant concedes that, in spite of themselves,
men are moved by a charming death. Even Lescure, who deems
Manon. beyond redemption and unworthy of her poetic death, agrees
that by dying, Manon elicits the reader's sympathy for protagonists
of dubious character. ”11 fallait que Manon mourfit pour qu'on put la
plaindre et plaindre Des Grieux” (59).

To Maupassant's credit, he acknowledges Manon's complexity.
She is a ”fille diverse, complexe, changeante, sincere, odieuse et
adorable, pleine d'inexplicables mouvements de coeur,
d'incompréhensibles sentiments, de calculs bizarres et de naiveté
criminelle." Prévost, he concludes, has rendered a true-to-life
heroine. ”Comme elle differe des modeles de vice ou de vertu
présentés sans complications” (xv) by sentimental novelists who do
not understand that human nature is multi-facetedl

Concurring with Maupassant, France, and the anonymous
author of an 1886 preface that readers do not want to rehabilitate
Manon, G.H. (1893) acknowledges readers' ambivalence and admits
that Manon is loved in spite of, perhaps even because of, her
waywardness. In fact, G. H. continues, we like the novel because of
its corruption. A less immoral Manon would no longer be the heroine

we love (vi-vii).

Time and again we see that reception is informed by how critics
position themselves artistically, historically, socially and culturally.
Most critical reaction to Manon Lescaut tells us more about the
nineteenth century and about the anxieties, desires and fears of these

writers than about Prévost's novel. Their readings are born of an era

45

that believes social, moral, physical, and psychological disorders spring
from active female sexuality. Men both desire and fear women. Their
essays reveal this conflict.

Identifying with the narrator, critics confuse the eponymous
heroine with the novel. In fact, they say relatively little about the
novel, about Des Grieux's narrative. Their essays have even less to do
with real women or with what women want. Just as Parent-Duchatelet
and other nineteenth-century sociologists give the prostitute no voice
in their studies of prostitution, women, including women writers, have
no voice in these essays. Rather, the goal of these works is to control
the female threat to masculinity. Their representation of Manon is an
image that springs from the male imagination; hence it is unreal.
Their creativity is in part driven by their anxieties about masculinity.

Most critics exaggerate either her angelic or her infernal
nature. Simultaneously they scorn and idealize Manon. Des Grieux's
ambiguous, ambivalent depiction of Manon's character invites these
multiple interpretations. Up until 1886, their commentaries tend
toward an increasingly harsh and conflicted tone. She is young, gay
and beautiful, but she is an unfaithful beauty who gave herself on a
first encounter and soon thereafter betrayed her lover. She is a
representative of her times, Regency France, a morally depraved
epoch in French history. Her story is "le paroissien des courtisanes"
(Dumas XXII). In a word, she is immoral, but delightfully so. These
are their frequent refrains.

Early in the century, critics tend to privilege the carefree, young
and gay Manon. The next wave of reception foregrounds the

repentant Manon who begs Des Grieux's forgiveness for her infidelities

46

and is transformed into a loving angel in the New World. It recasts
her, according to contemporary tastes, as a courtesan redeemed by
love. After mid-century, the focus falls on the unfaithful Manon who
betrayed Des Grieux, alienated him from his family, and defrauded her
lovers. Cast as a femme fatale who leads men to ruin, she is portrayed
as a more hardened, cynical and fearsome temptress than Prévost's
heroine. Using Manon as a symbol of contemporary moral decay, their
introductions to the novel serve as a platform from which to argue any
number of contemporary issues. Eager to espouse their own world
view, they rarely even cite Manon Lescaut in their introductions to the
work.

Toward century's end, critics turn from sociological criticism to
aesthetics. She is the poet's muse, and they debate her place in
literary history. According to one, she will never have the nobility
and purity of Shakespeare's Juliette, Ophelia, or Desdemona (Planche
275). According to another, her poetic death gives her the right to rest
alongside the heroines of Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe, ”toutes les
amoureuses de la galerie idéale" (Houssaye iii). Yet another declares
her the Dame aux camélias (Stephen xxvii) and Virginie before
purification (Janin xi).

Perhaps most importantly, this plenitude of editions with
original introductions demonstrates Romanticism's rejection of
criticism that evaluates literary works according to dogmatic tastes.
They show that Manon Lescaut continues to be read and reacted to.
Hence it remains relevant. In fact, nineteenth-century readers
transform Manon into a mythical creature. Dumas and Maupassant

have argued that Manon is the eternal feminine, the artist's muse.

47

The wealth of memorable literary and operatic creations inspired by
Manon Lescaut seems to prove them right.

The number of writers who take up the question of morality
underscores public debate on literature's function in society and
public concern about the moral fiber of French society, The
anonymous author of an 1875 preface defends the novel as less
dangerous than modern novels because it paints mores of a distant
epoch. Even Dumas fils, the great moralist, distinguishes literary
from social standards. Manon Lescaut is not immoral; it is simply
representative of its times, and ”constater une chose n'est pas la
glorifier" (xxx). None of these critics term Manon Lescaut immoral.
Quite the contrary, they insist that it is a morally instructive book in
which vice is always punished, virtue rewarded. Nowhere in the
novel, they argue, does the reader encounter ”une seule de ces
dangereuses peintures propres a echauffer les imaginations" (L.P.
xvi).

Yet clearly, the novel does inflame their imaginations. Despite
their moral posturing, a lesson in virtue is decidedly not what draws
these critics to the novel. These introductions to Manon Lescaut, like
the novel they preface, are creative works at once reflective of the
times in which their authors lived and of those writers' own
repressed fears and fantasies. The figure of Manon acts as a
lightning rod, sparking men's imaginations, providing a conduit for
expression of deep-seated conflict, and crystallizing their reactions to

literary and social issues.

48

Chapter 2

VARIATIONS ON THE MANON-DES GRIEUX STORY

L'amour est toujours an motif noble,
quoique la conduite soit basse.
Monte squieu

A literary work's meaning and significance are illuminated
over time as succeeding generations of readers and writers react to
the work. In this chapter we will examine how three nineteenth-
century authors react to--or against-~Manon Lescaut in creating their
own versions of Manon and Des Grieux's ill-fated love affair. In
Leone Leoni, an early feminist response to men's fears of Manon,
George Sand depicts a sinister homme fatal who is much more
menacing than Prévost's femme fatale. In a fantastic variant of
Prévost's tale, Théophile Gautier's "La Morte amoureuse" stirs the
Cinders of repressed sexuality. In Carmen, Prosper Mérimée
develops Prévost's emphasis on Manon's "charmes" and his portrayal
of passion as a violent emotion. In chapter 3 we will study a fourth
work inspired by Prévost's novel, Alexandre Dumas fils' La Dame aux
camélias, "a kind of anti-Manon" (Gilroy 101) with explicit
intertextual references to Manon Lescaut.

Though little of substance has been written about Sand's Leone
Leoni, several writers, including James Gilroy and Leon Cellier, have

observed that it is a "mirrored reversal of Manon Lescaut" (Riggs24

 

24 Larry Riggs' ”Class, Gender and Performance in George Sand's Leone
Leoni” is one of few articles devoted to the work.

49

50). In his 1846 Choix de maximes consolantes sur l'amour,
Baudelaire draws a similar analogy. Troubled by men's attraction to
women they should scorn, he concludes that love and scorn go hand
in hand in the two works: "Les plus habiles, 3e voyant contraints par
la nature de jouer l'éternel roman de Manon Lescaut et de Leone
Leoni, 3e sont tires d'affaire en disant que le mépris allait tres bien
avec l'amour.” He goes on to advise enthusiastic acceptance of Manon
and Leone as they are. Without their faults they would be
incomplete: 'Moins scelérat, mon ideal n'efit pas été complet" (474).

Sand penned Leone Leoni in 1834 while staying in Venice with
Alfred de Musset. She writes that Manon Lescaut was the last work
she read before leaving Paris. Having heard the novel discussed, she
thought that ”faire de Manon Lescaut un homme, de Desgrieux [sic]
une femme, serait une combinaison a tenter et qui offrirait des
situations assez tragiques, le vice étant souvent fort pres du crime
pour l'homme, et l'enthousiasme pour la femme” (Sand, Impressions
116).

There is no record of Gautier or Mérimée citing Prévost's
masterpiece as their source of inspiration for ”La Morte amoureuse"
(1836) and Carmen (1845) respectively. But if not consciously, at
least subconsciously their tales seem to have been inspired by
Manon Lescaut, a story that had entered the cultural consciousness

by the time these variants were written. L. De Wailly, in an 1852

 

Another discussion of Leone Leoni is found on pages 4 and 7-12 of
Shawn Morrison's unpublished dissertation, "Women in the Novels of George
Sand.” Her conclusion echoes that of the scholars already mentioned: ”Leone
Leoni is George Sand's speculation on what would happen if there were a
male 'Manon Lescaut” (7).

50

article, is the first of many, including once again Cellier and Gilroy,
who have commented on the similarities between Carmen and
Manon Lescaut. Glossing over Des Grieux's shooting of a servant as
easily as does the chevalier, Wailly seems to suggest that the murder
is nothing more than a trifling offense. He argues that the
differences between the two novels lie in the seriousness of the
protagonists' offenses:
Le sujet de Carmen est a peu pres celui de Manon
Lescaut. Ainsi que le chevalier des Grieux, don Jose a été
ensorcelé par deux beaux yeux. Seulement, au lieu d'une
lorette affolée de plaisir, son demon est une Bohémienne
qui vole, qui assassine [...] Aussi don José n'est pas
quitte, comme 1e pauvre petit chevalier, pour quelques
friponneries au jeu et autres peccadilles; par amour et
par imitation de sa belle, il est entrainé au vol et a
l'assassinat. (qtd. by Gilroy 103)

In the Causeries du lundi, Sainte-Beuve, too, characterizes the
novel as Mérimée's response to Manon Lescaut. «Cette Carmen n'est
autre chose qu'une Manon Lescaut d'un plus haut gout, qui débauche
son chevalier des Grieux, également seduit et faible, bien que d'une
toute autre trempe»" (qtd. by Gilroy 103). Later, comparing the two
works in Mes Poisons, Sainte-Beuve notes that a principal difference
is the change in setting: "Je viens de lire Carmen de Mérimée; c'est
bien, mais c'est sec, dur, sans développement; c'est une Manon

Lescaut plus poivrée et a l'espagnole" (qtd. by Gilroy 103).25

 

25 Readers interested in a review of the similarities of structure, theme
and characters between Manon Lescaut and its variants are referred to James

51

Carmen, like Manon Lescaut and Leone Leoni, is a first-person
account told to a frame narrator, a credible and respectable witness
who directs our reaction to the narrator's tale. All of these variants
borrow Manon Lescaut's narrative structure. Each is a first-person
account of a disastrous, life-consuming passion told to a sympathetic
third party. Except for the frame narrator's comments, everything is
seen from the principal narrator's point of view. Each is a
confessional tale, a genre particularly popular during the Romantic
period. Juliette, Romuald and Don Jose, characters patterned after
Des Grieux, know their behavior is scandalous and want to believe
themselves victims of an irresistible force. As James Gilroy points
out in his discussion of Leone Leoni and Carmen, protagonists "led to
ruin by [their] uncontrollable passionate love for an enigmatic figure
who is, for the most part, unworthy of the love he or she inspires”
(101) pursue "an unattainable happiness, an impossible ideal, and all
are defeated in their attempts to resist the pressure of the external
social standards which they defy” (102).

Tormented by his or her inability to resist the fatal allure of
the enigmatic and elusive figure of Manon, metamorphosed into
Leone Leoni, Clarimonde and Carmen, each narrator seeks to justify,
or at least understand and explain, his or her behavior. To do so,
they wrestle with the nature of love and passion, that seductive
irresistible force capable of leading otherwise honorable souls to

ruin. Across time, Sand, Gautier and Mérimée dialogue with Prévost

 

Gilroy's The Romantic Manon and Des Grieux: pages 111-117 for Leone Leoni,
pages 102-111 for Carmen, and pages 95-97 and 118-120 for La Dame aux
camélias.

52

and with one another in an attempt to characterize passion and to
understand the nature of this force which leads people to irrational,
degrading, destructive, and even violent behavior that is so often at

odds with what they believe their natural temperament to be.

Sand tends to create idealized, larger-than-life characters. Her
protagbnists usually embody a particular sentiment, such as love.
"As Manon had represented an incarnation of Prévost's ideal of
femininity, so does Leoni represent Sand's ideal man. He is a fatal
man, just as Manon is a fatal woman" (Gilroy 112). A handsome,
charming young Italian noble, this enigmatic Byronic seducer is truly
an homme fatal. At least two women, the Princesse Zagarolo and the
young sister of a courtesan Leone loves, die because of their
involvement with him. Others are led to financial ruin.

His ever suffering faithful lover is Juliette Ruyter, daughter of a
rich Belgian jeweler. She recounts her life to don Aleo Bustamente, a
Spanish aristocrat who wants to marry her. In Manon Lescaut and
the other variants, a male narrator recounts his adventures to a
second male. Sand does not depict the same kind of female collusion,
and by telling her story, Juliette, unlike Des Grieux, does not seek

reintegration into the society from which she came.26 She may want

 

25 Riggs, in fact, argues that she rejects the social order. In ”Class,
Gender and Performance in George Sand's Leone Leoni," he reads the novella
as a feminist statement that challenges bourgeois morality and social
discourse. "Though exhausted and tempted by the security of a respectable
man's name and protection, [Juliette] will embrace the 'Wild Other' and the
otherness in her self. Violation of the code performance that baffles
expectations reveals the code's arbitrariness and the possibility of altering it"
(51). ”The George Sand of Leone Leone is the Sand of Elle et lui and of Spiridon,
which is a critique of Catholicism against a background of utopian socialism"
(57).

53

 

 

 

to purge herself of memories of Leone, but she does not seek self-
vindication. Juliette is a passive heroine resigned to her fate.

Juliette's parents favor their daughter's marriage to the
aristocratic Leone. Nonetheless, the protagonists run off together
without the benefit of marriage. In the process, Leone absconds with
the family's fortune in jewels. The scandal leads to the early death
of Juliette's parents. Similarly, in Prévost's novel, Des Grieux's
scandalous escapades are partly responsible for the death of his
father (his only living parent).

A young innocent when she meets Leone, Juliette, again like
Des Grieux, possesses a naturally calm and sweet disposition, but
Leone soon awakens her to a previously undiscovered self They
spend their happiest moments in an idyllic pastoral retreat in
Switzerland reminiscent of the New World and Des Grieux's dream of
sharing a pastoral paradise with Manon. Juliette becomes a different
person: "Que ce fut l'ouvrage de Dieu, celui de Leoni ou celui de
l'amour, une ame forte se développa et s'épanouit dans mon faible
corps. Chaque jour je sentis un monde de pensees nouvelles se
révéler a moi" (25).

Ambiguity, however, casts an ominous shadow over Leone's
motives and feelings for Juliette. For example, we are never sure
whether Leone spends six poetic months with Juliette in their
romantic rural retreat mainly because he loves her or because he is
eager to avoid discovery after the jewelry heist. Initially she is blind

to his duplicity, but even after she realizes that Leone is a thief and a

54

cardsharp who may be involved in even more sinister plots, she
continues to be as blindly devoted to him as Des Grieux is to Manon.

To appease Leone, she involves herself in his increasingly
treacherous schemes for raising money and gradually debases
herself both morally and socially. In an episode that calls to mind
Des Grieux's posing as Manon's brother at M. de G... M...'s, Juliette
even agrees to pose as Leone's sister and move in with him and his
rich mistress in order to dupe Princess Zagarolo. Not surprisingly,
this exploit lands the protagonists in jail. Juliette experiences
occasional shame and remorse, but no matter how low she has sunk,
her ”coeur battait comme au premier jour de [s]a passion" (55-56)
the moment she sees the object of her affections.

Juliette's love is exceptional, and her beloved is an exceptional
character. Leone is ”[slupérieur aux autres hommes dans le mal et
dans le bien" (25). Always in need of money to support his addiction
to gambling and his affinity for the excitement of a lavish lifestyle,
Leone consciously and purposefully charms, deceives and
manipulates everyone he meets. Manon, on the other hand, is
rather naturally beguiling and never does serious harm to anyone
but herself. Though Des Grieux ruins himself for her, it is not at her
instigation.

By Juliette's account, Leone exhibits a mind-boggling bipolarity.
His ”ame est bien laide et bien belle, bien vile et bien grande; quand
on n'a pas la force de hair cet homme, il faut l'aimer et devenir sa
proie" (43). His soul was "recue du ciel et de l'enfer réunis" (62).
Capable of sublime tenderness and violent cruelty, his feelings for

Juliette are even more ambiguous than Manon's for Des Grieux.

55

Much more dangerous than Manon, he is an insidious character deft
at manipulation. Admitting that his behavior is vile, he argues that
Juliette is nonetheless better off with him than with a man "de
moeurs régulieres et de conscience delicate" because such a man
would take Juliette's goodness for granted. ”Avec cet homme-la,” he
tells her, "tu ne serais qu'une honnéte femme; avec un homme tel
que moi tu es une femme sublime, et la dette de reconnaissance qui
s'amasse dans mon coeur est immense comme tes souffrances et tes
sacrifices” (102). Contrary to his argument, however, his behavior
manifests little appreciation for Juliette‘s sacrifices. The more she
suffers, the more he abuses her, and Leone never undergoes the
conversion that transforms Manon in the New World. In comparison
to the homme fatal, the femme fatale, a myth fired by men's
imagination, appears much less menacing.

In Sand's novella, some roles remain gender bound. Both
Leone and Bustamente, as well as some of the minor male players,
display the violence seen in Des Grieux. Male proclivity for violence
is one of the reasons that the homme fatal is so much more menacing
than the femme fatale. His violence poses a threat not just to the
object of his affections but also to the men and women snared in his
web of intrigue. Redemption, on the other hand, still depends upon a
woman's selfless devotion and suffering. Leone tells Juliette that her
love has redeemed him: "Je n'avais eu qu'une periode vraiment
belle, vraiment pure, celle or) je t'ai possédée et adorée. Cela m'avait
lave de toutes mes iniquités" (62-63). Later, believing that Juliette is
near death, he confesses that she is dying "saintement et chastement

comme une victime expiatoire entre le ciel et moi" (95. Juliette asks

56

God to "accepter [s]es souffrances en expiation de [sles fautes" (79).
To a large extent then, in Leone Leoni Sand has accepted traditional
gender-based roles.

Passion, pride, passivity and fantasy seem to govern Juliette's
choices. She believes what she wants to believe. Like Des Grieux's
story, her account is couched in self-reflective expressions such as ”je
me flattais d'ailleurs que..." (57), ”je ne voulais pas comprendre...”
(62), and "j'aimais encore a me persuader ..." (78). In other words
she seems to suspect that perception alters reality. She lives her life
as a fiction.

Part of Juliette’s fascination with Leone stems from her vision
of him as a fatal man. Leone exploits her ”disposition romanesque"
(42). Prefiguring heroines such as Emma Bovary, Juliette is
influenced by the literature she has read.

[Ma mere] vit a peine le titre des ouvrages qui allaient
bouleverser ma téte et mon coeur. C'étaient de beaux et
de chastes livres, presque tous ecrits par des femmes sur
des histoires de femmes.... Ces récits touchants et
passionnés, ces apercus d'un monde ideal pour moi
eleverent mon ame, mais ils la dévorerent. Je devins
romanesque.... (25)

With her fantasies already inflamed by novels she has read,
she imagines Leone and herself as tragic Romantic figures. The fact
that he has a terrible deep dark secret makes Leone even more
attractive to Juliette and stimulates her rescue fantasy.

J'imaginai mille infortunes romanesques. C'était alors la

mode en littérature de faire agir et parler des

57

personnages frappés des malédictions les plus étranges et
les plus invraisemblables. Les theatres et les romans ne
produisaient plus que des fils de bourreaux, des espions
héro‘iques, et des forcats vertueux. [...] Je trouvai un
attrait de plus dans ce mystere impenetrable, et mon
ame de femme s'exalta devant l'occasion de risquer sa
destinee entiere pour soulager une belle et poétique
infortune. (42)
Urging her to flee with him, Leone appeals to Juliette's self-image as
a Romantic heroine: "Es-tu la femme que j'ai révée et que j'ai cru
trouver en toi? Es-tu capable d'héro'r‘sme? Comprends-tu les
grandes choses, les immenses dévouements? [...] Sens-tu ce qu'il y a
de beau, de sublime, a se sacrifier pour ce qu'on aime?" (32). It is a
self-serving manipulative argument that apparently convinces
Juliette. She seems powerless to resist and blindly follows Leone to
ruin.

In Manon Lescaut, Tiberge opposes divine love to human love
and tries to persuade Des Grieux that it is inexcusable to pursue an
attachment that he knows will lead to guilt, misery and crime. Des
Grieux counters that pursuing an unhappy passion is no less rational
than the behavior of mystics who pursue delights of the soul at the
expense of torments to the body. Human love at least promises
earthly joys. There is no worse method of discouraging a heart from
loving than to promise a Heavenly reward of greater happiness
through the exercise of virtue because the only happiness we know
is one which gives us pleasure. Arguing that human love and earme

happiness are the highest values, Des Grieux's declares that ”les

58

délices de l'amour sont ici-bas nos plus parfaites félicités" (93).

In Leone Leoni, Juliette's aunt Agathe is the voice of reason,
but she engages in no moralizing. If the novel takes any position on
love, it would seem to be that love is everything. Having awoken
Juliette to a passionate love she had not known existed, Leone asks
her: "Crois-tu qu'il y ait autre chose dans la vie que l'amour?" (103).
Juliette's complete surrender to the will of Leone and her gradual
self-abasement indicate tacit agreement with his argument that love
is as close to paradise as we get. Exalting love rather than any notion
of virtue or morality, Leone suggests that there is no conflict
between a heavenly and earthly paradise. With whomever we find
love, we should enjoy it as a gift from God.

quand Dieu nous l'accorde sur la terre, ce sentiment
profond, violent, ineffable, iI ne faut plus désirer ni
espérer le paradis; car 1e paradis, c'est la fusion de deux
ames dans un baiser d'amour. Et qu'importe, quand nous
l'avons trouvé ici-bas, que ce soit dans les bras d'un saint
ou d'un damné? (103)

Leone Leoni, like Manon Lescaut, "La Morte amoureuse," and
Carmen, attributes the narrator's life-consuming passion for an
ignoble character to forces beyond the narrator's control. An
exploration of the nature of that force is central to all four works and
to the intertextual dialogue among them. Literature had traditionally
cited love potions as the source of seduction. The best known
example is the philtre responsible for Tristan and Iseut's tragedy.
Manon Lescaut develops the tension between fate and free choice.

Arguing that he is the victim of a cruel destiny, Des Grieux likes to

59

cast himself in the role of a tragic classical hero. Renoncour (4) and
Tiberge (90), on the other hand, claim that he chooses to rush
headlong into misfortune and disgrace.

Juliette's narrative talks about destiny, but the novel tends to
characterize this irresistible force as a "puissance" or "force
magnétique" (78, 111, and 127) and suggests the possibility of
supernatural forces. From the opening scene, the story has Gothic
overtones. ”Quelques bougies éparses sur les tables et la lueur du
foyer éclairaient faiblement cette piece immense, et l'oscillation de la
flamme semblait faire mouvoir les divinités allégoriques peintes a
fresque sur le plafond" (3).

"[U]n affreux secret, un mystere épouvantable" (31) hangs over
Leone's head. When she sees Leone dig up the little safe in the
middle of the night in a remote region, fantastic stories come to mind
and she thinks it is a cadaver (45). Later she imagines the safe
”destiné a nous accompagner comme un talisman de salut ou comme
un instrument de mort" (46).

An eerie sense of death is in the air. Juliette is ”pale comme la
mort" (8), and her hand is ”froide comme la mort" (29). Her tale
mixes a sense of terror, confusion, illusion and foreboding. Juliette
recalls: "La terreur que Leoni ne pouvait plus dissimuler acheva de
brouiller toutes mes idées; une peur superstitieuse s'empara de moi,
mon sang se glaca comme dans le cauchemar" (30). Later she is
found lying on the floor "roide et glacée comme par la mort" (61).
Leone becomes "pale comme la mort et sembla frappé de l'apparition
d'un spectre" (75). Elsewhere she reports, ”Un froid mortel glacait

mes membres" (86). The foreboding is intensified by fever and the

60

fear of madness. Juliette recalls, "Une fievre lente me consumait.
L'émotion de la priere et l'air de l'eglise m'avaient baignée d'une
sueur froide; je ressemblais a un spectre sorti du pave sépulcral"
(79). The unearthing of the Princess's corpse adds another touch of
the macabre and prefigures scenes we will see in "La Morte
amoureuse" and La Dame aux camélias.

Leone is twice resurrected. Ruined and confined to a mental
hospital, he mysteriously emerges, seemingly cured, and rebuilds his
fortune--though no one knows how. Henryet thinks he has killed
Leone, but in fact he has mistakenly killed the wrong man, so once
again Leone is given a new lease on life. Talk of Satan (112), demons
(62), magic (27), and diabolic toasts (63) is ominous. Leone is
dressed in green, the color of the devil (126) and he is described as
"ce demon incarné” (134).

Manon Lescaut also suggests the presence of the supernatural.
Prévost's narrator never offers any concrete description of Manon.

She has a certain arr and ”figure.” She is an apparition
surprenante" (44). She lacks a material being. She is a goddess,
"l'Amour meme” (44), a mythical being. The main thing we know
about Manon is "la facon dont elle hante la mémoire du chevalier, et
la facon dont il tente de la ressusciter. [...]. Manon est a la fois un
«fantdme» ou un «spectre», c'est-a-dire une creation de l'imagination
..., mais aussi une «apparition», autrement dit une recreation par la
foi ou la poesie" (Sgard 90). Sand expands on this sense of the unreal
with its suggestion of the unclear distinction between the real and

the imagined that is found in Prévost's novel. Gautier takes it a step

further with a fantastic retelling of Des Grieux's tragic love for his

61

phantom mistress filtered through the images that permeate Sand's
rewriting of Manon Lescaut: images of illusion, addiction, fever,

madness, magic, demonic powers, and death.

”La Morte amoureuse,” is the story of an old priest, Romuald,
who recounts the double life he led as a young priest. At the
moment of his ordination, ”le regard de la belle inconnue" (122)
awakens his latent sexuality. In both ”La Morte amoureuse" and
Manon Lescaut, the narrator recovers some peace of mind in
religious life after the initial coup de foudre, only to be once again
confronted by the seductive young beauty. Subsequently, the
sacrifices demanded of a priest provoke an inner battle in which
Romuald feels torn between religious expectations and his repressed
sexual impulses. He begins to live a double existence. One is his
lived experience, the other, it seems, his dream life. During the day
he is a poor country priest, and at night a rich libertine, the lover of
Clarimonde, a courtesan of rare beauty. At age 66, memories of
Clarimonde continue to burn just below the surface, waiting to burst
into flame at any moment, and Romuald still responds with flustered
confusion: ”[J']ose a peine remuer la cendre de ce souvenir" (117).
"[Jle ne sais encore si c'est une realité ou une illusion" (128).

The fantastic rests upon this ambiguity which is characterized
by an eruption, or more precisely, the hero's perception of an
eruption of something inexplicable or inadmissible in real life. In ”La
Morte amoureuse,” the young priest suddenly finds himself in the
presence of the mysterious Clarimonde, ”un ange ou un demon, et

peut-étre tous les deux" (120). He feels divided between the ”real”

62

world of his daytime life as a pastor of the Lord and the fantastic
world of his night life as a young Italian lord. "Tantot [il se croyait]
un prétre qui révait chaque soir qu'il était gentilhomme, tantot un
gentilhomme qui révait qu'il était prétre" (143). Seeking to
understand this strange phenomenon, he hesitates between rational
and supernatural explanations. The fantastic effect is created by this
hesitation, a hesitation that becomes one of the themes of the story,
the problem of representation.

Manon, Leone Leoni and Clarimonde are absent. Des Grieux's,
Juliette's and Romuald's narratives fill that void, but strategies of
representation pose a problem. How do you represent something
that does not exist and perhaps never existed except in one's
fantasy? The narrator's discourse permits us to conceive of what is
absent, and the supernatural is always absent.

Gautier's heroine is a vampire, a supernatural being. Once a
famous courtesan adored by all, Clarimonde becomes a faithful lover
like the heroine depicted at the end of Manon Lescaut. According to
Romuald, she is as solicitous of him as Manon is of Des Grieux in the
New World. By Romuald's account, although Clarimonde is near
death and needs his blood to sustain her life, she fears wearing him
out by taking too much blood from his arm. "[E]lle [lui] entoura avec
soin le bras d'une petite bandelette apres avoir frotté la plaie d'un
onguent qui la cicatrisa sur—le-champ" (147). His description is
reminiscent of Des Grieux's depiction of Manon shortly before her
death. They have fled into the arid countryside, and Manon is
exhausted. Yet ”son premier soin fut de changer 1e linge de [s]a

blessure, qu'elle avait pansee elle-meme avant [leur] depart” (198).

63

1(—

Gautier was not the first to envision a resurrected heroine. In
the anonymously authored Suite de l'Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux
et de Manon Lescaut, Manon was not really dead when Des Grieux
buried her. The work was first published in 1762, then modified and
republished in 1847 and again in 1851.27 The verse from Horace
that accompanies the illustration at the beginning of the 1753 edition
of Manon Lescaut may have suggested the vampire motif to Gautier.
The illustration depicts a scene from Fénelon's Télémaque in which
Pallas, in the guise of Mentor, is leading Télémaque towards virtue
while Eucharis is reaching out for him and little Cupids are trying to
restrain him. Deloffre translates and explains the verse from Odes
1.27: ”«Quels tourments n'endures-tu pas dans Charybde, jeune
homme digne d'un plus noble amour!» Des 1e XVIe siecle, tous les
glossateurs voient dans ce Charybde la courtisane avide qui suce le
sang et l'or de ses amants" (9). Since fear of "la courtisane avide”
was widespread in the nineteenth century, it is not surprising to see

Manon represented as a vampire.28 For the healthy, a fascination

 

27 Feeling betrayed and believing Des Grieux tried to bury her in order
to get rid of her, Manon returns to France and is making her vows as a nun
when Des Grieux and Tiberge happen to enter the same church and the lovers
are reunited. Regarding themselves as superior beings due to their extreme
sensitivity, Manon and Des Grieux decide they can marry despite the class
differences that separate them. In the eighteenth century continuation, they
live happily ever after. In the nineteenth-century continuation, though they
remain loving and faithful, domestic tranquillity bores them. Manon and
Tiberge fall in love. To keep their virtue intact, Tiberge retires to a monastery
and Manon enters a convent where she can channel her forbidden love into
love of God.

28 On pages 154-157 of his chapter on Baudelaire in The Crisis of French
Symbolism, Laurence M. Porter discusses the poet's use of the word ”vampire"
to designate the desired woman (156) and his expression of what
psychoanalysts term ”the draining fantasy." This primordial fear arises from
”the unconscious belief that one's vital essence will be drawn out through the
penis during orgasm and lost. In the form of the fantasy which usually

64

with disease and death can enhance the allure of youth and beauty.
Gautier's "dalliance with death and the supernatural in La Morte
amoureuse reflects such perverse sensuality and carries
premonitions of the decadence at the end of the century” (John 11).
For many writers, of course, Manon, though of another age, came to
suggest the decadence of late nineteenth-century France.

Gautier was one of the first to imagine a female vampire,29 but
his Clarimonde is more innocent than most goules fatales. Vampires
were originally men, the "«homme fatal», paria romantique a la
Byron" (Dottin-Orsini 275-76). In the second half of the nineteenth
century, vampires changed gender. ”La Morte amoureuse" is a
forerunner to that transformation. With social life eroticized after
mid-century and sexual relationships more commercialized in the
industrialized society, the courtesan was more often viewed as a
figure who exploited men than as a figure exploited by men. Even in
his 1836 study of prostitution, Parent-Duchfitelet warned that
prostitutes could destroy one's health as well as one's fortune
because desire can lead to disease and death as a result of infection
(Hutcheon 42). Vampirism became ”une des modalités de la femme
fatale” (Dottin-Orsini 274). For a man, the term vampire, when
applied to a woman, ”peut designer toute femme réelle, si on la
considere comme dangereuse pour sa santé, sa fortune, son

intelligence, son honneur, son ame" (277). At the same time, the

 

reaches consciousness, the secondary defense of symbolic displacement
substitutes for sperm the blood or vital organs reduced to a fluid" (154).

29 Charles Nodier's Smarra, 1821, is an earlier work featuring a female
vampire.

65

prospect of ruin is the courtesan's most potent fascination ((Hughes-
Hallett 98).

In the scene at Saint-Sulpice, Des Grieux tells Manon, "Je vais
perdre ma fortune et ma reputation pour toi" (46). Tiberge warns
him that his soul is in danger and threatens him with "des
chatiments du Ciel" (65). No fortune is at stake in Romuald's
relationship with the wealthy Clarimonde. The country priest's
health, honor and soul, however, are jeopardized. Clarimonde drives
Romuald to a sleeplessness and inner turmoil that nearly cause him
"la perte de [s]on ame" (117).

Given nineteenth-century fascination with the macabre, the
interest in the functioning of the human mind, especially the
unconscious, and the obsessive fear of women, Prévost's novel invites
a fantastic retelling. Its bipolar heroine and its tension between
fantasy and reality, elements already developed in Leone Leoni,
provide the basic ingredients. Des Grieux describes Manon as ”un
monstre" (69) and an "ingrate et dure maitresse" (74), as well as a
"charmante maitresse" (86) who has "une douceur angélique" (102).
His rhetoric, like Juliette's, is not firmly grounded in reality.
Expressions such as ”je crus apercevoir" (29), "je voulais le considérer
une illusion” (28), "je veux le croire" (69), and ”j'ai eté toujours
persuade” (110) suggest a fantasy world of his own creation.30

Hyperbole also leads to the supernatural. To say one has

suffered or loved like no one else suggests an out of this world--or

 

30 Des Grieux's rhetoric and the tension between fantasy and reality are
topics that will be developed in chapter five. At this point, I simply wish to
suggest that the basic elements of a fantastic tale can be found in Manon
Lescaut.

66

supernatural--experience (Todorov 82). Manon swears to Des Grieux,
"[S']il n'y eut jamais d'amour tel que le votre, il est impossible aussi
d'etre aime plus tendrement vous l'etes" (187). Romuald, too, claims
to have lived an exceptional love: "[J']ai aime comme personne au
monde n'a aimé" (118).

Des Grieux's tale, like Romuald's, focuses on the heroine's
irresistible charms, and both narrators portray themselves as
helpless victims of forces beyond their control. Des Grieux admits:
"C'est mon devoir d'agir comme je raisonne! mais l'action est-elle en
mon pouvoir?” (93). Romuald describes himself as "la victime” (118)
of a ”fascination inexplicable" (118). "Vietime" is a key word.
Borrowing traits from Juliette, he is a typical fantastic hero. Passive
and unpowerful, he is subject to events beyond his control. He is
swept along by a mysterious force that leaves him confused and
incapable of resisting.

When they meet the femme fatale who nearly destroys them,
both Des Grieux and Romuald are inexperienced young men who
seem well suited for the priesthood--Romuald by temperament and
vocation, Des Grieux by temperament and an inclination toward
study. Clarimonde is a sensual being who offers beauty, youth and
love, those very qualities that endear Manon to critics. Clarimonde's
eyes seem to say, "[Jle suis la beauté, je suis la jeunesse, je suis la vie;
viens a moi, nous serons l'amour" (127). Consequently, Romuald and
Des Grieux experience a conflict between human love and divine
love. Divine love, however, poorly equips them for resisting the
flood of emotions that accompany sexual awakening. Des Grieux

declares, "Mon coeur s'ouvrit a mille sentiments de plaisir dont je

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n'avais jamais eu l'idée" (21), and he "se croit transporté dans un
nouvel ordre de choses" (45). A flood of sensations brings with it a
new world view. Describing his experience in the imperfect,
Romuald relives the moment when he ”sentai[t] s'ouvrit dans [lui]
des portes qui jusqu'alors avaient été fermées [i1] venailt] de naitre
a un nouvel ordre d'idées" (121). His experience unleashes the
previously unknown "other” that was already within him. For
Romuald, the battle is not against an outside force; it is with himself.
The bizarre events, the fantastic elements of Romuald's
account, are what Freud would later attribute to the '"return of the
repressed,’ to the reappearance, in disguised form, of an event or
fantasy an individual has unknowingly removed from consciousness
because of its disturbing nature” (Rashkin 801). Both Romuald and
Des Grieux are troubled by the explosion of their latent sexuality.
Priests are expected to be asexual, and Romuald transgresses the
priest's vow of celibacy. He recognizes that the priesthood asks him
to kill a part of himself: "J'avais scellé moi-meme la pierre de mon
tombeau" (125). Both narrators feel uneasy about their repressed
passion. Burning beneath the surface, it could easily be re-ignited.
”La Morte amoureuse” evokes a sense of delving into repressed
feelings and memories. One manifestation is the anterior language,
closer to nature and the sensation of the moment, that frequently
erupts. ”Oh! Quelles nuits! Quelles nuits!" exclaims Romuald. Des
Grieux's tale is similarly filled with sighs and exclamations.
Involuntary responses also spring from the unconscious. Romuald is
not able to enjoy his accomplishments as a priest because ”les paroles

de Clarimonde [lui reviennent] souvent sur les levres comme une

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espece de refrain involontaire" (130). The haunting "visions” of his
life with Clarimonde are ”involontaires" (147). Des Grieux is also
subject to "un mouvement involontaire” (37), and the novel offers no
clear answer to the question of whether or not he ”se précipitle]
volontairement dans les dernieres infortunes" (4, emphasis added).

Near death, Manon regrets the pain she has caused Des Grieux
and swears her love, admiration and gratitude. He is so
overwhelmed that he "cru[t] sentir une espece de division dans [s]on
fime" (188). Gautier develops that idea. The once great courtesan,
Clarimonde, becomes Romuald's loving and faithful mistress. As a
result of their relationship, his "nature s'est en quelque sorte
dédoublée et il y eut en [lui] deux hommes” (143). "La Morte
amoureuse” is Manon Lescaut turned inwards. Rather than create a
schism between himself and society, as Des Grieux does, Romuald
experiences an inner schism. He remains within the social order, but
in trying to deny his sexuality, he turns against himself. Clarimonde
must die in order for him to reintegrate his own personality, just as
Manon must die in order for Des Grieux to be reintegrated back into
aristocratic society.

Des Grieux's love provokes violent reactions he is unable to
reconcile with his gentle self-image. That is, passion transforms him
into a man he is reluctant to acknowledge being. Romuald too is
baffled by and tired of his dual existence. In a scene that will be
developed in La Dame aux camélias, the abbé Sérapion, something of
a counterpart to Tiberge, suggests that they dig up Clarimonde, the
succubus, so that Romuald will no longer be tempted to ”perdre [son]

ame pour un cadavre immonde dévoré des vers.” ”Voulant savoir,

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une fois pour toutes, qui du prétre ou du gentilhomme était dupe
d‘une illusion" (148), Romuald agrees. After uncovering Clarimonde's
corpse, Sérapion sprinkles holy water on her and draws a cross on
her coffin. Without Romuald's love, Clarimonde will die because she
will no longer be able to drink his blood, and the sight of her
disgusting ”cadavre immonde devoré des vers" transforms the
priest's love into repulsion. A vision of Clarimonde had awoken love,
and now it kills love. Clarimonde's "beau corps tomba en poussiére,"
and "le seigneur Romuald, amant de Clarimonde, se separa du pauvre
prétre" (148).

This scene develops the macabre aspect of Manon Lescaut.
When Manon dies, Des Grieux remains ”plus de vingt-quatre heures
la bouche attachee sur le visage et sur les mains de [s]a chere Manon"
(200). When Romuald is first summoned to Clarimonde's death bed,
he finds that death makes her even more appealing. She has "une
puissance de seduction inexprimable,” and he can not resist the
"triste et supreme douceur de deposer un baiser sur [ses] levres
mortes” (134). In both works, dead women have erotic appeal.

During his ordination ceremony, Clarimonde gives him une
oeillade pleine de divines promesses" (122), but in truth Romuald is
the one making a sacred promise. He often describes Clarimonde in
an attitude of prayer, "les mains jointes sur la poitrine" (132), but, in
fact, it is the priest, not the courtesan/vampire who is praying.
According to the priest, it is always Clarimonde who speaks of love.
It is she, the courtesan, who insists that their love is something pure
and unique. She is a projection of his own desire. She says "je

t'aime,” ”nous sommes fiances” (135), but in truth, Romuald is the

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a/_.

one who loves her and who imagines himself a young husband. He
dreams of her, and yet he claims that she tells him, ”Tu étais mon
réve" (141). The line between reality and fantasy remains blurred.
The fantastic underscores the role of perception in creating one's
personal reality.

If we accept the Freudian notion that art makes public
repressed fears and fantasies, albeit in a disguised form, the
transposition of Des Grieux's narrative into a fantastic tale is not
surprising. It is a tale that exploits men's attraction to and fear of
the figure of Manon. As a vampire, Clarimonde is both human and
superhuman, living and dead; she is a figure that both fascinates and
repulses. She is at once more frightening and less real than Manon.
While relegating her to the supernatural world renders her more
horrifying, it is also distances her, contains her and bars her entry
into the real world. Romuald's narrative reveals a troubling potential
in man himself, a force that both the individual and the society try to
repress, but as Romuald recognizes, man pays a heavy price: "La paix

de mon ame a eté bien cherement achetée" (150).

Before transforming Manon into a tender, loving angel in the
New World, Des Grieux frequently describes her as "charmante” (79,
86, 126, 157, etc.). His use of the word ”charme" should be
understood in its archaic sense of bewitchment. After their first
meeting, Manon is quite satisfied with the effect of her ”charmes"
(22). When she re-seduces Des Grieux at Saint-Sulpice, he notes that
she is "plus charmante que jamais" (45). Betraying him with the

young G... M..., she still has a ”fonds inépuisable de charmes" (135).

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In his Manuel lexique, Prévost defines "charmez" "Ce mot
signifie, dans le propre, un enchantement ou l'effet d'un pouvoir qui
surpasse celui de la nature... [O]n l'applique a tout ce qui est capable
d'attacher fortement le coeur ou l'esprit."31 Learning that Manon
betrayed him with Monsieur B..., Des Grieux is sure that B... did not
win her heart. Rather he must have used violence or "l'a séduite par
un charme ou par un poison" (35).32 When analyzing Prévost's use of
”charme,” "[i]l faut entendre a sa source étymologique, l'incantation
magique: carmen, la formule que savaient prononcer les sorcieres,
pour capturer les coeurs, ou pour faire danser la lune dans les
clairieres nocturnes" (Starobinski, ”L'Unique objet" 50). Quite
appropriately then, when Mérimée reincarnates Manon in the figure
of an exotic and seductive young Gypsy who mixes up strange
potions and casts spells, he names her Carmen.

She is described as "une sorciere, [...] une servante du diable”
(196), "un demon” (239), and "cette diable de fille-la" (210). She is
busy with ”3a magie" (238). When she argues with Don Jose, "[s]on
oeil s'injectait de sang et devenait terrible" (199). She has ”un
sourire diabolique" (230). Even Carmen tells Don Jose, "Tu as

rencontré le diable, oui, le diable; il n'est pas toujours noir" (216).

 

31 Quoted on page 322 of glossary appended to Manon Lescaut.

32 ”Charme" was linked to ”poison" in Phédre (1.3): "Quel charme ou quel
poison en a tari la source?" This intertextual allusion lends a sense of classical
tragedy to Des Grieux's narrative (35nl). Defining the traditional ”philtre" in
his Manuel lexique, Prévost again uses the word "charme.” It comes from a
Greek word meaning to love. "[L]es seuls philtres qu'on puisse reconnaitre
sont les influences immédiates d'un sexe sur l'autre, soit par le seul instinct de
la nature, qui les porte l'un vers l'autre, soit par les charmes de la beauté, de
l'esprit, et des autres qualités qui agissent tout a la fois sur les sens et sur
l'imagination" (qtd. in glossary, 323).

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Yet when Don Jose is wounded, she becomes an angel of mercy,
as do Manon and Clarimonde, and her love is as exceptional as theirs.
”[Ellle me soigna avec une adresse et avec des attentions que jamais
femme n'a eues pour l'homme le plus aimé" (234). Each of our male
authors harbors fantasies about being cared for by a beautiful,
tender, loving woman, the elusive mother and lover, Madonna and
Magdalen melded into one. For Des Grieux, Romuald and Don Jose,
the figure of Manon represents both the force that attracts him and
the force against which he needs protection. She is both the object of
desire, comforting, and maternal, the one who heals all wounds, and
she is the devouring abyss that saps men's vitality and destroys
them.

Don Jose is a "figure a la fois noble et farouche" that reminds
the archaeologist/frame narrator of "le Satan de Milton" (188)--in
other words, he is a fallen angel. Yet, he claims, sounding like Des
Grieux, "[I]l y a encore en moi quelque chose qui mérite la pitie d'un
galant homme” (191-92). Casting himself as a sensitive man, he has
to stop a moment in order to "maitriser son emotion” (202). He cries
"larmes chaudes" (218) more than once. Like Des Grieux and
Romuald, he was once destined for the priesthood. "On voulait [qu'il]
fusse d'Eglise" (203). He imagines himself to be a great romantic
hero riding across the countryside with Carmen mounted behind him.
Sensitive though he may be, his self-image is nonetheless fantasized.
He is a violent man with a history of violence before meeting
Carmen. His relationship with her is violent from the beginning. The
first time the archaeologist sees them together they quarrel

violently. As his frustration mounts, Don Jose begins beating her.

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When she wants to leave him, he begs her to seek a better life
with him in the New World. She refuses. He gives her time to flee,
asks a priest to pray for her soul, begs her to save herself--and him-
-or to let him save her (237-39). Like Romuald, Don Jose is
confronted with a strong female character, a surrogate of the devil.
She will not yield: "Je te suis a la mort, oui, mais je ne vivrai plus
avec toi. [...] Est-ce ici? [...] Tu veux me tuer, je le vois bien...; c'est
eerit, mais tu ne me feras pas ceder. [...] Carmen sera toujours libre"
(238-39). Her defiant resistance is a direct assault on Don Jose's
masculinity, on his social mastery, and by extension, on male pride.
"J'aurais voulu qu'elle efit peur et me demandat grace, mais cette
femme était un demon” (239). Appealing for sympathy, Don Jose
reminds the frame narrator that he offered Carmen everything:
”tout, monsieur, tout; je lui offris tout" (239). She remains
unyielding, and so, he seems to suggest, he has no choice but to kill
her.

To restore the social order, the ”victims" of temptation must
expose and purge temptation, the source of destabilizing desire, from
society. However, in Opera: Desire, Disease, Death, Linda and Michael
Hutcheon remind us that although in Don Jose's mind, ”his passion,
his jealousy, his desire are not to blame: she is” (186), this is violence
against women. ”Despite what the critics say, there is nothing
'universal' or eternal about this view of woman as devil, any more
than there is about smoking as sexy: both are constructions of a
certain culture” (187). So, too, the representation of passion as a
violent emotion, a theme underlying Manon Lescaut and each of the

variants but depicted most openly in Carmen, is a cultural construct.

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After Don José kills Carmen, her "grand oeil noir" continues to
stare at him. She will not release her grasp. Her unbridled eroticism
has drained the life from both of them. In another scene borrowed
from Prévost's novel, Don Jose remains "anéanti une bonne heure
devant ce cadavre" (240), before burying Carmen in a grave he has
dug by hand with just the help of his knife.

In Leone Leoni, Juliette cites an overly indulgent and decadent
tutor as the cause of Leone's weaknesses. Bustamente, the frame
narrator, cites lax parenting as the source of Juliette's problems. Don
Jose takes it a step farther, blaming not just a given set of parents for
Carmen's waywardness. but rather a whole society: ”Ce sont les Cales
qui sont coupables pour l'avoir elevee ainsi” (240). The frame
narrator is also interested in the sociological implications of Don
Jose's story.

In contrast to Renoncour and Bustamente, he expresses a much
more ambivalent attitude toward his protagonists. At the end of Don
Jose's story, he appends a final chapter33 in which he outlines his
"études sur le rommani" (247), a description of Gypsies' language and
customs. His observations about Gypsies represent a crude and
rudimentary effort to observe a society and provide a scientific
study, along with a limited critique, of that social environment His
criticism of Gypsies in general and the depiction of the miserable and
violent world in which they live sound like the scientific

determinism of Zola. His commentary reflects the mixture of science

 

33 The work was first published in La Revue des Deux Mondes (as was
Leone Leoni) in October 1845 without this final chapter. Chapter 4 was added
in 1846.

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and fantasy that reinforces the social construct that social deviance is
located in a lower class which in large part brings misery upon itself.
The narrative impact is twofold. It weakens the emotional impact of
Des Grieux's story and adds scholarly credibility to the account, as if
this is indeed a study of human customs and behavior. As a social
scientist, the frame narrator has limited interest in his protagonists
as individuals.

Whereas Renoncour is eager to assure readers that Des Grieux's
tale is morally instructive, morality is hardly a concern for the
archaeologist.34 He defines his protagonists as social creatures, but
his portrait of Gypsies as exotic, erotic, lascivious, manipulative,
deceptive, independent and unlawful is not objective. It is a
culturally determined image--as is the transformation of Manon into
an homme fatal, a vampire or the devil's surrogate.

With its exotic setting, which once again serves to hold the
femme fatale at a distance and mark her as the "Other," its portent of
black magic and tragedy, and its macabre climax, Carmen is
predominantly a Romanticized version of Manon Lescaut. Prévost's
masterpiece has proven itself a rich resource for recasting in the
Romantic tradition, and Sand, Gautier and Merimée have each seized
upon different aspects of Prévost's novel to create their own work.
Whether passion be a "force magnetique," a supernatural power or a
”charme,” its ”victims" all argue that they are helpless to resist.
Although the protagonists are isolated Romantic heroes, Juliette,

Romuald and Don Jose have increasingly distanced themselves from

 

34 Within the novella, Carmen and Don José are both punished for their
crimes, but that is not the focus of the archaeologist's comments.

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the classical noble hero and approached the "ordinary" hero of
realism. In other words, the trajectory followed by variants of

Manon Lescaut reflects broad literary movements.

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Chapter 3

MARGUERITE GAUTIER,
A COURTESAN REDEEMED BY LOVE

Il te sera beaucoup pardonné,
parce que tu as beaucoup aime.
Act V, scene 9, La Dame aux camélias

Alexandre Dumas fils' 1848 novel La Dame aux camélias opens
with the auction of the worldly goods of Marguerite Gautier, a
beautiful young courtesan who has just died. Soon after buying
Marguerite's copy of Manon Lescaut, a gift from her lover Armand
Duval, the frame narrator of La Dame aux camélias meets the grief-
striken Armand who asks to buy back the novel and eventually
recounts his tragic love affair with Marguerite.

"Il ne fait pas de doute que [Dumas] récrit l'Histoire du
chevalier Des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut,” according to Henri Béhar
(348). Corrado Rosso calls Manon Lescaut "un point de depart oblige"
for Dumas. ”En un sens un livre crée l'autre" (340). If "Dumas
n'imite pas expressément Prévost," there is, nonetheless "une
presence presque magique de Manon" (339) in La Dame aux
camélias. Rosso goes on to argue that despite this apparent fil
conducteur between Manon and Marguerite, there is an infinite
distance between them. Manon is a creature beyond good and evil
who belongs more to nature than to humanity. Void of conscience,
she is totally irresponsible. Even in the New World, she is

transformed by an understanding of what it means to love and be

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loved, not by any notion of virtue. Good and evil, however, do exist
for Marguerite, and she suffers from that awareness (Rosso 343).
The idea of virtue gives her the peace of mind sought by classical
heroines like the Princesse de Cleves. Des Grieux, on the other hand,
does not seek peace of mind so much as he seeks happiness, and
when he proposes marriage to Manon, the idea fills her with ”joie"
(190), not peace nor pride in her new virtue.

Believing his son's liaison with Marguerite sullies the family
honor, M. Duval asks Marguerite to prove her love by sacrificing her
love to Armand's future. The paternal manner in which M. Duval
speaks to her, the pure and noble feelings in her that he evokes, the
opportunity to win the father's respect and in time Armand's as well,
”tout cela eveillait en [s]on coeur de nobles pensees qui [la] relevaient
a [s]es propres yeux, et faisaient parler de saintes vanités, inconnues
jusqu'alors" (232). Making her love for Armand ”l'espoir, le reve et
le pardon” (232) of her life, she agrees to leave Armand in such a
way as to create an insurmountable barrier between them. Unable
to tell Armand her real reason, she lets him believe that a yearning
for luxury has led her to leave him for another man.

To drown out the pain, Marguerite throws herself into a
frenzied lifestyle. The lifestyle she chooses and the cruelty to which
an outraged and uncomprehending Armand subjects her drive the
consumptive Marguerite to an early death. She literally consumes
her life, squanders her vitality. At the time, sexual activity, the
feverish activity associated with tuberculosis, was believed to be one
of the causes of a consumptive‘s declining health. Rosso terms her

decision to leave Armand "un veritable et profond holocauste" (344,

79

a voluntarily imposed death sentence. Marguerite explains that
women like her ”sont quelquefois forcées d'acheter une satisfaction
pour [leur] ame aux depens de [leur] corps" (149).

That said, Rosso wonders if Marguerite's sacrifice is sufficiently
motivated (345). What he overlooks is the role played by Manon
Lescaut. Armand's father comes to Bougival, the pastoral retreat to
which Marguerite and Armand have withdrawn, to demand that
Marguerite renounce his son. Marguerite has bid adieu to her former
life, thoughts of which now embarrass her (167). Since their arrival
in Bougival, she has often read Manon Lescaut and even made notes
in the margin. She repeatedly tells Armand, “lorsqu'une femme
aime, elle ne peut pas faire ce que faisait Manon” (169). After she
leaves Armand, he finds the novel open on the table, and "d'endroits
en endroits les pages étaient mouillées comme par des larmes" (201).
It is the moral she has deduced from Manon Lescaut that inspires
her ”holocaust.”

Having been awakened to selfless love, an already seriously ill
Marguerite sees few options for herself when she chooses self-
abnegation. A realist, she has already told Armand, "tu ne sais pas
combien est leger le fil qui retient dans le coeur l'amour que l'on a
pour des filles comme moi” (179). "Malgre toi, tu penses déja a me
quitter un jour. [...] [Tu] veux conserver la distance morale qui nous
separe" (180-81). Marguerite is a realist. She understands that once
desire is fed, the fantasy is dead. She realizes that she has
transgressed traditional morality and that the stain of sin will

forever mark her as an outcast from respectable bourgeois society.

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What then is Manon Lescaut's role in La Dame aux camélias?
The novel itself creates and seals the friendship between Armand
and the frame narrator that leads to a retelling of Marguerite's story.
The novel also motivates plot in that, as we have seen, it seems to
inspire Marguerite's sacrifice. Before giving the novel to Marguerite,
Armand wrote this dedication: ”Manon a Marguerite, Humilité" (40).
It is this personal dedication that attracts the frame narrator's
attention and leads him to purchase the novel. Moreover, the
dedication establishes a relationship between Marguerite and Manon,
but the meaning of the dedication remains uncertain, thus prompting
a certain curiosity, a desire to continue reading in order to answer
that mystery. The intertextual allusion is a narrative strategy that
draws on cultural images of Manon and titillates readers' interest in
the new work by linking it to a familiar provocative image. More
importantly, it suggests a comparison between Marguerite and
Manon.

A distinction must be made between Manon Lescaut the
character and Manon Lescaut the novel. Both play a role in La Dame
aux camélias. It is clear that the character has already entered the
French cultural consciousness, that the mere mention of her name
conjures up an idea that is more or less fixed in people's minds.
Concerned about the family's reputation, M. Duval warns his son that
Marguerite can turn him into a greluchon: "Toute Manon peut faire
un Des Grieux, et le temps et les moeurs sont changes” (187). She is a
cultural referent, the archetypal femme fatale who exists in all times
and places and who leads men to dishonor, if not to ruin. The

implication is that the story needs a modern retelling because times

81

have changed. La Dame aux camélias modemizes the story by
placing it in nineteenth-century bourgeois society which revolves
around family and is principally concerned with property and
conventional morality.

When Marguerite tells Armand that she has found a means for
them to spend the summer together in the country, Armand is
embarrassed. Retelling his story, he explains, "Je me rappelai Manon
Lescaut mangeant avec Des Grieux l'argent de M. de B...” (132). Not
wanting to be a gigolo, Armand rejects Marguerite's offer. She soon
betrays him, they reconcile, and after their. third night together,
Armand sends Marguerite a copy of Manon Lescaut (154) with the
now famous dedication.

When the frame narrator first reads the dedication he
speculates on its meaning, wondering if, according to this M. Armand
Duval, Manon recognized "une superiorité de débauche ou de coeur"
(41) in Marguerite. The second is more likely, he decides, since the
first would be too impertinent. Reflecting on Prévost's novel, he
recognizes it as a timeless and irresistible story which paints a
sympathetic portrait of a courtesan who stimulates the imagination.

Certes, Manon Lescaut est une touchante histoire dont pas
un detail ne m'est inconnu, et cependant lorsque je
trouve ce volume sous ma main, ma sympathie pour lui
m'attire toujours, je l'ouvre et pour la centieme fois je
revis avec l'hero'ine de l'abbé Prévost. (41)
The comparison made between Manon and Marguerite, he continues,
is an added impetus to read or reread Manon Lescaut, and his

"indulgence, s'augmenta de pitié, presque d'amour pour la pauvre

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fille a l'héritage de laquelle [i1 devait] ce volume" (41). Behar says
that Dumas fils‘ decision to rewrite Manon Lescaut is a way of paying
homage to Prévost (11). However, Prévost's novel is not the only
work from which Dumas fils draws inspiration. "Hugo a fait Marion
Delorme, Musset a fait Bernerette, Alexandre Dumas [pere] a fait
Fernanda” (42), writes Dumas fils. All were sources for La Dame aux
camélias.35

What does Dumas fils add to the story? Like Sand, Gautier, and
Mérimée, Dumas fils infuses his retelling of Prévost's masterpiece
with several Romantic elements: tragedy, pathos, melodrama, and
the macabre. The protagonists are exceptional individuals. No one
has ever loved Marguerite the way Armand does (104). "L'histoire
de Marguerite est une exception,” and if it were not, there would be
no reason to tell it (250). While Dumas poeticizes his protagonists,
there is also an injection of raw realism, so Dumas fils' style in La
Dame aux camélias might best be termed a new realistic
romanticism.

In the novel Marguerite carries white camellias all but five
days each month. Those days she carries red ones--i.e., she uses
flowers to announce when she is menstruating. However, the
flowers' symbolism is never made explicit. When Marguerite agrees
to become Armand's mistress, she gives him a red camellia ”parce

qu'on ne peut pas toujours exécuter les traités 1e jour or] on les

 

35 Though beyond the scope of this study, excerpts from all three can be
found on pages 379-393 of the Béhar edition.

83

signe." Asked when he should return, Marguerite tells Armand,
"Quand ce camélia changera de couleur" (106).

In all the variants, a woman is buried or dug up. Romanticism
at its most morbid, both scenes are drawn from Manon Lescaut. Des
Grieux buries her, and later ”Synnelet avait pris soin de faire
transporter le corps de [Manon] dans un lieu honorable” (203).
Although the pretext for digging up Marguerite is the same--i.e., to
move her to a more dignified resting place, the exhumation is a
disgusting scene in La Dame aux camélias. Unlike "La Morte
amoureuse,” in which Clarimonde's corpse simply dissolves into dust,
Marguerite's rotting corpse is described in detail,36 prefiguring
realistic and graphic death scenes such as Madame Bovary's slow
death from poisoning.

Reflecting that God was merciful in taking Marguerite while
still young and beautiful because old age is the "premiere mort des
courtisanes" (27), the frame narrator remembers Louise, the
daughter of an aging prostitute. This scene, discussed in chapter one,
is another example of the novel's raw realism nuanced with a bit of
Romanticism. It also typifies the novel's conflicted moral and social
commentary. If we compare Dumas' depiction of Marguerite to Zola's
portrayal of Nana, Dumas offers a sympathetic portrait of courtesans-
-or at least of Marguerite, who is the exceptional courtesan.
Nonetheless, it is a portrait tainted by the arrogance, titillated

bourgeois voyeurism, and moral rectitude of both narrators.

35 See page 94 for further discussion of this scene.

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With a mixture of vanity and voyeurism, he recounts his visit
to Marguerite's apartment before the auction of her belongings: "Moi
qui ne m'effarouchais pas a la vue du cabinet de toilette d'une
femme entretenue, je m'amusais a en examiner les details...” (2).
Condescendingly, he remarks that "Dieu avait éte clement pour elle"
because he allowed her to die "dans son luxe et sa beauté" (29). At
this point, with an attitude of moral rectitude, he remembers the
story of Louise. Then, as if to underscore Marguerite's status as a
commodity for male consumption, he inquires about her debts and
who will receive the proceeds from the auction. Attempting to paint
himself as a sensitive man sympathetic to the plight of courtesans
and prostitutes, he succeeds only at depicting himself as an arrogant
man with an overgrown sense of self-importance who undermines
the moral and social commentary the author is ostensibly trying to
interject: "Cette indulgence instinctive, cette pitié naturelle que je
viens d'avouer tout a l'heure me faisaient songer a sa mort plus
longtemps qu'elle ne meritait" (31).

Unlike Manon Lescaut, La Dame aux camélias is not set in an
aristocratic world where characters are concerned with proving their
nobility of character. The values espoused in La Dame aux camélias,
both in the novel and in the play, are bourgeois. The family is
sacred, and the father is the head of the family.

In Manon Lescaut, Des Grieux's aristocratic father is a distant,
symbolic figure. He mocks his son's naivete. He has him abducted
and sequestered when he does not approve of his behavior. When

Des Grieux refuses to give Manon up, his father renounces him. In

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essence, the "problem” is simply gotten rid of, just as books are
banned and women deported when they become a problem.

Armand's father, on the other hand, is a physical presence in
his son's life. He intervenes to avoid or resolve problems. He
commands respect. Especially in the play, Marguerite explicitly tells
Armand that he should not quarrel with his father (111.6). Even
Prudence advises him that it would be a mistake (290). Marguerite,
unlike Manon, urges Armand to write to his father (111.2). Correcting
M. Duval's erroneous impression of her, Marguerite tempers her
remarks by saying, "avec tout le respect que je dois au pere
d'Armand" (111.4). Elsewhere, she declares, "je tiens avant tout a
l'estime du pere d'Armand" (111.4), and ”je vous respecte et je vous
aime, parce que vous étes son pere" ((111.4).

In a blend of pathos and conventional morality, Dumas fils
envisions a repentant courtesan. The divine voice speaks through
the father, M. Duval. He baptizes Marguerite with his tears when she
decides to redeem her soul by sacrificing her earthly well-being for
love of the son, Armand. When Armand's father embraces her, she
feels ”sur [s]on front deux larmes de reconnaissance qui furent
comme le bapteme de [ses fautes d'autrefoisl" (233). Symbolically
she is born again, just as one is in baptism. She has internalized the
patriarchal moral code, but parting with Armand is indeed heart-
wrenching. On the verge of faltering, she asks God for strength: "[Cle
qui prouve qu'il acceptait mon sacrifice, c'est qu'il me donna cette
force que j'implorais" (233). For those who read la Dame aux
camélias as an intertextual continuation of Manon Lescaut,

Marguerite's redemption retroactively transforms Manon into a ”tart

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with a heart of gold" (Segal xxi), an altogether different image than
that left by Carmen.

Béhar contends that the author of La Dame aux camélias is,
above all, a novelist and not yet the moralist he will become (11, 14,
354). While I would agree that his posture as moralist is deeply
suspect, he does infuse his narrative with more direct and forceful
Biblical metaphors and intertextual references than any of the other
works we are studying. Even Manon Lescaut, written by a priest and
recounted by a former seminarian, and ”La Morte amoureuse,"
ostensibly told by a priest, can not match Dumas fils' Biblical rhetoric.

Urging compassion and indulgence for prostitutes, the frame
narrator reaffirms the conservative, patriarchal social order which
limits the aspirations of the women whose redemption it champions.
Redeeming the courtesan simultaneously confirms that she needs
redemption, that she is a permanently tainted marginal creature.

Le christianisme est la avec sa merveilleuse parabole de
l'enfant prodigue pour nous conseiller l'indulgence et le
pardon. Jesus était plein d'amour pour ces ames blessees
par les passions des hommes, et dont il aimait a panser
les plaies en tirant le baume qui devait les guérir des
plaies elle-memes. Ainsi, il disait a Madeleine: «II te sera
beaucoup remis parce que tu as beaucoup aimé»,37
sublime pardon qui devait éveiller une foi sublime.
Pourquoi nous ferions-nous plus rigides que le Christ?

(43)

 

37 Cf. Luc, VII, 47: ”C'est pourquoi, je te le dis, ses nombreux péchés ont
été pardonnés : car elle [Mary Magdalene] a beaucoup aime.”

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For all the talk about compassion and redemption, there is no
reward for goodness in La Dame aux camélias. On the one hand,
serious sin offers the opportunity for cataclysmic conversion. On the
other, the line taken by Dumas fils in La Dame aux camélias is as
hard as the Marquis's in Nana who, when asked, "N'est-ce pas, mon
ami, on doit pardonner beaucoup aux autres, lorsqu'on veut etre soi-
méme digne de pardon?” responds, "Non, pas de pardon pour
certaines fautes... C'est avec ces complaisances qu'une sociéte va aux
abimes" (282). According to La Dame aux camélias, "Il n'y a pas
d'absolution sans penitence” (121). Suffering expiates sin. Death
purifies, but there is no forgiveness in the here and now, and
Marguerite dies a lonely death. While this harsh attitude augments
the reader's sympathy for Marguerite, it is also indicative of the
inner conflict Dumas fils feels between compassion for and fear of
courtesans, of sexually active women who both attract and frighten
him.

The potentially redemptive power of love is the best-known
theme Dumas fils adds to the myth of Manon. As overly sentimental
as the theme may appear to modern readers,38 it is the theme that
most appealed to the Romantic imagination (Cellier 263). Manon
begins to appreciate Des Grieux's genuine selfless love on the road to
Le Havre, and the experience of such a love leads to her conversion
and self-sacrifice in the New World. La Dame aux camélias develops
that theme. In Dumas' rewriting, it is Armand, the character loosely

inspired by Des Grieux, who does not match the nobility of sentiment

 

33 In fact, the success of the movie Pretty Woman demonstrates the
appeal of the underlying storyline.

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of the original character. Whereas Marguerite, replacing Manon,
surpasses the original's devotion and nobility. And if Armand's love
does not match Des Grieux's, it is precisely because Manon Lescaut
figures so predominantly in his thinking, making him more
suspicious of Marguerite.

Because he is haunted by the story of Manon and Des Grieux,
he is fearful that Marguerite is but another Manon and is anxious not
to replay that story with her. Gilroy calls La Dame aux camélias "an
anti-Manon because the resemblance between Prévost's heroine and
[Dumas fils'] is mostly in Armand's mind. Marguerite's total devotion
is in complete contrast with Manon's thoughtless egoism" (96). I
would counter that the novel develops the image of Manon converted
in the New World. The frame narrator describes Marguerite as a
"pécheresse comme Manon, et peut-etre convertie comme elle" (41).
In other words, the frame narrator finds Manon's conversion
convincing. Yet for Armand and his father, Manon is an unfaithful
courtesan ready to sell her sexual favors in order to support her
amant du coeur. The tension of this conflicting portrayal is felt
throughout La Dame aux camélias. Bourgeois society wants the
courtesan redeemed, the ”problem” resolved--and prostitution is a
social problem, but they do not want the redeemed courtesan
admitted to their ranks. They want class differences to remain
clearly marked, and they are doubtful about the possibility of
genuine and permanent redemption.

Dumas' subject was apparently dear to his heart. He admits
modeling his heroine, Marguerite Gautier, after Marie Duplessis, a

beautiful young courtesan with whom he had an affair from 1844-45

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(Dumas fils, A propos... 367). In his 1875 preface to Manon Lescaut,
Dumas assumes that Prévost has written ”une histoire dont la plupart
des faits se sont certainement passes comme il 1e raconte" (xxxii), and
that Prévost' ”a peut—etre éte 1e heros, dans certaines parties," of
Manon Lescaut. Continuing, Dumas posits that the best--and the
most difficult--way for a writer to write a masterpiece is to depict
"ce qu'il a vu, ce qu'il a eprouvé" (xxxiii).

Certainly he encourages us to speculate on the similarities
between himself and Armand, with whom he shares the same
initials, and between himself and the frame narrator. The story
opens with the frame narrator urging us to believe "la realite de
cette histoire dont tous les personnages, a l'exception de l'héro’r'ne,
vivent encore" (25). All the authors examined in this study use the
same literary device: a frame narrator assures us that the story we
are about to read is true. Dumas fils, however, is the only one to
name the person on whom his story is based and to publish a
biographical sketch of her, written by the critic Jules Janin, along
with his own work.

Janin, who had met Marie Duplessis on three occasions, wrote a
piece about the historical ”Mademoiselle Marie Duplessis” in 1851.
Soon it served as an introduction to most editions of La Dame aux
camélias. In his 1839 introduction to Manon Lescaut, it will be
recalled, Janin argues that redemption requires more than just loving
and repenting. Death alone sanctifies, bringing with it pity and
pardon. He appears nonetheless to be quite taken by Marie Duplessis
whom, after her death, he describes sympathetically. Exceptional,

even among the great courtesans of her time, ”elle était une femme

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d'esprit, de gout et de bons sens” (356). "L'ennui a été le grand mal
de sa vie" (359). ”Elle était un produit brillant d'une société
expirante" (365).

Dumas fils met Marie Duplessis more than two years after first
seeing and falling in love with her. Clémence Prat, a milliner past
her prime, arranged for him to have dinner at Marie's apartment.
Suddenly, Marie became ill and left the table. “Alexandre followed
her and within minutes had convinced the seriously-ill Marie of his
genuine love. That he wanted, above all, to take care of her and
nurse her back to health was indisputable. [...] He truly believed that
a love as powerful as his could redeem the most expensive whore in
Paris” (Eduardo 48).

In brief, Marie Duplessis loved Alexandre Dumas fils, he went
broke, she strayed, they went to the country for a week and then
back to Paris where she betrayed him. The couple separated, Dumas
fils took a long trip abroad, and Marie found a new lover, went to
England, and a year or two later she died of consumption. Knowing
that she was dying, Dumas fils wrote to her from abroad asking her
to pardon him for the bitter fashion in which he had severed their

relationship.39 A few days after her death, he arrived back in Paris.

 

39 Having learned of Marie Duplessis's illness, Dumas fils wrote to her
from Madrid on October 18, 1846. ”Voulez-vous me permettre de m'inscrire au
nombre de ceux qui s'attristent de vous voir souffrir? [...] Si je trouve a la poste
restante, un mot 3 mon nom, et qui me pardonne une faute que j'ai commise il
y a un an, je reviendrai moins triste en France, si je suis absous, et tout a fait
heureux si vous étes guérie" (340). In the novel, we know that Armand writes
a similar letter to Marguerite because she writes to him saying yes she is sick,
thanking him for his letter, declaring that if anything could cure her, it
would be his letter, and telling him, in response to his plea, that yes she
forgives him (49-50).

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This resume of Dumas and Duplessis' relationship could be
mistaken for a summary of La Dame aux camélias. The distinction
between fact and fiction is blurred, as for example, in Armand
Duval's note to Marguerite Gautier.

Adieu, ma chere Marguerite; je ne suis ni assez riche
pour vous aimer comme je le voudrais, ni assez pauvre
pour vous aimer comme vous le voudriez. Oublions done,
vous, un nom qui doit vous étre a peu pres indifferent,
moi, un bonheur qui me devient impossible. (138)
At midnight on August 30, 1845, Dumas fils, the betrayed lover,
wrote this note to Marie Duplessis:
Ma chere Marie. Je ne suis ni assez riche pour vous aimer
comme je 1e voudrais ni assez pauvre pour etre aime
comme vous 1e voudriez. Oublions done tous deux, vous
un nom qui doit vous étre a pen pres indifferent, moi un
bonheur qui me devient impossible.40

Both Dumas and his hero are in love with a high-priced
courtesan he is unable to support in the style to which she is
accustomed, and neither is willing to be supported with the
courtesan's profits. Armand regrets sending his note to Marguerite
and waits for a reply that never comes. Perhaps Dumas fils did
likewise and his novel is the fantasy response he would have liked to

have received from Marie Duplessis. Or maybe the nascent moralist

 

40 For a copy of the original note, see page 49 of Leigh Eduardo's article
”The Lady of the Camellias" in the summer 1996 issue of France. The note is
also reprinted on page 340 of Béhar's chronology accompanying La Dame aux
camélias although there is a small error: ”Je ne suis ni assez riche" is
reprinted as ”Je ne suis pas assez riche.”

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needs to justify his love for a courtesan. In the avant-propos of Le
Doyen de Killerine, Prévost comments on what motivates novelists to
write: "quelque vue d'intéréts propre, qui leur fait souhaiter que
certain faits obscurs ou équivoques auxquels ils ont eu part, soient
expliqués dans un sens honorable pour eux-memes et pour leur
parti" (qtd. by Sgard 16). Perhaps Dumas fils seeks to explain, ”dans
un sens honorable,” why he loved Marie and why she left him.

Whatever the reason, Dumas transforms his affair into a
legendary tale of love and sacrifice. Yet La Dame aux camélias is not
autobiographical. Rather, Dumas fils' own life experience is one
source of ideas and inspiration, just as his fantasies and Manon
Lescaut are others. Perhaps his alter ego Armand speaks of his need
to fantasize this relationship when he confesses, “quoique ce fut une
fille entretenue, je m'étais tellement, peut-étre pour la poetiser, fait
de cet amour un amour sans espoir" (109). "Je faisais des reves
incroyables...." (110). The author has associated himself with the
hero, and through Armand, Dumas suggests that La Dame aux
camélias gives life to his own fantasies, to his own need to poeticize
reality, to give grandeur and moral value to the ordinary. Armand
even suggests to the frame narrator that "11 faut pourtant que je
vous raconte cette histoire; vous en ferez un livre auquel on ne croira
pas, mais qui sera peut-étre intéressant a faire” (71). Both the
author and his protagonist fancy themselves the romantic hero of a
sentimental drama.

Dumas fils draws inspiration from life and literature in order to
transform Marie Duplessis' death into Marguerite Gautier's

heartrending fictional death. In the novel, Marguerite dies a lonely

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death. No one comes and no one cares. Drawing from a literary
source of inspiration, the frame narrator compares her death to
Manon's. "Manon etait morte dans un desert” (41), he writes.
Marguerite died “an milieu de ce desert du coeur,41 bien plus aride,
bien plus vaste, bien plus impitoyable que celui dans lequel avait été
enterree Manon. Marguerite, en effet, n'avait pas vu s'asseoir une
réelle consolation a son chevet, pendant les deux mois qu'avait duré
sa lente et douloureuse agonie" (41). It is a fictional scene that
springs from the imagination of a writer who wants to see the Fallen
Woman expiate her sin in a work that appeals to bourgeois tastes.
Marie Duplessis, in fact, was gently cradled and consoled by
many friends as she lay dying. Having preserved an innate decency,
as did Marguerite, Duplessis "eut le bon gout supreme de vouloir etre
enterree a la pointe du jour, a quelque place cachée et solitaire, sans
embarras, sans bruit, absolument comme une ~ honnete mere de
famille" (Janin 364). After her funeral mass at the Madeleine, she
was first put in a temporary grave. Then on February 16, 1847,
thirteen days after her death, she was moved to her permanent

grave.42 The transfer of the courtesan's corpse was a matter of

 

41 Verdi's opera La Traviata is based on La Dame aux camélias. The
composer follows Dumas fils's play but draws from Dumas' novel as needed. For
example, "an milieu de ce desert du coeur" is a line from the novel that he uses
with great effect to characterize the Parisian society in which the young
courtesan lives. It also establishes a connection with Manon Lescaut whose
heroine crosses "de stériles campagnes" (197) and dies ”au milieu d'une vaste
plaine" (I98).

42 She is buried in line 4 of division 15 of Montrnartre cemetery. Her
body lies beneath 'un petit monument carré qui porte sous ces mots:
Alphonsine Plessis, une couronne de camélias blancs artificiels, scellée au
marbre, dans un écrin de verre" (Dumas fils, ”A propos" 368). Marie Duplessis
is the more euphonious name the girl from Gacé (Today there is a museum
dedicated to her in this Norman town.) created for herself when she went to

94

practical considerations and was much less dramatic than the
fictional exhumation of Marguerite Gautier.

In fiction, the exhumation serves the storyline. Marguerite was
so young and beautiful when Armand last saw her that he finds it
difficult to believe that she is dead. He needs to see her corpse to
accept her death as a reality. Sick at a time when love was
considered a sickness and physical illness a sign of moral decay,
Armand insists that seeing Marguerite's dead body is the only thing
that can cure him. He must see her putrid rotting corpse in order to
be so disgusted by the sight of her that it cures his passion for her:
"peut-étre le degofit du spectacle remplacera-t-il le désespoir du
souvenir” (63). Her decomposing corpse marks the end of desire's
infection and guarantees his safety. Once dead he can speak for her,
he can imagine an idealized love.

None of Marie Duplessis' belongings were sold as she lay dying
but rather from February 24 to 27 at a public auction attended by
Dumas fils, who later composed an elegy for M. D. (Marie Duplessis)
that was published at the end of his collection of poems entitled
Péchés de jeunesse (Béhar 341) and dedicated to Théophile Gautier
who "consacra [a Marie] quelques lignes d'oraison funebre a travers
lesquelles on voyait s'évaporer dans le bleu cette aimable petite ame
que devait... immortaliser le péché d'amour” (Dumas, "A propos" 367-

68).43 It is at once a sweet poetic line and a condescending one, as if

 

Paris. When she died, she was covered with camellias, but during her lifetime
she was never known as La Dame aux camélias. Alexandre Dumas fils is also
buried in the Montrnartre cemetery.

43 The lives of Dumas fils, Gautier and Sand seem to crisscross
continually. In his 1867 introduction to La Dame aux camelias, Dumas fils

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to remind readers that Marie was a sinner and to accuse her of
making sin attractive. What makes Dumas' moralizing misogynistic is
his failure to implicate himself or his narrator as a man who

appropriates and exploits the courtesan's body.

When first published in 1848, La Dame aux camélias was a big
success, but interest in the novel soon waned, and Dumas derived
little income from the work. Then the public learned that the
heroine was based on a real life figure, and interest in the novel
resurged. Janin's article not only prompted renewed interest in
Dumas fils' novel and play, but it also spurred Marie Duplessis's
transformation into a legend.
Whether Janin's portrait of Marie Duplessis is accurate and
objective or whether he is somewhat given to Romantic excesses, he
assures readers that la Dame aux camelias was a real woman and
that Dumas fils' work was based on real life. He recognized that
Le public, qui veut tout savoir et qui sait tout en fin de
compte, apprit l'un apres l'autre tous ces details, et le
livre In, on voulait le relire, et il arriva naturellement
que la vérité, étant connue, rejaillit sur l'intéret du récit.
(366)

We know, of course, that as Armand Duval, Dumas ennobles his affair

with Marie Duplessis with fantasies of what might have been.

 

explains that he spelled camellia with one ”1" first by mistake and then stuck
with that misspelling because "madame Sand écrivant ce mot comme moi,
j'aime mieux mal écrire avec elle que bien écrire avec d'autres" (367nl).
Today, of course, both camélia and camellia are accepted spellings.

96

Dumas was more interested in popular success than critical
acclaim, so just one year after writing the novel (though it would be
1852 before the censors allowed the work to be performed), he
transposed it. to the theatrical stage, "1e lieu de la consecration et de
la reconnaissance immediate des écrivains" (Béhar 17). As Dumas
fils himself would later write, this play was "la source de cette
indépendance materielle d'ou découle, pour qui sait la diriger,
l'indépendance morale” (376).

Gautier calls the play "the least perfect work of Alexandre, but
certainly the most seductive” (qtd. by Eduardo 48). The play
dispenses with much of the sociological and psychological
background that attempts to explain Marguerite and to encourage a
compassionate audience reaction. The novel seems more suited to
such topics and can interject anecdotes such as the story of the young
girl forced into prostitution by her mother. Marguerite's mother beat
her for twelve years (150), and her family never loved her (245),
according to the novel. Her mother died of tuberculosis (227),
suggesting a genetic weakness. All that remains in the play is a brief
comment near the end that Marguerite's family never loved her.

Theater, above all, is the art of representation. Theatergoers
generally seek an uplifting aesthetic experience. In the theatrical
version of La Dame aux camélias, Marguerite's life has been further
poeticized and melodramatic elements have been added to appease
the censors and appeal to pepular tastes. It happens in ways small
and large. In the play, for example, instead of telling Armand to
come back when her flowers change from red to white, Marguerite

tells him to return when the flower has faded. That is, the flower

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now portends her death. In both works, men's adultery is accepted
as natural, but in the play, there is a stand against adulterous
women. When Marguerite first meets Armand in the novel, she
advises him, ”Prenez une femme mariée" (102). In the play she says,
”[A]imez une autre femme, ou mariez-vous" (1.10). Perhaps because
there is no longer a frame narrator between the author and his hero
and because a play is more public, Dumas distances himself from
Armand. The letter Armand sends Marguerite to announce that he is
leaving her is entirely different from the real life letter used in the
novel. It is also more arrogant and sarcastic: "Il ne me convient pas
de jouer un role ridicule, meme aupres de la femme que j'aime. [...]
Pardonnez-moi le seul tort que j'aie, celui de ne pas etre millionnaire
...” (11.7).

The novel's sickening morbidity has been eliminated from the
play. The decaying corpse is not something most people want to see.
Knowing that the public found M. Duval's attitude objectionable,
Dumas has M. Duval write to Armand confessing the true story of
why Marguerite left him and granting his permission for Armand to
return to her. Adding to the melodrama, Armand arrives just in time
for Marguerite to die in his arms, which is, of course, why his father
allowed him to return; he knew that Marguerite was near death and
that the relationship could not last.

In the play, Armand does not take a new mistress, and there is
no conflict between Olympe and Marguerite. On the other hand,
Marguerite is not publicly humiliated in the novel the way she is in
the play in the scene in which Armand throws money in her face in

front of everyone and ends up fighting a duel with Varville.

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Armand's suspiciousness, jealousy, arrogance and haughtiness are
dramatically played out on stage. Unlike Des Grieux, Armand is not
striving for heroic fidelity and nobility of the heart. Armand hurts
Marguerite. While some scenes from the novel were expunged from
the play, this scene was added, suggesting that Dumas' audience
tolerates a certain level of violence towards women. In both Manon
Lescaut and La Dame aux camélias, the protagonists stand in contrast
with one another. But whereas Des Grieux's character is superior to
Manon's, the role are reversed in La Dame aux camélias. Marguerite
is the self-sacrificing character, and she conducts herself with more
dignity than Armand. Recounting how Marguerite responded to his
cruel attacks with "le calme sans dédain, la dignité sans mepris,”
Armand confesses that her reaction ”la faisait superieure a moi [et]
m'irrit[ait] encore contre elle” (219). In the novel, in the aftermath of
the tragedy, he is distraught and remorseful, but during Marguerite's
lifetime his behavior is governed by jealousy and wounded pride.

In the play, when Marguerite tells Armand she has figured out
a way they could spend the summer together in the country, he asks
her if she has read Manon Lescaut. She has. He fears that she
intends to support a summer in the country together the same way
Manon supported her life with Des Grieux--i.e., with money from a
wealthy lover: ”Marguerite, vous avez plus de coeur qu'elle, et moi,
j'ai plus de loyauté que lui!” (11.4). He imagines that they both have
more character than their literary ancestors.

When Marguerite leaves Armand, he is totally unaware of what
has happened. Waiting for Marguerite to come home, he spots

Manon Lescaut on a table: "Manon Lescaut! La femme qui aime ne

99

fait pas ce que tu faisais." Randomly opening the book, he reads in
its entirety the letter Manon wrote Des Grieux announcing that
although he is "l'idole de [s]on‘coeur," given their sorry financial
state, "c'est une sotte vertu que la fidelité,” and that she has gone off
to make money "pour rendre [s]on chevalier riche et heureux." _ "Elle
avait raison, mais elle n'aimait pas, car l'amour ne sait pas
raisonner.... Cette lecture m'a fait mal, ce livre n'est pas vrai" (111.7),
concludes Armand. Moments later, when he finds Marguerite's letter
telling him she has left, he is ready to believe that Marguerite is but
another Manon. Confused, hurt and uncomprehending, Armand
seeks to understand and explain Marguerite's behavior. Manon
becomes a metaphor, a new embodiment for this devastating
experience that he now carries with him in his imagination.
Essentially, La Dame aux camélias argues for individuality, for a
case by case consideration, for a nobility of character, while
simultaneously arguing that such cases are indeed rare. Although
Armand is the narrator in the novel, our sympathy for Marguerite
rests in large part on her own words and on the journal she writes
for Armand to explain why she left him. Consequently, La Dame aux
camélias is not characterized by the ambiguity that pervades Manon
Lescaut. Marguerite, unlike Manon, has voice. In the play, of course,
she has an even stronger voice and presence; thus she elicits an even
more sympathetic response. Armand, on the other hand, becomes
less likeable because, in fact, he treats Marguerite cruelly, and we do
not see the heartbroken and despairing figure who recounts their

tragic love.

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The Biblical reference is moved to the end of the play, a
position of emphasis that makes it memorable. The curtain comes
down on the line, ”Dors en paix, Marguerite! i1 te sera beaucoup
pardonne parce que tu as beaucoup aime" (v.9). It is the same
explanation critics cite for excusing Manon and Des Grieux's
transgressions--though they do not couch their argument in Biblical
language.

But if the theatrical transposition of the tale heightens the
theme of redemption, it also more strongly underscores the hero's
role, as opposed to Manon Lescaut's role, in inspiring that conversion.
The novel portrays the hero's role in general terms: "quelquefois un
grand homme a réhabilitlé les courtisanes] par son amour et meme
de son nom" (42). In the play, the love of a good man is more
explicitly the cause of Marguerite's conversion. "[Jle suis bonne...
C'est Armand qui m'a transformée!--Il m'a aimee, il m'aime" (111.4).
Armand's father characterizes their love as "un bonheur pour
[Armand] et une rehabilitation pour [Marguerite]" (230). It is a
convenient theory that gives an honnéte homme an excuse for loving
a courtesan.

M. Duval attempts to persuade Armand to renounce Marguerite
for the sake of his family's reputation.

Que vous ayez une maitresse, c'est fort bien; que vous la
payiez comme un galant homme doit payer l'amour d'une
fille entretenue, c'est on ne peut mieux; mais que vous
oubliiez les choses les plus saintes pour elle, que vous

permettiez que le bruit de votre vie scandaleuse arrive

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jusqu'au fond de ma province et jette l'ombre d'une tache

sur le nom honorable que je vous ai donné, voila ce qui

ne peut étre, voila ce qui ne sera pas. (186)
M. Duval thinks it only natural that his son have a mistress. He just
wants him to be discreet and avoid scandal. The mistress is not to
compromise family life. In the play, M. Duval asks Marguerite if at
Armand's age, ”1e coeur peut-il prendre un engagement définitif? Le
coeur ne change-t-il pas perpetuellement d'affections?” (299). The
double standard is obvious: one expects a man to change affections
often, but a woman who loves more than one man is tainted for life.

The play, first banned on moral grounds, adds a virtuous
couple, Gustave and Nichette, who end up happily married. In an
opening scene, Nanine explains that Gustave is not yet Nichette's
husband but that he will be. Gustave loves only Nichette. She loves
only him and has never loved anyone but him. He will marry this
"tres honnete fille" (1.3). An "honnéte fille” is expected to have but
one lover, her husband, but no such demand is made of the man.
Even in subtle ways the double standard is advocated although the
author may indeed think he is taking a more compassionate attitude
and railing against hypocrisy. Dumas' essay on La Dame aux camélias
demonstrates his muddled thinking. He describes Marie Duplessis as
"une des dernieres et des seules courtisanes qui eurent du coeur”
(367). Apparently he feels a man should be able to buy true love.
The frame narrator opens La Dame aux camélias by painting

himself as having a natural indulgence and compassion for
courtesans, but his compassion is mixed with disdain and arrogance

as he characterizes courtesans he has known: ”Pauvres creatures! Si

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c'est un tort de les aimer, c'est bien le moins qu'on les plaigne" (42).
According to Armand, seducing a sixteen-year-old virgin is easy
(120), and he in no way suggests that there is anything wrong with
it. Winning a courtesan's love, on the other hand, the love of a
professional, is viewed as real victory (121). His arrogance and
failure to acknowledge his double standard throw doubt on the
sincerity of his sympathy and on his whole posture as a voice for
moral authority

Just as Des Grieux, Juliette, Romuald and Don Jose talk about
desire in an effort to put an end to desire, so does Armand. Once all
has been told, "Armand, toujours triste, mais soulagé un peu par le
recit de cette histoire, se rétablit vite" (249). Throughout his
account, Armand appeals to "vous,” the frame narrator--and by
extension, the male reader, to empathize with him. "Vous savez ce
que c'est d'aimer une femme, vous savez comment s'abregent les
journees, et avec quelle amoureuse paresse on se laisse porter au
lendemain. Vous n'ignorez pas cet oubli de toutes choses, qui na‘r‘t
d'un amour violent, confiant et partagé" (170). After Armand's tale
of how Marguerite has suffered, often unjustly, the frame narrator
responds, "Je comprends ce que vous avez dt‘r souffrir, mon ami"
(249). Not a word of sympathy for Marguerite. This is a men's club
and the frame narrator's sympathy rests with Armand. Armand's
narrative strategy has succeeded.

In comparison to the other rewritings of Manon Lescaut, one of
the most striking aspects of La Dame aux camélias is the sense of the
author's personal involvement with his heroine (a characteristic also

noted in his preface to Manon Lescaut). As we have seen, La Dame

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aux camélias springs from a curious mix of life and literature in
which one. nourishes the other.44 Simply put, Dumas fils never seems
able to let go of Manon Lescaut. He is obsessed with her. Like his
hero Armand. and the other narrators studied, Dumas fils is trying to
put an end to desire by talking about desire, albeit indirectly. He is
an "artiste obsedé par un chef-d'oeuvre inimitable mais
transposable" (Behar 11). In 1851,45 he pens Le Regent Mustel, a
rather bizarre novella in which Manon, Des Grieux, Paul, Virginie,
Bérnardin de Saint-Pierre, Werther, Charlotte, Goethe and Mustel all
come back to life and see their fates crossed. In 1867 he writes a
preface to La Dame aux camélias, in 1875 his introduction to Manon
Lescaut, and in 1881 another introduction to La Dame aux camélias.

Armand admits, ”J'avais eu affaire a une fille semblable a
toutes les filles entretenues, je l'avais beaucoup trop poétisée" (137).
Perhaps feeling likewise, Dumas fils distances himself from his
heroine and his work, which he discusses in quite impersonal terms
in his two prefaces to La Dame aux camélias. The man that emerges

is a proud, sensitive man who takes pains to point out that if Marie

 

44 As we have seen, life and literature are intertwined in La Dame aux
camélias. Dumas fils' own father, the celebrated writer, Alexandre Dumas pere,
did not recognize his son until he was six years old, and as an adult Dumas fils
long fought for the rights of natural children. More specifically, La Dame aux
camélias gained the praise of Alexandre Dumas pere and effected a
reconciliation between father and son. In his 1881 introduction to his work,
he calls his father "mon juge supréme" (375). The elder Dumas had not
thought it possible to successfully transpose La Dame aux camélias to the
theatrical stage. Unexpectedly one day, he learned his son was trying to do
just that and asked his son to read to him what he had written. Dumas fils
began rather nervously but seeing that his father was moved, he continued a
bit more boldly. Before it was all over, Dumas pere cried like a baby and
declared the play new, bold, original and moving (375).

45 It was first published as Les Revenants. In 1852 the title was changed
to Le Regent Mustel.

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Duplessis "n'a rien sacrifié a Armand [i.e., Dumas fils], c'est
qu'Armand ne l'a pas voulu” (368).

Assuming the role of moralist, he takes up a theme hinted at in
La Dame aux camélias when describing how respectable women
follow fashion trends set by courtesans. Dumas fils rails against a
society in which one can no longer tell women apart, can no longer
tell the difference between respectable women and courtesans. In
his 1867 preface, he writes that courtesans "devinrent une classe,
elles s'érigerent puissance. [...] Les femmes du monde accepterent
la lutte avec ces dames sur le terrain or] celles-ci l'avaient placée. [...]
Non seulement on cut les memes toilettes, mais on cut le meme
langage, les memes danses, les memes aventures, les memes amours,
disons tout, les memes spécialités. [...] Nous allons a la prostitution
universelle" (372).

The Second Empire (1852-1870) encouraged a permissiveness
born of unrestrained gaiety, but the age of the great courtesans
ended with the collapse of the Second Empire. Dumas speaks for a
generation that believed the scandal was not that courtesans were
depicted in novels and on the theatrical stage, but rather that they
existed. As we saw in his 1875 preface to Manon Lescaut, Dumas fils
is a conflicted writer who never made peace with the figure of
Manon, a writer for whom love and scorn, passion and fear, fever
and creative imagination are inextricably bound. A writer whose
best known works are about a woman he believes never should have
existed, Dumas fils poignantly gives voice to the conflict and

confusion of men who love women they can neither accept or reject.

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Leone Leoni, ”La Morte amoureuse,” Carmen and La Dame aux
camélias, the best known literary works inspired by Manon Lescaut,
cluster around the publication of the famous 1839 Bourdin and
Charpentier editions of the novel which marked the height of the
novel's fame. None of the variants has enjoyed the critical and
popular success of Manon Lescaut. Mérimée's Carmen is known
mostly through Bizet's opera which is one of most popular operas
performed in France today. Dumas' La Dame aux camélias is also
well known in large part due to the success of Verdi's La Traviata.

What sets Prévost's masterpiece apart? First of all, the force of
the myth and mystery of the heroine has inspired many retellings,
each of which further enriches the myth of Manon. Prévost's
characters seem more real and are more sympathetic than their
imitators. The frame narrators in the variants do not predispose us
to view the protagonists as compassionately as Renoncour does. La
Dame aux camélias is a confused overly sentimental and overly self-
important work. Leone, Clarimonde and Carmen are all threatening
figures. Certainly we are much more suspicious and fearful of Leone
than of Manon. Clarimonde and Carmen arouse uneasiness although
we can dismiss the discomfort and the characters because they live
outside our realm of reality.

De3pite her nineteenth-century representation, Prévost's
heroine is not a menacing figure. She is a frivolous and insouciant
young beauty. The confusion, anguish, and charm with which Des
Grieux narrates their ill-fated love endears the protagonists to us.
That is, we do not pull away, we do not distance ourselves from

them. We share the magic and mystery, rapture and ruin of a life-

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consuming passion. And precisely because we do not draw back,
because Prévost succeeds in arousing our interest in his protagonists,
his novel challenges our expectations and causes us to question our
values in a way that Leone Leoni, ”La Morte amoureuse,” and
Carmen--and to some extent La Dame aux camélias--do not:
Clarimonde, Carmen, Leone and Marguerite are already marked as
pathological or unnatural creatures and thus as different from us. In
Manon Lescaut, the focus is on Des Grieux's story, not Manon's. We
see very little of her life as a courtesan whereas Marguerite's opulent
lifestyle is portrayed in concrete detail.

With their Romantic emphasis on the exotic, pathetic,
melodramatic, and even macabre, the variants are not as universal as
Manon Lescaut. In each of the variants, the Manon figure is
described, she acquires a physical presence, and thus she no longer
fans our imagination in quite the same way Prévost's original does.
The variants are less open-ended and emotionally less powerful.
None leaves us with the ambiguity that continues to intrigue us in
Manon Lescaut. None has the humor of Prévost's novel.

The variants are also more localized. They appeal too much to
the tastes of their times. Prévost's work, though certainly a
reflection of his times, nonetheless focuses on the more universal
aspects of his tale. And to the extent that it reflects his times, it is
more a reflection of a historical period than a response to the tastes
of the masses, as is La Dame aux camélias. That said, La Dame aux
camélias is also a weaker work precisely because the author has too
high a personal investment that is translated into muddled thinking.

He has not sufficiently distanced himself from personal experience.

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Symbolically, the story Des Grieux tells Renoncour is nine months in
the making, that is, nine months pass between Manon's death and
Des Grieux's return to France where he meets Renoncour.

Read as variants of the Manon-Des Grieux story, these works
influence our reading of Manon Lescaut by focusing our attention on
certain aspects of the novel. Each narrator embraces a character who
embodies his or her "other” self," a less socially acceptable self whom
each tries to understand and explain "dans un sens honorable.” The
personal conflict, the inner schism between self-image and the
awareness that there is an "other" lurking within him is most
forcefully expressed in "La Morte amoureuse.” Leone Leone develops
several motifs found in Manon Lescaut: Manon's bipolarity, the
ambiguity of Des Grieux's portrayal of her, Des Grieux's fictionalizing
of his experience, and the effect emotion has on perception and
interpretation of reality. In Carmen, we are left to question whether
the protagonists are victims of fate or free will or something else--
sorcery or biological and sociological forces, for example. Passion is
depicted as a violent and fearsome emotion. Eros, it seems, must be
repressed--or at least the ritual of the ”sacrifice” of Eros must be
enacted. La Dame aux camélias causes us to consider more seriously
the plausibility of Manon's conversion. As a whole, the novel moves

in the direction of the lover developing into a storyteller.

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Chapter 4

THE VOICE OF ENCHANTMENT IN MASSENENT'S MANON

Ah! les expressions ne rendent jamais
qu'd demi les sentiments du coeur.
Des Grieux in Manon Lescaut (178)

Still drawing a sell-out crowd more than a hundred years after
its composition, Massenet's 1884 Manon, like Prévost's Manon
Lescaut, has enjoyed a popularity that none of the composer's other
works has matched. According to Massenet's memoirs, he was in the
library of Henri Meilhac, his principal librettist, when he spotted
Prévost's novel and was struck with the idea for this opera.
However, Edward Noél, secretary of the Opéra-Comique and later one
of Massenet's collaborators, claims that during a performance in
memory of Auber, a celebrated soprano and tenor sang a duet from
Auber's largely forgotten Manon Lescaut (1856). The effect was so
phenomenal that the director of the Opera-Comique suggested that
Massenet compose a new operatic rendition of the novel. Yet another
theory is that Philippe Gille, Massenet's other librettist, noted the
novel's popularity and suggested the idea (Branger 31-33).

A burst of national pride and the popularity of opéra-comique
account for both the interest in Auber and the composition of a new
Manon. French nationalism and genre vogue are two cultural
influences that also explain the publication of new nineteenth-
century editions of Prévost's novel. Following France's disastrous

1870 defeat under Napoleon III by the Prussians at Sedan, the

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French were particularly bent on resisting Wagnerian theater and
the German cultural invasion; a new adaptation of a French
masterpiece seemed highly desirable.

Jean Sgard argues that, in fact, it was the success of Verdi's La
Traviata that led to the composition of operas based on Manon
Lescaut.46 Generic transformation and intertextual influence thus
came full circle. As previously discussed, Prévost's work inspired
Dumas fils' novel La Dame aux camélias in 1848. The following year
Dumas fils created a melodramatic theatrical adaptation (first
performed in 1852) of his novel. Shortly thereafter, Verdi composed
La Traviata (1853), an opera based on Dumas fils' play. Finally,
Auber (1856)47 and Massenet (and later Puccini), inspired by the
success of La Traviata, transposed Prévost's novel to the lyric stage.
Massenet's Manon even borrows scenes from La Traviata. The
success of each of these works attests to the power of Manon Lescaut
to transcend time, demonstrates the unending circle of influence
among writers and composers, and shows how the success of one
work can help elevate the popularity and stature of another.
Massenet's Manon, for example, gave new life to the novel. Between
1885 and 1889, eight new editions were published, varying in price
from 25 centimes to 200 francs-or (Sgard 228). That is a rather
extraordinary phenomenon in itself, indicating that the novel
appealed to readers across a broad spectrum of socioeconomic

classes.

 

46 Cited by Starobinski, "L'unique objet" 57.

47 Auber's Manon Lescaut - Opera-Comique bears little resemblance to
Prévost's story.

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Massenet and his librettists, Meilhac and Gille, began work on
their Manon in early 1882, and the work, composed between May
and October 1882, was first performed on January 19, 1884, at the
Opéra-Comique in Paris. Massenet wanted to contribute to the
development of opéra-comique, "un genre éminemment national”
(Gautier 142-43). While Gerard Conde contends that Manon is ”in
many ways pastiche, or imitation opera-comique and owes much of
its artistic success to the fact that it is more an exercise in style--a
sequence of genre pictures--than a sentimental drama" ("Massenet'
15), Jacques Joly points out that except for a few one-act works,
Manon is the only one of Massenet's works "a étre baptisee 'opéra-
comique.’ La tradition de ce genre typiquement francais (dont
Manon est devenu un des archetypes) nourrit donc l'oeuvre" (15).

Herve Lacombe defines opera-comique, which reached its peak
between 1830 and 1840, as ”essentiellement une comedic ou une
tragi-comédie a dénouement gai ou le chant alterne avec le dialogue
et prend sensiblement la meme importance que lui ..." ("L'opera-
comique" 43). However, by 1883, the term opera-comique no longer
signified a lighthearted plot or a happy ending. After Bizet's Carmen,
an opéra-comique first performed in 1875 which climaxes with Don
1036 killing Carmen, no subject could be excluded from opera-
comique.48 By using spoken passages but replacing the spoken
dialogues, characteristic of traditional opéra-comiques, with

recitative (sung speech), Massenet builds on French tradition in order

 

48 The moving death scene in Auber's I856 Manon Lescaut - Opera-
Comique actually marks a turning point in the staging of opéra-comique death
scenes. However, the violence and power of Carmen's murder sparked
considerable controversy.

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to rejuvenate an essential characteristic of this genre and mark his
difference from Verdi and Wagner. And he did so even though, as of
March 1882, the Opéra-Comique no longer required that works
alternate between sung and spoken lines (Branger 35, n24).

In Manon, the spoken word is a dramatic element. Lines
spoken over music intensify the emotional impact of a scene, quicken
the pace of the plot, and provide comic relief. In Act I, for example,
the ridiculous Guillot de Morfontaine speaks to Manon in his effort to
seduce her. In the frenetic HOtel de Transylvanie scene (Act IV), the
spoken lines, usually .dialogue about gambling, are continually
juxtaposed with lines that are sung and which play out the
sentimental drama against the tumultuously frivolous gambling den
backdrop. When Manon first sees Des Grieux and says to herself,
”Quelqu'un! Vite! A mon banc de pierre!“ (I.viii), the spoken word
quickens the action and signals that this is a moment of dramatic
importance. The spoken dialogue in Manon's final moments raises
the pathos to fever pitch as she gasps, ”Ah, je meurs!” and Des Grieux
cries out, ”Manon!” as she resignedly and realistically rejoins, ”11 1e
faut! Il le faut" (V.v).

The comic scenes likewise provide more than just comic relief.
Developing the novel's tension between passion and pleasure,
Massenet's opera sustains a contrast between Manon and Des
Grieux's unfolding drama and the general merriment that ironically
underscores the protagonists' personal tragedy. In an effort to open
new possibilities for the lyric stage, Massenet sought an authentically
French genre which incorporated both the Italian masters' emphasis

on the voice and Wagner's focus on the dramatic atmosphere

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(Branger 35). The result is a popular French opera that changes
much of Prévost's narrative and yet remains essentially the same
story--or at least it feels the same. Yet neither plot, character,
theme, setting, tone, nor narrative structure remains unaltered. A
look at the differences and similarities between Prévost's novel and
Massenet's opera will more effectively illuminate Massenet's

transformation of Prévost's masterpiece.

Critics have long debated whether or not Prévost really
intended to write ”un traité de morale" (6). Des Grieux adamantly
argues that love is an innocent passion. Yet he is at a loss to
understand how love has become "une source de miséres et de
désordres" which has caused him to become "si criminel" (72). Even
though "les délices de l'amour sont passageres et seront suivies par
d'eternelles peines, elles sont ici-bas nos plus parfaites félicités"
(93). It is a morally evasive position, typical of Des Grieux's stance
throughout the novel, which leaves us uncertain of Prévost's moral
intent. Both Renoncour and Tiberge claim that the young chevalier
plunges into misfortune by choice. Des Grieux, however, contends
that he is a victim of fate. In the novel, the conflict between fate and
free will is left unresolved. In Massenet's opera, as in most operas,
moral quandaries are not central to the experience of the opera.

There is no pretense that the opera is a lesson in morality. The
tale is no longer a retrospective first-person narrative told to a
sympathetic frame narrator. In the novel, Manon has virtually no
voice. Her side of the story is never told. We see her mostly through

Des Grieux's eyes. But in the opera, Manon speaks; we see her on

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stage. Most of the story's moral ambiguity and some of Des Grieux's
ambivalence about Manon's character are lost. There is no Tiberge
figure, and the protagonists' sins are substantially minimized. Des
Grieux's father remains alive and well at the end of the story, the
protagonists never leave the Old World, and Manon dies, without
plausible cause, on the road to Le Havre. Thus the conflict between
Old World and New World values is averted in the opera.

Prévost's narrator both idealizes Manon and blames "cette
charmante et perfide creature” (43) for all his 'désordres." While
Massenet's Manon is no longer as perfidious, she is also no longer as
angelic as Prévost's narrator would have us believe. Nonetheless,
Massenet envisions a complex figure. Because the operatic Manon
has voice, she is is no longer seen exclusively through the eyes of
others. The opera is not Des Grieux's tale, and the Manon that
emerges exhibits a subtlety and range of emotion not seen in the
noveL

To showcase Manon and her voice, Massenet and his librettists
set the six scenes, four drawn from the novel and two of their own
creation, they feel best capture the essence of the story: Manon and
Des Grieux's first meeting, Manon's betrayal of Des Grieux, Manon's
life as a courtesan, the lovers' reunion at Saint-Sulpice, gambling and
arrest at the Hetel de Transylvanie, and finally, Manon's poignant
death.

Act I dramatizes the coup de foudre. Des Grieux meets Manon
in a bustling Amiens courtyard and their fate is sealed. Both his
words and the stage directions indicate that, from the beginning, the

opera largely circumvents the tension felt throughout the novel

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between choice and determinism. Incorporating one of the novel's
motifs, the stage directions specify that Des Grieux turns
"involontairement" toward Manon, the mistress of his heart, and tells
the enchantress: ”On dirait que ma vie / Va finir ou commence! / Il
semble qu'une main / De fer me mene en un autre chemin / Et
malgre moi m'entraine devant elle!" (I.viii). Manon is bewitching,
and, as his music and body language dramatize, Des Grieux is
powerless to resist.

For her part, Manon has just refused Guillot's advances. Yet
she is tempted by his tantalizing proposal of pleasure, and a dreamy
internal struggle ensues: "Combien ce doit étre amusant / De
s'amuser toute une vie! / Ah! Voyons, Manon, plus de chimeres! / OI)
va ton esprit en revant ? Laisse ces desirs ephemeres I A la porte de
ton couvent" (I.vii). She is realistic enough to try to prepare herself
for life in the convent, but also self-aware enough to realize it will be
difficult to curb her yearning for amusement. In the beginning,
Massenet's Manon is both more innocent and more ambivalent than
Prévost's original, and his Des Grieux is less naive.

In Act 11, they are living on rue Vivienne in Paris. The
beautiful music, first heard in Act I when the lovers meet, evokes
the joy of love, the wonder of their first meeting. Des Grieux is
writing a letter to his father, pouring out his heart and requesting
paternal approval for marriage. Describing how enchanting Manon
is, his letter is a lyrical evocation of her seductive charms, of her
sweet voice and tender glance. "On l'appelle Manon, elle eut hier
seize ans. En elle tout séduit, la beauté, la jeunesse, la grace!” His

words call to mind those of Prévost's hero when confronted with the

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vision of Manon at Saint-Sulpice. ”Elle etait dans 3a dix-huitieme
annee. Ses charmes surpassaient tout ce qu'on peut décrire" (44). As
in the novel, the operatic Des Grieux offers no physical description of
Manon; his father is left to imagine this exemplar of feminine
perfection. Of course, in the opera, we do see her, she acquires a
physical presence, albeit at a distance, but her identity and her
charm lie in her voice. Musically, the soprano must be capable of
inspiring Des Grieux's immediate, devoted love. She is a femme
fatale in the tradition of Circe. "Nulle voix n'a de plus doux accents"
(II.i). Totally enraptured, Des Grieux has no idea that Manon is just
moments away from betraying him.

Act III is divided into two sharply contrasting tableaux. The
first is a carnival scene on the promenade of the Cours-la-Reine, a
scene not found in the novel, which showcases Manon, the
resplendent courtesan. Featuring a pastiche of Regency style music,
the scene is introduced by an eighteenth-century minuet heard as a
recurring theme throughout the scene, and it features an opera-
ballet set to music of the period. As might be expected from a
composer intent on rejuvenating a French genre and seeking to
distinguish himself from the German and Italian masters, ”Chacun
[des tableaux de la piece] a sa tonalité propre, son atmosphere a 301.
Chacun d'eux a la couleur exacte du milieu qu'il représente, a son
époque precise” (Massenet, qtd. by Lacombe, Les voies 172-73).
Massenet's protagonists are forcefully situated in their times,

Regency France, and the eighteenth-century music and imagery is

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essential to capturing the world of the rococo Regency felt
throughout the work.49

In the novel Des Grieux insists that his father would love
Manon if only he met her (26). The opera plays out this possibility.
Spying Manon in the Cours-la-Reine, the Comte des Grieux concedes,
”Elle est charmante et je comprends qu'on l'aime" (III.1er.v). Yet he
remains steadfast in his opposition to a union between Manon and
his son. The difference of social class would presumably constitute
an affront to family honor. In the novel, the two never meet.
Massenet's scene appears to be inspired by the encounter between
Violetta and Germont in La Traviata50 and, as we shall see, is but one
of several intertextualities.

The emotionally-charged second tableau captures the novel's
pivotal scene at Saint-Sulpice, which so moved Massenet that it is the
first scene he composed (Hiss 122). Des Grieux is haunted by the
female erotic figure. In an obsessional meditation, he attempts to
chase memories of Manon from his mind and regain his serenity:
"Ah! Fuyez, douce image a mon ame trop cher, I Respectez un repos
cruellement gagné" (III.iii). Manon's entrance follow immediately

upon this moving aria.

 

49 By way of contrast, Puccini is less interested in recreating a Regency
atmosphere--although he does capture it in the Act II dancing lesson scene in
Manon's grand boudoir. Instead, Puccini focuses on creating an Italian opera
filled with desperate passion that stresses the unavoidable tragedy. Whereas
Massenet has a more substantive text which highlights lyrics and drama,
Puccini emphasizes voice and music. With limited plot development and few
light moments, heavy emotion resonates throughout his Manon Lescaut in
music less restrained than Massenet's.

50 In La Traviata, Verdi changes the names of Dumas fils' protagonists to
Violetta and Alfredo. Alfredo's father is renamed Germont.

117

She begs God's forgiveness, confesses her guilt to Des Grieux,
implores his pardon, and like a siren beckoning a sailor to shipwreck,
caressingly reminds Des Grieux of the love they once shared, and
beseeches him to love again. Just as mariners were defenseless
against the mythical Greek Sirens who lured men to their death by
their seductive singing, Des Grieux appears powerless to resist
Manon's enchanting voice. He capitulates to her charms, to the
irresistible appeal of her voice.

Much of what Prévost expresses through text, Massenet quite
naturally expresses through music and through Manon's voice. In
the novel Manon overwhelms her chevalier with ”mille caresses
passionnées" (45). In the opera, her voice does the caressing, the
seducing, as she sings a moving aria in which she pleads with Des
Grieux to acknowledge that she is still the same Manon he once loved
so passionately. For Massenet, as for Prévost and many of the critics
discussed in chapter one, man's sexual desire for a woman does not
originate in the man. Rather it emanates from the woman who wants
to be desired and whose presence unleashes desire. Massenet's
desire to transcend the destabilizing threat of corporal reality
inspires his transfiguration of Des Grieux's desire into Manon's voice.
Even though her body is on stage, her physical presence as an object
of desire, possessing the power of seduction, is sublimated through
her voice. The voiceless Manon of the novel, imprisoned in the
language of Des Grieux, is endowed with a tantalizing vocal brilliance
when placed upon the lyric stage. Her absent body reappears
filtered in and through the voice. Des Grieux seems to have no choice

but to surrender.

118

"On the face of it, Manon Lescaut does not seem very promising
material for the stage,” according to Vivienne Mylne, “since the plot
is somewhat repetitive” (29). Consequently, Massenet omits most of
the novel's remaining episodes: the protagonists' life and the fire at
Chaillot, borrowing money from Tiberge, their servants' theft of their
worldly goods, duping M. de G... M..., Manon's imprisonment at the
HOpital General and Des Grieux's at Saint-Lazare, Des Grieux's attacks
on M. de G... M... and threats to the Superior at Saint-Lazare, his
subsequent escape during which he kills a servant, Lescaut'35l death,
the attempt to defraud the young G... M..., their imprisonment at
Chatelet, their life in the New World, the duel with Synnelet, Des
Grieux's reunion with Tiberge and his anticipated return to the
family fold. Most of these events are eliminated to avoid
redundancy or to lessen the severity of Des Grieux and Manon's
offenses. To condense text and action, a few incidents are suggested
in brief allusions that those familiar with the novel will recall. For
example, ”Notre opulence est envolee... nous n'avons plus rien”
(IV.iii) alludes to their servants stealing their valuables, thus
explaining their need for money. But opera aims to create a pleasing
aesthetic experience by capturing the mood, atmosphere, and
emotion of key moments, not plot detail. Unlike a novel which most
read but once, an opera is often listened to and enjoyed several

times. Opera-goers frequently know the story line beforehand, and

 

51 In the novel Lescaut is Manon's brother, and he enters the story
shortly before the fire at Chaillot. In the opera he is her cousin and meets her
when she arrives in Amiens.

119

Massenet even relies on audience familiarity with the novel to fill in
the gaps in plot development and character motivation.

Act IV, a splendid period piece at the H6tel de Transylvanie, is
rich in intertextuality but weak in plot development and character
motivation. One moment Des Grieux swears he would never gamble,
and the next moment he is winning sizable stakes. Guillot accuses
him of cheating and has Des Grieux arrested and Manon deported.
The act ends with the improbable appearance of Des Grieux's fathers2
who obtains Des Grieux's release. In Act V, Manon dies in Des
Grieux's arms, begging his forgiveness and recalling happy times

past.

Two problems are evident in Act IV: plot improbability and
inconsistent character development. Although Prévost's novel
includes no dates within the narrative, nearly all critics term the tale
a Regency narrative. Sgard, however, amply documents the evidence
leading to his conclusion that Manon Lescaut explicitly takes place
between 1712 and 1716 and that only the Louisiana episode takes
place after the death of Louis XIV. All historical allusions signal a
society in crisis, a period marked by disillusionment and the collapse
of a social value system that, for Prévost, characterized the end of
the reign of Louis XIV. Only under the sun king, during a period of
rigid rules, would the conflict depicted in the novel arise between
father and son, between the traditional patriarchy and what Des

Grieux calls ”an nouvel ordre de choses" (45), governed by a nobility

 

52 Though a familiar operatic convention, his appearance is improbable
in terms of plot development.

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of the heart. Des Grieux's ignominious affair with Manon, une fille de
joie, scandalizes his family and friends and even the narrator
himself. His exploits are not part of the collective frenzy that
marked the Regency, argues Sgard, because they would not have
seemed aberrant during that period. The disruption of the moral
order depicted in Manon Lescaut erupted in a stable world. (56-61).

Massenet, on the other hand, clearly indicates that his Manon
takes place in 1721--i.e., during the Regency. This date is important
for several reasons. The Regency is characterized, at the beginning of
volume VI of the Mémoires et aventures d'un homme de qualité,S3
by greed, debauchery, irreligion and anarchy. It was an age in which
the aristocracy thought only of their own pleasure, but temporal
distance later allowed the Romantics to poeticize the Ancien Regime
and render it picturesque. The opera follows in that tradition. While
Massenet's Manon appears to view the Ancien Regime with affection,
it exaggerates the notion of a frivolous society where pleasure
reigned and few earned their living by working. By situating the
opera in the Regency, Massenet was thus able to use traditional
eighteenth-century imagery in which society revolves around
spending money, libertinage and entertainment (Joly 54). These
themes easily lend themselves to parody and to the light moments
needed for contrast with the unfolding drama. In fact, explains
Gerard Condé, this lightness is at the heart of the drama. Regency
frivolity is what lures Manon and Des Grieux into decadence. Their

tragic destiny plays itself out against this backdrop, a world in which

 

53 Manon Lescaut is volume VII.

121

their less than exemplary behavior is hardly remarkable. That is
what makes the opera a tragedy ("De la beauté" 40).

Though perhaps overstating the tragic aspect of the opera,
which lacks the depth needed to provoke a cathartic experience,S4
Condé highlights a significant point in noting that Des Grieux and
Manon are no better and no worse than their contemporaries and
that their transgressions are "fautes ordinaires" in this Regency
society. Yet they suffer extraordinary consequences ("De la beauté"
40). Were the opera to take place, as does the novel, before 1715,
Des Grieux and Manon's sins would no longer be "fautes ordinaires."
In the novel, Des Grieux, while imprisoned at Chatelet, tries to
convince his father that he has done no worse than other aristocrats,
but this argument undermines his attempt to paint himself as an
exceptional noble living an extraordinary love. By changing the
dates and eliminating Des Grieux's claims of character superiority,
Massenet more convincingly develops the theme that Des Grieux is
neither better nor worse than his peers.

Placed within the Regency, Manon's deportation becomes less
improbable, though still without basis. She runs off with Des Grieux
in the coach Guillot provided for her. She is not appreciative of the
opera the latter orders for her amusement. And she is Des Grieux's
accomplice while he allegedly cheats at cards. A misdemeanor or

two at most, but hardly crimes that call for deportation. Nonetheless,

 

54 This is to be expected. Lacombe explains: "L'opéra franeais ne
recherche que rarement 1e sublime, l'intensite et la profondeur de
l'expression ou la densité de l'écriture; il leur préfére ce qui est divertissant,
agréable, nuance, léger, mais aussi, tout ce qui etonne et impressionne" (Les
voies 9).

122

Guillot wants vengeance and his success in using the arm of the law
to obtain it depicts the corruption of a society where wealth and
power can buy inordinate influence. Unable to purchase Manon's
favors, Guillot purchases his revenge, an act that seems at odds with
his portrayal as a silly old lecher. We could infer that Poussette,
Javotte, and Rosette's betrayal (Act III) has helped embitter him, but
the story line makes no such connection.

The characterization of Des Grieux's father may be consistent
with a pre-l715 setting and with nineteenth-century morality, but it
is less consistent with Regency France. In contrast to the novel's
final scene, which implies that Des Grieux will be reconciled with his
family even though his escapades have been a contributing cause in
his father's death, the comte rejects the possibility of reconciliation
with his son. "Pas de pardon! Non, pas de pardon!" is his response to
Des Grieux's plea for compassion. Urged by the crowd to take pity on
the young man, the comte's final words are ”Non, jamais!” (IV.v).
Having allied himself with the despicable lecher Guillot, his
contention that he must guard the family honor, a claim reminiscent
of the scheming Lescaut's appeal to Manon to respect his role as
”gardien de l'honneur [d]e la famille!" (I.vi), is somewhat hypocritical.

The patriarchy is clearly degenerating.

The constant interplay between Prévost's novel and Massenet's
opera is one type of intertextuality that fills in the gaps, nuances,
enriches, and even changes the meaning of Manon. Despite Guillot's
accusation of cheating, the libretto attributes Des Grieux's winnings to

beginner's luck. Yet the improbability of a novice winning and the

123

knowledge that in the novel Des Grieux is, in fact, a cardsharp easily
lead one to see cheating on the opera stage.

This Act IV gambling scene at the Hotel de Transylvanie, as
well as the Cours-la—Reine scene in Act III is inspired by, the festive
scene at Flora's party in Act II of La Traviata. In both operas, these
scenes give the composers opportunity aplenty to interject the local
color so popular with opera audiences. To entertain her guests, Flora
has ordered a chorus of fortune-telling Gypsies followed by a lovely
ballerina who gracefully descends the staircase into her waiting
matador's arms. Manon's regal entrance at the Cours-la-Reine and
the opera and ballet arranged by Guillot draw inspiration from this
scene55 in which the real action at Flora's, the confrontation between
Violetta and Alfredo, takes place against the gaming and
entertainment backdrop. In Massenet's work, Manon's music at the
Cours-la-Reine is among the most popular in the entire opera. The
appeal to youth and the carpe diem theme capture the wonderfully
appetizing narcissism of her self-appreciation.

In her final adieu to images of happier days, 'l'auberge la
petite table ta robe noire" (V.v), Manon's mood is naturally quite
different. Not found in Prévost's novel, the scene again draws from
La Traviata and Violetta's poignant farewell to beautiful dreams of

the past. Like all artists, composers and librettists continually

 

55 The Gypsy-matador motif of the entertainment at Flora's suggests a
comparison with the tragic fate of Carmen (in both Mérimée's novella and
Bizet's 1875 opera), once again reinforcing the intertextual relationship
among the three heroines, Manon, Marguerite/Violetta, and Carmen, and
among the literary works and operas that give them life. Though beyond the
scope of the present inquiry, the relationship among the transposition of
these three novels into musical drama suggests the possibility of a rich study.

124

borrow successful ideas from one another. By borrowing from La
Traviata, . Massenet echoes the familiar courtesan-redeemed-by-love
theme A without resorting to the tedious moralizing found in La Dame
aux camélias.
An explicit intertextual allusion is heard when Des Grieux sings

a verse from Musset's Namouna (183255) in the gambling den scene
(IV.iii). Suggesting that dreams enrich our lives, the poet is
enraptured by Manon, a literary figure ”si vivante et si vraiment
humaine" (stanza LVII) that she has long embodied the fantasy of
many a reader who feels slhe knows her. The poet, like Des Grieux,
has ambivalent feelings. He is attracted to and repulsed by Manon.
He loves her and yet harbors a certain fear of her.

Manon! sphinx étonnant! veritable sirene,

Coeur trois fois féminin...

["1

que je t'aime et te hais

quelle ardeur inou’r‘e

Pour l'or et le plaisir!

ah! folle que tu es,

Comme je t'aimerais demain, si tu vivais!

(stanzas LIX and LX)

 

55 The reader will recall that Musset met George Sand in 1833, and in
1834, during her stay in Italy with Musset, she wrote Leone Leoni, her own
variation of Manon Lescaut. Certainly she was familiar with this verse from
Namouna because she used the stanza just before it as an epigraph for volume
2 of Lélia (1833).

125

Singing this verse, Massenet's Des Grieux expresses his love and
despair. With minimal modifications in the lyrics, the creators of
Manon once again demonstrate their genius in extracting material
judiciously and modifying it to suit their needs57 while at the same
time remaining faithful to the spirit of Manon Lescaut, as well as to
their other sources. In just a few words set to powerful music, they
capture the hero's ambivalence and conflict as Manon urges him to

take up gambling in an effort to restore their fortune.

Prévost's novel is a retrospective first person account told to a
sympathetic frame narrator. Des Grieux, the narrator, relives his
great passion by remembering Manon and recounting their life
together. To capture this retrospective aspect, Massenet creates a
motif of memory and remembrance by infusing the opera with
recurring musical themes and with the language of remembering.
With her aria at Saint-Sulpice, a scene to which we shall return,
Manon re-seduces Des Grieux by appealing to the past and
attempting to make it appear present once again: ”N'est-ce plus ma
main que cette main presse? [...] Tout comme autrefois? Rappelle-toi
N'est-ce pas ma main?" (III.2e.vii).

If we again consider the verse borrowed from Musset, we see a
more complex way of translating retrospection onto the opera stage.

Jean Starobinski explains: "C'est attribuer au heros, dans l'opéra,

 

57 They add a first line echoing her name, "Manon! Manonl"; combine
two of Musset's verses into one: ”pour le plaisir et l'or quelle ardeur inou'r‘e";
and change the final line to unconditional love: ”Comme je t'aime!” Manon's
response interjects the conditional: ”Et moi, comme je t'aimerais si tu voulais...”
(IV.iii).

126

c'est-a-dire dans l'histoire elle-meme, les mots d'un poete qui se
souvient d'une fiction; c'est donc introduire une dimension de
réflexion nostalgique et de mémoire" (58). Prévost, Musset and
Massenet, through their characters, are all participating in the same
self-reflective literary dialogue. The poet remembers a fictional
hero. Thinking of Manon, Des Grieux remembers the poet
remembering Manon, a memory within a memory, a memory
rendered more powerful by its circular effect.

Perhaps even more important than the words, though, is the
music that recreates a sense of remembering. "Les retours
thematiques ravivent l'ivresse du premier regard et de
l'innamoramento dans la cour de l'hbtellerie. L'éblouissement initial
s'inscrit dans une ligne mélodique qui revient lors de la scene du
parloir et dans l'agonie de Manon" (Starobinski 59). The most
celebrated melodies in Manon derive their power from the effects of
memory.

For example, when Manon knows Des Grieux is about to be
seized in an abduction to which she is a silent accomplice, she bids
adieu to their little table, a theme she again takes up in her dying
moments.

Adieu notre petite table

Qui nous réunit si souvent!
Adieu notre petite table,

Si grande pour nous cependant.
On tient, c'est inimaginable,

Si peu de place en se serrant! (Div)

127

Then a change of verb tense signals that the present scene is fading
into bittersweet memories of times past.

Un meme verre était 1e n6tre,

Chacun de nous, quand i1 buvait,

Y cherchait les levres de l'autre.

Ah! Pauvre ami comme il m'aimait! (II.iv)
Blending realism and sentimentality, Marion's plaintive song focuses
her melancholic memories on concrete objects symbolizing the
simplicity of happy moments they shared.

In the novel, there is no equivalent to this scene of Manon
remembering tenderness she will no longer have. Des Grieux,
however, does describe their emotional "last supper,” as it were.
Erich Auerbach cites this "interrupted supper" as an example of an
”intérieur,‘ a portrait of contemporary mores, sentimentalized and
eroticized, that is frequently found in eighteenth-century novels. It
is ”a neatly framed, vivid, intimate picture whose polished
elegance, tearful sentimentality and erotic and ethical frivolity
represent a mixture unique in its kind" (398). In the opera, Manon
paints the 'intérieur." In both the novel and the opera, the
protagonists' high tone lends seriousness and a sense of tragedy to
the domestic scene. Alhough there is no mention of an erotic subject
in either scene, both are steeped in sensuality.

The frame narrator is the second element of the novel's
narrative structure. Renoncour, the homme de qualité, is Prévost's
frame narrator. His role is to suggest how we might read Des
Grieux's adventure. Before we hear Des Grieux's account, Renoncour

predisposes us to view the protagonists with compassion and a

128

certain respect. At first glance he recognizes Des Grieux as un
homme qui a de la naissance et de l'éducation," and who has "un air
si fin et si noble que [Renoncour se sentit] porte naturellement a lui
vouloir du bien." The little that Des Grieux divulges strikes the frame
narrator as so touchingly extraordinary that he is moved to offer
financial assistance. Des Grieux's gratitude convinces Renoncour that
he was 'né quelque chose, et qu'il méritait [sa] libéralité" (15).
Likewise, our first view of Manon is through the frame narrator's
eyes. '[Sla vue [I']inspira du respect et de la pitié" (12).

In a similar fashion, Massenet's crowd guides our sympathies
and judgments. When Brétigny and Manon majestically sweep into
the festival at the Cours-la-Reine, the crowd sings:

Voici les elegantes,

Les belles indolentes,

Mattresses des coeurs,

Aux regards vainqueurs! (III.1er.iv)
The visual image is verbally and musically reinforced: these are
beautiful people leading empty lives. Manon, however, stands out.
A magnificently attired courtesan, she is ”ravissante [...], adorable,
divine." Though of common birth, Manon appears to be a 'princesse,
[on] au moins une duchesse" (11.1er.iv), and she is dressed like one.
In the novel, the homme de qualité remarks that even in a sorry
state and chained to five prostitutes, Manon stands out as "un peu
mieux que ses compagnes.” Under any other circumstances, he
would have taken her to be a person of distinguished rank (12). In
the opera, however, it is not until Manon dresses the part that the

crowd acclaims her a noblewoman. Portrayed more realistically, she

129

does not exhibit the innate nobility that Renoncour suggests for
Prévost's heroine.
When Manon and Des Grieux are about to be arrested, the

crowd counsels,

Ah cédez a ses pleurs!

Pour sa jeunesse!

Grace! Tant de beaute

Mérite que l'on ait pitie. (IV.v)
As the couple are seized, the crowd once more urges Guillot and the
comte to take pity, but their pleas fall on deaf ears. Although Manon
has committed no crime, that is not the basis of the crowd's plea for
her release. Rather they appear to assume her guilty of something--
but to know what, one would need to be familiar with the novel--and
urge compassion for the same reason that is found in many of the
nineteenth-century introductions to the novel: she is young and
beautiful, and she suffers. Her tears in this scene are typical of the
tears, both Manon's and Des Grieux's, that fill the novel and reflect
the importance that tears, as an independent motif, assumed in
eighteenth-century literature. Hovering between the soul and the
senses, tears evoke the thrill of sentiment mixed with eroticism that
the eighteenth-century audience found so tantalizing (Auerbach 397-
98).

In the opera, orchestral and vocal music underscore the
opposition between the brouhaha of the crowd and the isolation of
the protagonists lost in reverie and torn between the fire of their

own desires and the demands of the social order. The novel opens on

130

a courtyard in Pacy buzzing with activity. Arriving to spend the
night, Renoncour, the homme de qualité, is surprised by the
brouhaha he encounters. Everyone's curiosity has been aroused by
the arrival of two wagonloads of young women. Renoncour asks an
archer accompanying the convoy what is happening and learns, ”Ce
n'est rien, monsieur, c'est une douzaine de filles de joie" (34).
According to Jean Starobinski, Massenet's Manon develops this notion
of ”rien” and possession that the heroine's name represents: Manon,
a possessive adjective (ma) plus a negation (non). In the novel, the
void created by this ”rien," by this lack of concrete portraiture, sets
the readers' imaginations to work envisioning their own ideal of a
young woman of high rank. Rica is also a way a negating, of
discounting Manon. The non, the second syllable of her name, is
another negation, one that can be read as both a negation of the girl
who carries the name and as the girl's refusal to be anyone's
possession. For Starobinski it is the latter. Des Grieux is obsessed
with the girl and with the name, as if by grasping the name he can
hang on to the girl who continually eludes him and who seems to
have no permanent identity. ”[Mlais ce souffle, ce nom, Manon porte
en lui un semblant d'identité permanente" (51). Voice, name and
identity are closely interwoven throughout Manon. Her voice is
seductively beautiful; it is the source of her irresistible appeal, and it
gives her a personal identity.

Yet her name is something others give her. In the novel Des
Grieux tells us, "Mademoiselle Manon Lescaut, c'est ainsi qu'elle me
dit qu'on la nommait" (41). Since she rarely speaks, she exists only

in the words of others; she is their possession. Proof, states

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Starobinski, of the passivity that tradition has long attributed to
women (52). In the opera, too, others give Manon her identity. "On
m'appelle Manon” (I.viii),58 she tells Des Grieux. And her name
echoes throughout the work. It is repeated 88 times: 43 times by
Des Grieux, 16 by Manon, and 29 by others. The opera repeatedly
insists on naming her as if somehow to ground her identity. Des
Grieux begins his letter to his father by naming her. Modifying
Musset's verse in Act IV, he echoes her name, ”Manon! Manon!“ He
is obsessed with the name. Trying to chase her memory from his
mind at Saint-Sulpice, he cries, ”Je ne veux que chasser au fond de
ma mémoire un nom maudit! Ce nom qui m'obsede" (III.2e.iii).
References to Manon's voice also resonate throughout the

opera. In the novel's scene at Saint—Sulpice, Des Grieux takes
Manon's hands in his after she overwhelms him with caresses.
Simultaneously giving voice to Manon and developing the role of
memory, Massenet's Manon, dressed in all her splendor,59 pleads
"avec un grand charme et tres caressant" (according to the stage
directions),

N'est-ce plus ma main que cette main presse?

N'est-ce plus ma voix?

N'est-elle pour toi plus une caresse,

Tout comme autrefois!

[---l

 

58 In Puccini's La Boheme (1896), Mimi's celebrated aria sounds a
similar theme: "Mi chiamono Mimi, il perché non so” (They call me Mimi, why
I do not know). In Puccini's and Massenet's operas, a name given by others
brings to life a heroine soon to exist but in memory, a memory evoked by the
mere mention of her name.

59 She has just come from the Cours-la-Reine.

132

 

Ne suis-je plus moi? N'ai-je plus de nom?

[---]

N'est-ce plus Manon? (III.2e.vii)
With an impressive economy of means, several motifs are
intertwined: remembrance, plus a voice, name and identity for
Manon. As she insists, ”Regarde-moi! Ne suis-je plus moi? N'est-ce
plus Manon?" she presses Des Grieux to remember and to respond.

The nostalgia and beauty of the final scene are intensified

when Des Grieux echoes Manon's words:

N'est-ce pas ma main que cette main presse,

N'est-ce pas ma voix!

N'est-elle pour toi plus une caresse

Tout comme autrefois! (V.vii)
Starobinski sums up his argument thus: "Au moment de son
épuisement extatique, la passion renoue avec son origine, avec ce
rien fulgurant qui a decide de tout. Cela sonne juste. Il fallait que
l'opera glorifie ce que la musique ajoutait au roman: l'attrait
irresistible de la voix” (59). The opera not only adds, but celebrates,

her voice, the gloriously irresistible voice of a mythical siren.

Massenet also accentuates the other side of Manon's character,
her initial innocence and inexperience. She starts out, as a rather
dreamy-eyed innocent dazzled by the excitement of her first trip.
When Guillot tries to seduce her, she reacts rather naively. Shortly
thereafter she turns serious as Lescaut counsels more prudent
conduct (I.vi). In the next scene, after Lescaut's departure, we both

hear her sadness and see it in her facial expression while an inner

133

struggle ensues between her yearning for pleasure and her effort to
resign herself to the convent life her family intends for her. Yet
another facet of her character is soon revealed when she suggests to
Des Grieux that they run off in Guillot's carriage. Nonetheless, she
has some doubts. She is torn between the allure of beauty and
pleasure and the earlier exhortations of her cousin.

In the novel, M. de B... and Manon plot Des Grieux's arrest
together (34), but in the opera, Manon is not an active participant in
the plot, though Brétigny buys her silence with the promise, ”Vous
serez reine par la beauté! Ah, Manon, c'est la fortune!” (II.ii). Her
fluctuating emotions--elation, regret, nostalgia and anguish--all
convey her complexity.

Later she is transformed into a vain and sophisticated
courtesan caught up in the carnival atmosphere. She is also a bit
nostalgic remembering lost love. When she sees the Comte des
Grieux and hears that Des Grieux is about to take orders, she
implores, "Mon Dieu, donnez-moi le courage [d]e tout oser lui
demander" (III.1er.vi). Learning that Des Grieux has forgotten her,
she becomes lost in reverie and pays no attention to the opera and
ballet Guillot has summoned for her entertainment in hopes of
winning her favors. The first tableau of Act III concludes with her
hasty departure for Saint-Sulpice.

From the beginning, Manon's love for Des Grieux seems much
more certain in the opera and in nineteenth-century criticism than in
Prévost's work. After talking to Des Grieux's father, she is visibly
shaken, and her decision to seek out Des Grieux at Saint-Sulpice is

purposeful. In the novel, it is more by impulse than by plan that she

134

 

goes to see him. Des Grieux's account of Manon's motives are, as
usual, ambiguous. Manon hears his name in the streets. ”Elle ne Ie
reconnut pas avec certitude sous le titre d'abbé; mais un reste de
curiosité, ou peut-etre quelque repentir de m'avoir trahi (je n'ai
jamais pu déméler lequel de ces deux sentiments) lui fit prendre
intérét a un nom si semblable au mien; elle vint en Sorbonne avec
quelques autres dames" (43).

In the opera, the focus is on a complex Manon rather than on
Des Grieux's self-reflective need to express and grapple with the
doubts that plague him. Just before seeing Des Grieux, she begs God's
pardon three times. The repetition betrays the depths of her
anguish, and yet her plea is somewhat ambiguous. She seems to be
pleading for forgiveness of her past sins while at the same time
asking God to indulge her once more, this time by granting her the
heart of one of His own servants:

Pardonnez-moi, Dieu de toute puissance,

Car si j'ose vous supplier

En implorant votre clémence,

Si ma voix de si has peut monter jusqu'aux cieux,

Ah! c'est pour vous demander le coeur de Des Grieux!
Pardonnez-moi, mon Dieu! Pardonnez-moi, mon Dieu!
(III.2e.vi)

Turning to God adds a new dimension to Manon's character not
seen in the novel. Until her transformation into a faithful, selfless,
loving Manon in the New World, she is an amoral girl untroubled by
questions of virtue. Nonetheless, Des Grieux assures us that ”Manon

n'avait jamais été une fille impie," and when he proposes marriage in

135

”1e Nouvel Orleans,” she is as eager as he to ennoble their ”amour par
des serments que la religion autorise" (190). Massenet envisions a
Manon close to this idealized heroine. It is something of an inversion
of roles because the operatic Des Grieux sheds his cloak of religious
language.

Throughout the novel, he exhibits a moral delicacy that causes
him a shame and remorse not evident in the opera. He has an
"aversion naturelle pour le vice” (17). Intent on self-justification, he
is caught up in the conflict between liberté and fatalité, grace and
Providence (chrétienne), guilt and innocence. Des Grieux's
conversation is a blend of Christian and pagan vocabulary. More
particularly, he frequently uses the traditional literary vocabulary of
tragedy ('fatale" and "funeste," for example). At Saint-Sulpice, he
responds to Manon ”avec un melange profane d'expressions
amoureuses et theologiques" (45). His friend Tiberge, a character not
found in the opera, is his conscience. Tiberge argues for adherence to
conventional Christian virtues, and Des Grieux often uses religious
discourse to appeal for the compassion of Tiberge and other
defenders of established patriarchal values. In the opera, other than
his appeal to God ("Mon Dieu, purifiez mon ame!" III.2e.iii), just
before his unexpected reunion with Manon, he paints his conflict in
the language of classical Greek tragedy and casts Manon as a pagan
goddess, a "veritable sirene" (loc. cit.). As in Greek myths, he seems
to have no choice but to surrender to his fatal destiny. "Et dussé-je
sur moi faire crouler les cieux, [m]a vie est dans tes yeux! Ah, viens,

Manon! Je t'aime, je t'aime! (III.2e.vii).

136

Based on Prévost's depiction of Manon's conversion and death
in the New World, the opera portrays a humbled, repentant Manon
who dies on the road to Le Havre with a grief-stricken Des Grieux at
her side. In both the novel and the opera, Des Grieux's decision to
share her exile and misery awakens Manon to an understanding of
what love really is and leads to her conversion: "Je ne sais
qu'aujourd'hui 1a bonté de ton coeur, / Et si bas qu'elle soit, helas,
Manon réclame / Pardon, pitié pour son erreur" (V.v). Recognizing
her impending death, she still has the self-awareness and wit to poke
gentle fun at herself and her coquettishness. Spotting a shining star
and comparing it to the sparkling diamonds she formerly coveted,
she murmurs, ”Ah, 1e beau diamant! Tu vois, je suis encore coquette"
(V.v).

Massenet's heroine displays personality, depth of character and
individuality. Yet she is also a more loving figure closer to Des
Grieux's idealized vision of her in the novel than the actual heroine
he depicts in that narrative. After arguing that the Romantics tried
to tame Manon, Leon Cellier concludes that the one who succeeded
was Massenet, ”un musicien qui savait trop bien... que la musique
adoucit les moeurs” (268). Above all, Manon is a figure of
enchantment, a literary legend that had already entered the cultural
consciousness when the opera was composed. Her death on the
opera stage is more poignant than tragic. The opera is a celebration
of her feminine charms. Forever elusive and enigmatic, she is at
once more real and more mythical, more individualized and more
idealized than Prévost's original. She is simply marvelously,

surprisingly and delightfully captivating. And when she sings,

137

neither man nor God60 apparently can resist that enchanting voice.
Therein lies her perennial power to bewitch us.

Massenet's Des Grieux, on the other hand, is a less well-
developed figure than in the novel. Except for his inner struggle at
Saint-Sulpice to chase from his soul the ”douce image” of the ”perfide
Manon” and the text borrowed from Musset, Massenet's Des Grieux
evidences little ambivalence. Though his escapades with Manon lead
him to a fall from aristocratic grace and alienation from his father,
his transgressions are but common offenses. He exhibits neither the
initial naivete nor exceptional sensitivity of Prévost's hero, and his
basic character evinces little depth and undergoes minimal
transformation within the opera. The significant differences are
those between Massenet's hero and Prévost's original. The operatic
Des Grieux is never imprisoned, not even by his father. Though it is
suggested he cheats at cards, there is no evidence that he defrauds
anyone. We are given fleeting glimpses of his latent violence (II.ii
and IV.v), but in fact he attacks no one, and murder is hardly among
his offenses.

In part this may be a response to genre conventions, but more
significantly, the substantial differences between the fictional and
operatic Des Grieux suggest a shifting social order and a late
nineteenth-century audience that would be offended by the behavior
of Prévost's hero, by a decadent aristocrat who could kill a servant

with impunity. Ironically, it is still a man's world, so on the lyric

 

60 After she implores God, "Si ma voix de si bas peut monter jusqu'aux
cieux / Ah! c'est pour vous demander le coeur de Des Grieux!” (loc. cit.), she
does, in fact, win back the seminarian's heart.

138

stage, only the perfidious femme fatale merits punishment despite
having committed no crime. Yet she did the unthinkable; she
wounded male pride. She spurned Guillot's attention and generosity
for Des Grieux's love, and he wants vengeance. More importantly,
this is still a world that believes man's desire emanates from woman.
To control passion's power to wreak havoc in our lives, the woman

must be controlled.

With so many differences between Prévost's novel and
Massenet's opera, what has not changed? Why does the opera feel
like the original story? In other words, what is the essence of Manon
Lescaut? And among the modifications Massenet makes, which are
most significant? What does Massenet, with the help of Meilhac and
Gille, add to the story?

Massenet's Manon remains the lyric tale of ill-fated love
between a ravishing young temptress who loves pleasure and a
young man equally enamored of her. Destined for the priesthood,
Des Grieux is thunderstruck by the vision of a beautiful girl who
awakens his latent sexuality with such a force that he forsakes
family and fortune, foregoes the priesthood, and surrenders pride,
honor and decency to the irresistible charms of this enchanting
beauty. Her love of luxury and her consequent infidelity lead them
on a downward spiral to shame and disaster, which ends with her
deportation and touching death, a death which ultimately
immortalizes his devotion and the power of her charms.

Much of what at first appears changed is, in fact, transposed to

the lyric stage, though often subtly or cursorily, as seen, for example,

139

in the motif of remembering that runs throughout the work and in
Manon's brief explanation of why they need money. By simplifying
the plot, Massenet focuses more attention on the atmosphere and on
Manon's inner conflicts. The emphasis on Manon's emotional state
and the lack of credible conflict between Des Grieux and Guillot
internalize the conflict, which, though largely undeveloped, is, in
part, a struggle for individuality, a rejection of the paternal values
represented by Guillot and Des Grieux's father.

The principal differences, then, between the opera and the
novel are not the more obvious plot changes, but rather the
sometimes subtle modification of character. Both of Massenet's
protagonists are more demure than Prévost's originals. Their real
crimes have been expurgated. Any implied criticism seems to be
directed at the corruption of the Ancien Regime and the "gofit de
frivolité et la dépravation des moeurs” (7) which concerned the
author of an anonymous 1830 preface. Yet the French in the latter
quarter of the nineteenth century had a fascination with the Ancien
Regime, a system they had long since rejected politically. Their
relationship to Manon is somewhat analogous. Publicly they
condemn her and yet she captures their imagination in a way no
pristine heroine can match. Massenet's very French opera reflects an
affection and compassion for Manon and a certain fascination with
and nostalgia for the Ancien Regime, an important chapter in
France's glorious past.

Whether the modified portrayal of Manon and Des Grieux is
motivated chiefly by a desire not to offend the opera-going public,

by Massenet's personal vision of the story, or by genre consideration

I40

is difficult to ascertain with certainty, but is most likely a
combination of all three factors. Part of Massenet's originality is that
he develops the comical aspect of what Des Grieux calls his and
Marion's "triste comedic" (34). Since Des Grieux and Manon's offenses
are largely obliterated, there is no need for the moralizing Tiberge.
Nor is moralizing high in entertainment value, as recognized by the
poet who reminds Manon, "Tu m'amuses autant que Tiberge
m'ennuie" (Namouna, stanza LX). Unlike Carmen, where a figure of
innocence, Micaéla, is added as a musical and moral foil to Carmen,
Massenet's Manon has already minimized Des Grieux and Manon's
transgressions to such an extent that no figure of innocence is needed
to balance and soften the impact of the protagonists' immorality.
Quite the contrary, the characters added are three Regency
courtesans whose beauty and riches Manon first admires and then
surpasses.

Significantly, Des Grieux's character undergoes the greatest
transformation. With much of his ambivalence lost and his inner
conflict glossed over, Des Grieux also becomes a less interesting
character. While he is still a privileged young man with a devotion
to Manon that sets him apart, he is no longer the apostle of a new
nobility of the heart depicted in the novel.

In Massenet's Manon, the spotlight is on Manon. She is the
much richer character. New depth and complexity mark her
evolution as they did the evolution of a whole society of burgeoning

individuals in the nineteenth century.61 Typical of Massenet's

 

61 For more on this topic, see volume IV of A History of Private Life
(page 455, for example), Michelle Perrot ed.

141

 

century, Manon, too, acquires some individuality, an identity. She is
both the young innocent of Act I and the gold-digging courtesan of
Acts 111 (first tableau) and IV. We twice see her fall from grace and
plead for pardon.‘52 By de-emphasizing the details of her decadence
and balancing the tragic with the comic, Massenet reduces the
menace posed by Manon while intensifying the lyric drama of her
life.

In the opera we see Manon, and more importantly, we hear
her, that exquisitely beautiful and hauntingly seductive voice and
the music that exalts the young innocent, the sophisticated courtesan,
and the repentant lover. Because Manon loves greatly and dies
opportunely, readers and opera enthusiasts, like Prévost's Des Grieux,
tend to idealize her. The proliferation of works inspired by Manon
Lescaut, in a variety of genres, raises her legend to mythic
proportions. This masterpiece of musical drama crowns Manon's
mythical standing as the Eternal Feminine, a muse capable of firing
men's imaginations by unleashing their latent fears and fantasies and
transporting them to new lyrical heights. She is not such a passive
creature, such a "rien," after all. Over the years, many have
concluded that the Histoire de Manon Lescaut et du Chevalier des

Grieux is a story about Manon,63 not about Des Grieux, nor even

 

62 This exaltation of pity that counterbalances the excesses of masculine
power is typical of the nineteenth-century (History of Private Life, Vol. IV,
page 605).

‘3 Mylne seems to suggest that interest centered on Manon practically
from the beginning. She writes that "as early as 1746 one edition carried the
title Histoire de Manon, thus recognizing that she was the main attraction of
the book" (33). However, it should be noted that the 1885 and 1886 editions,
among many others, carried the title Histoire de Manon Lescaut et du Chevalier
des Grieux, so critics have long differed on this issue. In the next chapter, I

142

 

about Manon and Des Grieux. That is what Massenet shows us better
than anyone before him, and the Manon he creates is a figure of
enchantment who seems to captivate every man she meets--but
without any conscious effort.

Set within the Regency, Massenet's Manon can exalt the beauty
of her story without dwelling on its moral implications. The novel's
hero captured Manon's archetypal essence: she is "I'Amour meme.”
As narrator of their story, Des Grieux tries to transform the earthly
Manon into an idealized Manon. His narrative represents our need to
ennoble ordinary mortals and capture a universal essence in a
beautiful story that transcends banal reality and celebrates the
magic and mystery of love. The opera crystallizes that effort. When
Manon's story is set to music, it is clear that her power of
enchantment makes the work particularly well-suited to the lyric

stage and accounts for much of Manon's enduring appeal.

 

will argue that the novel, unlike the opera, is more about Des Grieux than
Manon.

143

Chapter 5

THE BIRTH OF A STORYTELLER IN MANON LESCAUT

J'ose a peine remuer la cendre de
ce souvenir. " ”Je ne sais encore si
c'est une realité ou une illusion.
"La Morte amoureuse"

The Chevalier des Grieux's love affair with Manon Lescaut
provides rich evidence that many experiences in life are better in the
retelling than in the living. His lived experience is a life-altering
passion for a blossoming beauty of inferior social station which leads
the young aristocrat on a downward spiral to degradation and
disaster. But when he recounts his illicit passion to the Marquis de
Renoncour, he transforms this rather tawdry personal affair into a
powerful expression of a universal experience: the magic, confusion
and disgrace experienced by a young man caught in the grips of an
”amour fatal” (61).

After just a few weeks with Des Grieux, Manon betrays him.
Forcefully separated from her and sequestered in his father's house,
Des Grieux is torn by conflicting emotions, but books help him regain
some peace of mind: 'Tous mes sentiments n'étaient qu'une
alternative perpétuelle de haine et d'amour, d'esperance ou de
désespoir. [...] On me donna des livres, qui servirent a rendre un peu
de tranquillité a mon ame" (37-38). Having experienced love, he
discovers new meaning in the classical poets: "Les lumieres que je
devais a l'amour me firent trouver de la clarte dans quantite

d'endroits d'Horace et de Virgile, qui m'avaient paru obscurs

144

 

auparavant" (38). New sensations and new feelings expand and
transform his consciousness. A flood of emotions clamor for
expression and understanding. The young man, who claims to have
had "le défaut d'étre excessivement timide" (19) before meeting
Manon, now has something to say, ”l'amour [lui] ayant ouvert
extrémement l'esprit" (23).

He composes his first literary work, a commentary on Book IV
of the Aeneid (38). In Book IV Virgil gives allegorical expression to
desire and the nature of young manhood,">4 a theme with which Des
Grieux identifies. Like Des Grieux, Aeneas A is snared by a fatal
passion that leads to confusion and disgrace. Eventually Aeneas
chooses duty over passion. After he abandons his beloved and
faithful Dido, she dies. "C'était un coeur tel que le mien qu'il fallait a
la fidele Didon" (38), Des Grieux concludes, stressing his own capacity
for fidelity.

Inspired by classical literature, he idealizes his love affair with
Manon and imagines himself the faithful and devoted lover Dido
needed. Recounting his adventures to Renoncour, Des Grieux casts
himself not as a disgraced or foolish aristocrat, but rather as a
classical hero in a tragedy of ill-fated love. The problem is that
Manon is not a faithful Dido, at least not without the literary license
of a nascent storyteller who transforms the object of his desire into a
literary heroine worthy of his devotion.

Of course, if she were faithful, Des Grieux would experience no

compulsion to tell his story repeatedly as he seeks to understand and

 

54 Throughout this chapter, the material on the Aeneid is drawn from
Bernardus Silvestris's Commentary on the First Six Books of Virgil's Aeneid.

145

 

justify his behavior, no need to fictionalize his experience as he tries
to give it shape and meaning. However, the aristocratic and the
classical literary traditions in which he was raised prove to be
ineffectual guides unable to account for the likes of Manon Lescaut.
To tell his story, he will need to create a new value system and a
new genre. In this chapter we will study Des Grieux's development
as a storyteller, examine his narrative techniques, and analyze how
he turns shame and degradation into an argument for a new nobility
of the heart and how he transforms "la plus volage et la plus perfide
de toutes les creatures” (36) into ”an amante incomparable" (198),

the most perfect of all beings (200).

When Des Grieux, Manon, and her brother have dinner with M.
de G... M..., Des Grieux has an opportunity to expand his burgeoning
literary talents. Posing as Manon's brother and feigning inexperience
in the ways of the world, he creates and tells a story for his own
amusement and that of Manon and Lescaut. “Je trouvai l'occasion
de raconter [a M. de G... M...] sa propre histoire, et le mauvais sort
qui le menacait. (...) Je faisais son portrait au naturel; mais l'amour-
propre l'empécha de s'y reconnaitre, Ct je l'achevai si adroitement
qu'il fut le premier a le trouver fort risible" (85). He is developing
his capacity for deceit and realizing that, with a little imagination,
truth can be altered and manipulated to create an entertaining,
compelling scenario with more than one layer of meaning.

Writing to his father, “d'une maniere si tendre et si soumise
qu'en relisant [sa] lettre, [il se flatta] d'obtenir quelque chose du

coeur patemel" (115), Des Grieux becomes a satisfied reader of his

146

 

own text, aware of and pleased with himself as a writer. At the end
of the first part of Manon Lescaut, Renoncour says, ”Notre attention
lui fit juger que nous l'avions ecoute avec plaisir. Il nous assura que
nous trouverions quelque chose encore de plus interessant dans la
suite de son histoire” (116). Thus Des Grieux does not promise a
true and complete account of his adventures, but rather an
interesting story.

He is a man who appreciates a good story. When Manon gives
him an ”explanation” that he knows is untrue, he observes, ”Par un
tour naturel de genie qui m'est particulier, je fus touche de
l'ingenuite de son recit, et de cette maniere bonne et ouverte avec
laquelle elle me racontait jusqu'aux circonstances dont j'etais le plus
offense" (147-48). Touched by a storytelling technique similar to his
own, Des Grieux is aware of Manon's talent for invention and of his
own literary sensibilities, sensibilities that reach full flower when he
tells Renoncour his tale. Although this is the first time he recounts
the entire story of his fateful attachment, it is not the first time he
has narrated certain episodes. He hones his rhetorical and narrative
skills while telling parts of his story to eight others: his father,
Tiberge, Lescaut, the pere superieur at Saint-Lazare, the Lieutenant
general de Police, M. de T..., the ship's captain, and the Governor of
Louisiana. His first is his father.

When Des Grieux's father begins making fun of his son for
having been Manon's "jolie dupe” (33), Des Grieux remains silent. His
father continues to detail Manon's infidelity. When he bluntly
portrays her betrayal, Des Grieux faints. Regaining consciousness,

thoughts of betrayal loosen Des Grieux's tongue. Along with a torrent

147

of tears, he unleashes "les plaintes les plus tristes et les plus
touchantes" (34-35). Des Grieux is perceptive enough to notice his
father's sympathetic reaction but has not yet learned to turn
sympathy to personal advantage. He pleads with his father to be
allowed to return to Paris to kill Monsieur B.... As a result of this
indiscreet outburst, his father locks him in an upstairs room. Later,
when his father tries to reason with him, he again cries and talks of
vengeance, a reaction that earns him another six months of
sequestration.

When Des Grieux meets his father two years later, while
imprisoned at Chatelet, the fledgling storyteller has learned to elicit a
more favorable response by adapting his story to his audience.
Arguing that society is corrupt, he contends he has done no worse
than others. It is a strategy he tried out earlier on Tiberge using
ecclesiastical references: "[Uln grand nombre d'eveques et d'autres
pretres savent accorder fort bien une maitresse avec un benefice"
(65). Talking to his aristocratic father, he changes the comparison
from men of the cloth to nobles. Because his father is upset by the
stain on family honor created by his son's escapades, Des Grieux
endeavors to convince his father that he has done no worse than
other aristocrats. "A chaque faute dont je lui faisais l'aveu, j'avais
soin de joindre des exemples celebres pour en diminuer la honte"
(163). He is aware of his rhetorical skills: '[Mon pere] fut touche
du tour que j'avais donne a mes excuses” (163). Having learned to
adapt his rhetoric to the situation, Des Grieux is successful in

persuading his father to get him released from prison.

148

 

A fatal passion, he argues, is the source of all his woes. ”C'est
l'amour, vous le savez, qui a cause toutes mes fautes. Fatale passion!"
He is not in prison because of violence, deceit or kidnapping. Quite
the contrary. "L'amour m'a rendu trop tendre, trop passionne, trop
fiddle et peut-etre, trop complaisant pour les desirs d'une maitresse
toute charmante; voila mes crimes” (162, emphasis added). The
young hustler who has brought shame to his family and himself
argues that he has 'trop d'honneur" not to condemn himself for

having 'desseins sur la bourse des deux G... M... and asks his father
to ”pardonner cette faiblesse aux deux violentes passions qui
[l']avaient agite, la vengeance et l'amour" (164). Vengeance,
according to this argument, is a violent passion but not a crime.
Wanting to believe he is still the quiet and gentle soul he was
when he met Manon, Des Grieux remains incapable of acknowledging
that his passion for Manon has transformed him into a man given to
violent outbursts whenever his desire is thwarted. His narrative
does not depict any objective reality. Rather, it is a subjective,
incomplete account influenced by illusions and delusions that have
become a part of his identity. His tears, his modest and respectful
attitude, his appeal for pity, his self-blame, and his stance as tragic
hero work in concert to arouse his father's pity and prompt him to
obtain Des Grieux's release from prison. These are themes and
narrative strategies he has successfully deployed more than once,
strategies that seem to have taken shape during a conversation with

his friend Tiberge, whose friendship surpasses "les plus celebres

exemples de l'antiquite" (18).

149

 

After losing everything in the fire at Chaillot, Des Grieux turns
to the virtuous and devoted Tiberge. In the Aeneid, Mercury chides
Aeneas. for his disgraceful behavior and persuades him to put
passion aside. in order to fulfill his duty. Tiberge likewise tries to
reawaken Des Grieux's sense of duty. Confused and embarrassed
when his friend meets him in the Palais-Royal garden, Des Grieux
asks if he can still consider Tiberge a friend. Tiberge responds that
"[sles malheurs memes, [sles fautes et [s]es desordres, avaient
redouble sa tendresse pour [Des Grieux]" (58-59). As if taking a cue
from Tiberge, Des Grieux explains what has happened since he fled
Saint-Sulpice.

Je 1e satisfis; et loin d'alterer quelque chose a la verite, ou
de diminuer mes fautes pour les faire trouver plus
excusables, je lui parlai de ma passion avec toute la force
qu'elle m'inspirait. Je la lui representai comme un de ces
coups particuliers du destin qui s'attache a la ruine d'un
miserable, et dont il est aussi impossible a la vertu de se
defendre qu'il l'a ete a la sagesse de les prevoir. Je lui fis
une vive peinture de mes agitations, de mes craintes, du
desespoir or) j'etais deux heures avant que de le voir, et
de celui dans lequel j'allais retomber, si j'etais abandonne
par mes amis aussi impitoyablement que par la fortune;
enfin, j'attendris tellement le bon Tiberge, que je 1e vis
aussi afflige par la compassion que j'etais par le

sentiment de mes peines. (59)

150

 

"Représentai" is a key word. This is a representation, a dramatic tale
artfully told to take advantage of Tiberge's ”tendresse" in order to
elicit his pity and gain access to his purse.

Des Grieux contends that he has not altered the truth. Perhaps
he has not altered events, but the heart of Des Grieux's story does not
lie in a chronicling of events. It lies in the mood he creates and the
interpretation of events he offers. He appeals to Tiberge's emotions,
not his sense of reason or virtue. To understand how subjective Des
Grieux's account is, we need only consider the story his father would
tell. Likely it would be to the effect that here is a foolishly naive
young man who, caught in the claws of a duplicitous and avaricious
whore, brings shame upon himself and his family.

Des Grieux, on the other hand, gives free rein to his passion and
imagination. Displaying an artist's self-awareness of sensitivity, he
savors his eloquence. Although his bond with Manon is carnal, he
discreetly circumvents any account of the ”plaisirs de l'amour” (40)
which inflame his passion. As he attempts to impose order on this
sensory firestorm, his imagination is inseparable from his senses.
Both his lived and his literary experiences stimulate his fantasy, a
fantasy that is displacing reality. Feeling ashamed and seeking self-
justification, he suggests a comparison between himself and the
literary hero, the victim of a tragic fate, he imagines himself to be.
He paints a vivid picture of his apprehensions and despair, a picture
calculated to garner Tiberge's compassion. His dramatic story,
followed by his declaration that death would be preferable to
separation from Manon, transforms Des Grieux's escapades into

pathos.

151

 

As Deloffre and Picard have demonstrated, even when talking
to a priest, Des Grieux, a former seminarian, more closely identifies
his situation with literary tradition, especially with Racinian and
classical tragedy, than with theological tradition. Des Grieux suggests
that he is a tragic hero. Like classical heroes and heroines, he is the
victim of fateful forces. ”Oreste, Roxane, Phedre, sont des victimes
exemplaires du Destin; Des Grieux 3e glisse parmi elles, et l'univers
tragique se constitue autour de lui" (Deloffre CXXX-CXXXI).

Casting himself in the role of tragic hero, his passion as a fatal
attraction that destiny has visited upon a hapless victim, Des Grieux
cloaks his story in the rhetoric of classical tragedy. In Racinian
tragedy, love is "aveugle' and 'funeste.” So too in Manon Lescaut.
"L'amour suffisait seul pour [lui] fermer les yeux sur toutes [les]
fautes [de Manonl' (148). Des Grieux suffers from a "funeste
ascendant" (42); Manon is subject to "funestes pensees” (183); they
both suffer a 'funeste evenement."55

According to Jean Sgard, Des Grieux marshals all the resources
of Ciceronian rhetoric. His eloquence renders his apparent modesty,
sincerity and suffering all the more poignant. Skillfully Des Grieux
guides Tiberge's response--and ours. "Il n'est pas besoin de m'aimer
autant que vous faites pour etre attendri [par mes peinesl” (59).
He opposes his friend's ”compassion” to fortune's "impitoyable"
manner of abandoning him. This is typical of Des Grieux's habit of
manipulating his interlocutors' sympathies and judgments by

reducing situations to polar opposites and appealing to their

 

55 Other uses of fitneste are found on pages 73, 125, 164 and 183.

152

emotions. Frequently, he notices or is even able to predict the
reaction of his interlocutors. Here he notices that the "bon" Tiberge is
'afflige par la compassion" (59). ”Bon,” of course, is not an evaluation
of Tiberge's moral fiber. Rather, he is deemed good because he is the
ideal reader, one who responds compassionately.

Despite Des Grieux's seeming sincerity and forthrightness in
admitting his errors, lies of omission are apparent. When Des Grieux
asks Tiberge to deliver a letter that will set in motion his plan to
escape from Saint-Lazare, he makes no mention of his intention to
flee. Just before going into exile with Manon, Des Grieux writes
Tiberge to ask for money once again. Declaring, ”je ne puis laisser
[Manon] partir sans quelques soulagements" (181), be conveniently
omits mentioning that he intends to follow her to the New World.

Taking the captain aside on the voyage to Louisiana, Des Grieux
even convinces himself that lies are not lies: ”Pour m'attirer de lui
quelque consideration, je lui avais decouvert une partie de mes
infortunes. Je ne crus pas me rendre coupable d'un mensonge
honteux en lui disant que j'etais marie a Manon” (183-84). Judging
which of his woes are most likely to touch the captain's heart, Des
Grieux reveals selected episodes from his story, and as might be
expected, the sympathy that he succeeds in arousing results in better
treatment for him and Manon.

At Saint-Lazare he also develops his aptitude for drama and
deceit, his ability to transform fact into fantasy. Taking advantage of
the priest's hope of effecting a conversion in Des Grieux, the chevalier
resolves to increase the priest's good opinion of his "excellent fond de

caractere" (82), not because he has experienced any real conversion,

153

but rather because he sees it as the surest way to shorten his
imprisonment. To give the priest proof of the change that the priest
wants to see, Des Grieux plays the role of a chastened young man: "Je
feignis de m'appliquer a l'etude. (...) Cependant il n'etait qu'exterieur.
[J]e jouais, a Saint-Lazare, un personnage d'hypocrite" (83). He
admits that his modest, sincere air disguises his real objective: escape
from Saint-Lazare. "J'observais soigneusement le visage et les
discours du superieur, pour m'assurer de ce qu'il pensait de moi, et je
me faisais une etude de lui plaire, comme a l'arbitre de ma destinee"
(83). '

Although the priest is as virtuous and serious as Tiberge, he is
easy-going, perhaps even a bit senile. He will be easily swayed by
Des Grieux's tears and lofty rhetoric. To elicit the priest's pity, Des
Grieux passionately recounts his tale and judiciously seasons it with
cries to heaven: "0 Dieu! justice du Ciel!" (85) and "O Ciel!” (86).

He begins with respect, tears, and despair. Speaking in
superlatives, he paints a vivid picture of his ”insurmontable passion”
(86). Rhetorically he directs the priest's--and thus the reader's--
response: "Vous etes bon, vous aurez pitie de moi” (86). He creates
the illusion of sincerity and tragedy. He glosses over those aspects of
the story that are at odds with his objective and self-image. His
attack on G... M... becomes incidental in Des Grieux's version of
events: G... M... is a barbarian, Des Grieux and Manon his victims.
Playing on his interlocutor's self-image, Des Grieux calls the priest
”bon" and opposes the good father and himself, a man dominated by
a great love, to the despicable, cowardly and unworthy G... M..., a man

prone to the most hideous cruelties. He is so successful in playing

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the role of tragic hero and portraying himself as a sensitive young
man victimized by a brute that the priest, who is also his prison
keeper, endeavors to comfort himl.

Throughout his tale, Des Grieux posits reductive opposites.
Those who are moved by his and Manon's anguish are depicted as
good, compassionate and generous souls, those opposed to their
designs as barbarians, a recurring motif. Some form of ”barbare,”
used thirteen times,“ is a motif introduced early. The archers
transporting Manon to Le Havre "ont la barbarie de repousser [Des
Grieux] brutalement" whenever he tries to approach Manon. Only a
”barbare” (47) would not be moved by Manon's tender remorse at
Saint-Sulpice. The concierge at the Hepital is the only one, 'dans le
sejour de la durete et de la barbarie" (167), to react compassionately
to Des Grieux's suffering. Even his father is characterized as
”barbare” (194) when he fails to respond compassionately to Des
Grieux's "plaintes.” In the scene at Saint-Lazare, Des Grieux deflects
attention once again from his own behavior--he has just tried to
strangle G... M...--by claiming that G... M... is "le barbare qui venait de
[l']assassiner" (85). G... M...'s real crime? He sent Manon to the
Hepital.

The rhetoric with which Des Grieux deflects attention from his
attempt to dupe and later strangle G... M... is so effective that it
completely changes the priest's understanding of events. "11 me dit
qu'il n'avait jamais compris mon aventure de la maniere dont je la

racontais" (87). The pere Superieur goes to the Lieutenant general

 

66 Pages 11, 14, 30, 47, 79, 85, 86, 143, 167, 172 (twice), 193 and 194.

155

de Police to plead for leniency for Des Grieux. Leniency, however,
does not lead to a release from prison, so Des Grieux plots his own
escape. And when he kills a servant to implement his plan, he
devotes but a single sentence to the deed. Then he adds, "Voila de
quoi vous étes cause, mon Pere" (97). It is a familiar pattern. He
shifts responsibility to someone else, first "le bon Pete” and later
Lescaut (97). This lack of remorse over the murder of a servant may
be explicable by the chevalier’s social standing in early eighteenth-
century France. Nonetheless, his unwillingness to accept personal
responsibility is yet another reminder that he renders a very
subjective account.

When Des Grieux must deal directly with the Lieutenant
general de Police, he notices that the officer is "un juge raisonnable"-
-i.e., inclined to attribute Des Grieux's transgressions to imprudence
and folly rather than malice. Des Grieux explains his situation "d'une
maniere si respectueuse et si moderee, [que le Lieutenant general de
Police] parut extremement satisfait de [s]es reponses, et il sentait
dispose a rendre service [a Des Grieux], en faveur de [sla naissance
et de [s]a jeunesse” (160). Class is an underlying issue felt
throughout the novel, and Des Grieux benefits from a society
indulgent toward young people with aristocratic origins. The priest
at Saint-Lazare, the Lieutenant general de Police, M. de T... and
Renoncour all give him special treatment because of his class.

At the beginning of the novel, before we meet Des Grieux, the
Marquis de Renoncour predisposes us to view Des Grieux as a young
man of good breeding who is worthy of our interest and respect. He

has "un air si fin et si noble” that Renoncour feels ”porte

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naturellement a lui vouloir du bien." It is a narrative technique used
by the author, frame narrator and storytelling hero. The frame
narrator or Des Grieux predisposes the reader to view a character
favorably or unfavorably before revealing what the character says or
does. Before we learn anything about Manon, Renoncour tells us she
is a young woman "dont l'air et la figure etaient si peu conformes a
sa condition, qu'en tout autre etat je l'eusse prise pour une personne
du premier rang" (ll-12). Her sadness and the filth covering her
inspire him with ”respect” and ”pitie." She turns away so that people
cannot see her face. The gesture is ”si naturel qu'il paraissait venir
d'un sentiment de modestie" (12). Similarly, Des Grieux favorably
depicts anyone who responds compassionately to his and Manon's
plight and negatively anyone opposed to their desires. For example,
he paints G... M... as a barbarian, the guards charged with
transporting the convoy of prostitutes to Le Havre as "miserables'
and ”laches coquins” (13) before disclosing that he attacked them and
then complaining that they limit his access to Manon. Tiberge, on the
other hand, has ”un zele et une generosite'" (18) unsurpassed in the
annals of friendship. Before revealing that M. de T... helps Manon
escape from prison, Des Grieux announces that M. de T...'s appearance
and manners augur well for him. Of course, this is Prévost's
narrative strategy, but he attributes the same device to his
narrator/hero.

Returning to France after Manon's death, the nascent
storyteller meets Renoncour and recounts the full history of his
fateful passion. The narrative strategies developed while spinning his

stories-within-the-story are evident, but the larger story is a much

157

 

richer, more complex narrative complete with character, plot, and
theme. Whether his narrative shapes or reflects his fate, it gives life
to the destiny he imagines for himself.

Their fateful first meeting is the coup de foudre. When he sees
Manon in that Amiens courtyard, she is ”si charmante" that Des
Grieux finds himself disoriented and "enflamme tout d'un coup
jusqu'au transport” (19). It is a sexual awakening for a young man
who had never thought about the ”difference des sexes" (19). For
Des Grieux, as for Aeneas, excitement of the flesh leads to desire, and
he is spontaneously propelled toward ”la maitresse de [s]on coeur”
19).

Much of the power of his narrative lies in his attempts to
articulate his feelings. When Manon appears unexpectedly in the
celebrated scene at Saint-Sulpice, Des Grieux experiences "a total
disorientation of his inherited categories of perception and their
accompanying modes of discourse” (Josephs 187), just as he did at
their first meeting. She is a dazzling enchantress beyond description.
He attempts to express the fear and chaos that grip him as he stands
speechless and trembling before her blinding beauty and troubling
sensuality.

Quel passage, en effet de la situation tranquille ou j'avais
ete, aux mouvements tumultueux que je sentais renaitre!
J'en etais epouvante. Je fremissais, comme il arrive
lorsqu'on se trouve la nuit dans une campagne ecartee: on
se croit transporte dans un nouvel ordre de choses; on y

est saisi d'une horreur secrete, dont on ne se remet

158

 

qu'apres avoir considere longtemps tous les environs.

(45)
Struggling to understand and explain his reaction, he talks of a
passage, but it is a movement of his heart, mind and soul, not a
physical movement. He describes the disturbing, frightening
sensations that so easily overwhelm his hard-won serenity and
propel him into a "un nouvel ordre de choses.” His metaphor
suggests that understanding, along with a less terrifying view of this
captivating creature, will come later. Regaining his speech, he speaks
in a new language, ”un melange profane d'expressions amoureuses et
theologiques" (45). Despite the tinge of theology, his discourse
resonates with the power of Manon's earthly charms. Throughout his
narrative, however, he persists in this process of spiritualization as
he seeks to deal with the unfamiliar reality represented by Manon.
Transforming her into an abstraction, 'I'Amour meme" (44), he
attempts to move from sensation to understanding.

Translating Manon into linguistic form allows Des Grieux to
dominate her and to relive and reshape the memory of his great
passion while grappling with the questions that haunt him, questions
about the nature of passion, about Manon, about their relationship,
and about himself. He struggles to put a name to his experience and
to understand by what fatality love, "une passion innocente" became
"une source de miseres et de desordres,” and how he, who had led a
life ”31 sage et si reglee" (17), became "si criminel" (72).

In the course of his tale he will often describe the ”desordre"
created by Manon's bewitching power over him. He is embarrassed

by the realization that his life is dominated by forces he feels

159

helpless to control. Her sexuality is a disturbing presence that
obliterates his self-control, causing him to behave in scandalous ways
it shames him to admit. He frequently depicts himself in a state of
confusion and smarts at "la honte et l'indignite de [sles chaines" (61).
For Des Grieux, like Aeneas, desire leads to impurity of the flesh,
causes confusion, and clouds judgment and discretion. In the Aeneid,
not even the public disgrace of a bad reputation checks Aeneas's
scandalous behavior, nor does it Des Grieux's. As long as Manon
lives, she can erupt at any moment and turn his life upside down.

By imposing his script on her after her death, he wrests control
from Manon and regains some control of his own life. There is no
possibility of her compromising his story or disproving his
assessment of her character. Only after her death is he able to take
control of his script, reconcile purity and desire, and become once
again "douce et tranquille" (17). His narrative melds his life
experience with his literary experience to stimulate fantasies that
displace sordid realities.

Des Grieux is on his way to meet his brother when he meets
Renoncour in Calais. It has been three or four years since the two
brothers have met. Quite possibly the story he tells Renoncour is a
trial run of the story he will tell his brother and friends later on in
an attempt to narrate his way back into the traditional Old World
social milieu in which he grew up. Manon's death provides the
necessary preamble for the re-establishment of the traditional
patriarchal social order and for Des Grieux's reintegration into that
social order. He recounts his adventures to Renoncour, a member of

his social class. William Ray argues that by listening to Des Grieux's

160

 

story, this older nobleman, who is touched by Manon and yet
possesses the principles of virtue which the chevalier has
transgressed, can perform Des Grieux's reintegration into the social
order (192).

Des Grieux tells his story just after learning of his father's
death, to which he fears his ”egarements" (204) may have
contributed, but this realization comes to him in the time of the
narration as he comes to understand the shamefulness of his conduct.
In part his story is an attempt to persuade himself that his behavior
was not so scandalous as to have been a contributing factor in his
father's death To admit responsibility for that death--and,
symbolically, for the death of the old order--would be to negate his
role as a classical hero victimized by a tragic destiny.

Throughout his story, his violent passion is at odds with his
gentle self-image. Citing aristocratic origins, he notes that he comes
from a good family, that he led an exemplary life as a student, and
that he has an innate aversion to vice. 'J'ai l'humeur naturellement
douce et tranquille” (17). His use of the present tense suggests that
his basic nature remains unchanged, yet it is an assessment difficult
to reconcile with his violent outbursts: his desire to kill B..., attempt
to strangle G... M..., his murder of a servant, his duel with Synnelet,
the ”apoplexie violente" (66), etc. Unable to justify his violence or to
reconcile it with his self-image, he claims that others provoke him,
he blames someone else, or he simply glosses over his violent
behavior. His self-assessment, in other words, is fictionalized and

incomplete. As narrator, he lacks the intellectual and moral distance

161

needed to challenge the inconsistencies in his story. The problem is
reflected in the confusion of tenses.
Des Grieux intersperses his narrative with frequent judgments
in the present tense, often using the subject pronoun "on" to
introduce generalizations. Because he so readily mixes past and
present tenses, it is difficult to distinguish between the narrator and
protagonist. Reacting to the letter in which Manon announces that
she has run off with M. de G... M..., both protagonist and narrator
appear suspended in confusion as Des Grieux struggles to express
how he felt.
Je demeurai, apres cette lecture, dans un etat qui me
serait difficile a decrire car j'ignore encore aujourd'hui
par quelle espece de sentiments je fus alors agite. Ce fut
une de ces situations uniques auxquelles on n'a rien
eprouve qui soit semblable. On ne saurait les expliquer
aux autres, parce qu'ils n'en ont pas l'idee; et l'on a peine
a se les bien demeler a soi-meme, parce qu'etant seules
de leur espece, cela ne se lie a rien dans la memoire, et ne
peut meme etre rapproche d'aucun sentiment connu.
Cependant, de quelque nature que fussent les miens, il
est certain qu'il devait y entrer de la douleur, du depit,
de la jalousie et de la honte. (69)

A retrospective account offers the possibility of understanding. Yet

Des Grieux, who is recounting this episode more than two years after

it occurred, remains unable to to unravel the troubling turmoil into

which Manon's letter throws him. It appears that time and distance

162

 

have not quelled the disquieting feelings she awakens. Anguished
confusion characterizes his account.

Citing evidence that Manon loves him, he asks plaintively,
”Quelle raison aurait-elle de se contrefaire jusqu'a ce point?" (110).
The question gnaws away at him. He tries to work out an answer by
revisiting his entire relationship with Manon. The inadmissible
possibility is that Manon did not love him as much as he wants to
believe she did, and that hers was not just an infidelity of the flesh,
but also an infidelity of the heart. "Accuser Manon, c'est de quoi mon
coeur n'osait se rendre coupable” (30). Yet he is tormented by
doubts. "O dieux! dieux! serait-i1 possible que Manon m'eut trahi, et
qu'elle eat cesse de m'aimer!" (35). As he relives his great passion,
we cannot tell if he is talking in the time of the action or in the time
of the narration. It appears to be both, once again confusing the
roles of the narrator and the protagonist. It is the purposeful
confusion of a narrator captivated by the power of his own story.

When Des Grieux learns that the priest at Saint-Lazare has
been fully informed of his scandalous escapades, shame and
confusion overwhelm him. But avowals of confusion are a shield he
uses to protect himself from having to deal with disgrace and
embarrassment. By repeatedly admitting his shame, he hopes to
absolve himself of shame.

A passage follows in which Des Grieux proposes a nobility of
sensitivity, the new value system by which he and his story are to be
judged. Shame and vengeance (i.e., his violent attacks on others),
which he terms two ”violentes passions" (81, 164), are

metamorphosed into virtues.

163

11 y a peu de personnes qui connaissent la force de ces
mouvements particuliers du coeur. Le commun des
hommes n'est sensible qu'a cinq on six passions, dans le
cercle desquelles leur vie se passe, et or) leurs agitations
se reduisent. Otez-leur l'amour et la haine, le plaisir et la
douleur, l'esperance et la crainte, ils ne sentent plus rien.
Mais les personnes d'un caractere plus noble peuvent
etre remuees de mille facons differentes; et comme
elles ont un sentiment de cette grandeur qui les eleve au
dessus du vulgaire, il n'y a rien dont elles soient plus
jalouses. De la vient qu'elles souffrent si impatiemment
le mepris et la risee, et que la honte est une de leurs plus
violentes passions. (81)
Once again, Des Grieux carefully guides the priest's and our reading
of his story. He first expresses and then celebrates his feelings. In
addition to compassion, he now wants our approval and admiration
as well. As Herbert Josephs has so persuasively demonstrated, this
passage, along with others, represents the resourceful intellectual
evasiveness which pervades the novel. Speaking in the present
tense, Des Grieux never achieves the critical distance needed to
examine the possible implications of a new aristocracy. Nor does the
class-conscious narrator, whose thoughts often turn toward home
with pride and yearning, ever address the conflict between a new
aristocracy founded on sensibility and the old aristocracy based on
birth, a system whose privileges he is reluctant to relinquish.
His discreet cynicism also reveals a moral and intellectual

evasiveness. After fire consumes their home at Chaillot, it occurs to

164

Des Grieux to use his "esprit" and ”qualites naturelles" (53) to take up
gambling and dupe others at the gaming tables. In fact, "Le Ciel [lui]
fait na‘r‘tre [cette] idee" (53). ”C'e‘st un fond excellent de revenu pour
les petits que la sottise des riches et des grands” (54). Rather than
acknowledge that he is a scoundrel or express any regret over having
bilked other gamblers of their money, he claims it was a divinely
inspired idea for sharing wealth, a plan ordained by "la divine
Sagesse” (54) for taking care of everyone's needs. Like his avowals
of shame and confusion, his cynicism sidesteps the moral and
intellectual challenge we might expect from a narrator who claims a
return to virtue at the end of his account.

Telling his story to Renoncour, he is torn between his need to
create an idealized Manon that merits his faithful adoration and his
need to acknowledge that some of her behavior is indeed difficult to
defend. He oscillates, dealing intermittently and in different ways
with his conflict. He admits her intended infidelity with G... M..., then
diffuses the pain of betrayal with ironic humor: "Elle ne pouvait
esperer que G... M... la laissat, toute la nuit, comme une vestale"
(147). As narrator, he repeats his father's account of Manon's
betrayal. As protagonist, he refuses to believe that she willingly
betrayed him. He insists that M. de B... must have used a charm or
poison to seduce her, an idea he may have drawn from Phedre.57
More often he tries to justify behavior that appears to conflict with
his idealized vision of Manon. Such is the case after she rejects his

plan to write his father requesting permission to marry. "Les

 

57 ”Quel charme ou quel poison en a tari la source?" (Phedre, 1.3, qtd by
Deloffre, 35, note I).

165

 

difficultes qu'elle y opposa n'etant prises que de sa tendresse meme
et de la crainte de me perdre" (26).

Manon appears to feel a genuine affection for Des Grieux, but it
is at odds with the penchant for pleasure that drives her to betray
him. He describes her demeanor at their ”interrupted supperz'

Je crus apercevoir de la tristesse sur le visage et dans les
yeux de ma chere maitresse. [...] Je remarquai que ses
regards s'attachaient sur moi d'une autre facon qu'ils
n'avaient accoutume. Je ne pouvais demeler si 66th de
l'amour ou de la compassion, quoiqu'il me parut que
c'etait un sentiment doux et languissant. (29, emphasis
added).
"Je crus apercevoir" and ”i1 me parut” are two of the many self-
reflective signs that Des Grieux uses and wants us to hear throughout
his narrative. This is the subjective account of a narrator who
recognizes how emotion and affect shape and influence our
perception. Just as he is aware of and needs to voice the realities of
his experience, he is aware and needs to say that this reality can be
transformed.

Moments after their initial encounter, Manon reveals herself as
a self-interested young woman with some talent for duplicity. She is
”plus experimentee" than he (20). She responds "ingenument" when
Des Grieux asks what brings her to Amiens (20). Of course, these are
observations that occur only later to Des Grieux the narrator. Pride,
not affection, seems her primary motivation. She finds Des Grieux
likeable, but more importantly, "elle se trouva flattee d'avoir fait la

conquete d'un amant tel que [lui]" (22), a handsome aristocrat. From

166

the very beginning, then, there are indications that Manon's passion
for Des Grieux is less fervent than his for her. Yet his story is
ambiguous: ”Quelque passionne que je fusse pour Manon, elle sut me
persuader qu'elle ne l'etait pas moins pour moi" (24 emphasis
added). He recognizes he may have been deluded and yet he clings
to his fantasy of loving a faithful Dido.

When the protagonist finally begins to recognize the hints that
Manon may have a new lover, he finds it difficult to "dormer a tant
d'enigmes un sens aussi favorable que [s]on coeur souhaitait" (28).
At once he is confessing that her infidelity is difficult to admit and
that his heart is unwilling to entertain just any explanation, but
rather it demands an explanation in accord with his fantasized vision
of their relationship. When his father tells him he hopes “cette petite
aventure” (50) will make him wiser in the future, Des Grieux
confesses his proclivity for self-delusion: ”Je ne pris ce discours que
dans le sens qui s'accordait avec mes idees' (32). From the
beginning, Des Grieux, a young man who grew up buried in books,
clings to fantasies about noble but ill-fated love affairs found in
classical literature. Refusing more realistic explanations, he seeks
within his narrative to fuse the more sordid realities of his actual
experience with the glow of his fictional aspirations.

The devoted Manon depicted at the end is different from the
faithless, frivolous, amoral Manon portrayed throughout most of his
story. Des Grieux's attempt to transform Manon's character is his
solution to his need both to idealize her and to acknowledge that she
is unworthy of his devotion. In death he immortalizes the "other”

Manon, the one that he has imagined all along. Giving his memory a

167

 

permanent literary form enables him to revisit and relive his love
affair. As he grows older, his story will allow him to continue to
enjoy «cette erreur de jeunesse» (38). He transposes her into a
literary subject he can contemplate, admire and adore. The literary
Manon belongs to him alone. Others can only look and admire; they
cannot possess her. She is a complex literary heroine of his own
creation.

He argues that she has beauty, charm, and a sweet gentle
quality. Until their arrival in the New World, we see few
manifestations of her ”douceur,” but Des Grieux offers the testimony
of a prison guard at the Hepital who reports that she has behaved
with "une douceur angelique" (102). This use of third-party
testimony adds credibility to his own assessment of his beloved's
character. During incarceration Manon cried continually, sewed and
read, according to the guard. In fact, she seems to dissolve into tears
as easily as Des Grieux, suggesting an emotionally fragile young
woman, not the dangerous femme fatale described by writers such as
Dumas fils and Maupassant. The vision of Manon sewing presents a
new image that counterbalances visions of a courtesan who threatens
social stability. And she is literate (102, 130, 140), again a portrait
out of keeping with typical notions about early eighteenth-century
filles de joie. Like Des Grieux, she stands out from her peers. Or does
she? Some of Des Grieux's claims seem questionable.

He claims that the scene with the Italian prince demonstrates
"les agrements de son esprit" (119). Actually she is a bit crude in
this scene in which she finds it highly amusing to drag one aristocrat

around by the hair in order to insult and embarrass another for no

168

reason other than her own entertainment. Manon displays a
commonness of manners and moeurs that represent an unfamiliar
reality for the class-conscious Des Grieux. Her letter announcing her
betrayal, for example, reflects a certain vulgarity: ”C'est une sotte
vertu que la fidelite. Crois-tu qu'on puisse etre bien tendre lorsqu'on
manque de pain?” (69). Having renounced family and fortune for
love of Manon, Des Grieux is shocked by Manon's sense of economic
realities, which are so foreign to his aristocratic sensibilities: "Elle
apprehende la faim. Dieu d'amour! quelle grossierete de sentiments!”
(70). However realistic her sentiments might be, they lack
délicatesse.

For every proof of a certain nobility in Manon's character that
Des Grieux offers, he negates it with contradictory evidence. In one
scene she has "un caractere extraordinaire" (61), in another "un
miserable caractere" (142). His inability to understand Manon
continues to plague him. He is both drawn to and repulsed by her.
It is this ambivalence about her character and his reluctance to
shoulder responsibility for his own complicity that, in large part,
drives his narrative because Des Grieux continues to find it difficult
to reconcile reality with the more ideal world he imagines.

Despite his doubts about Manon's sincerity, he reports that she
was never happy with M. de B... because "elle portait, au fond du
coeur, le souvenir de mon amour, et le remords de son infidelite”
(47). Her reticence in delivering promised sexual favors to M. de G...
M... and his son suggest her love for Des Grieux was genuine. Manon
is not given to debauchery. For every indication that her love was

not sincere, there is another that suggests that she did love Des

169

 

Grieux--at least in her own fashion if not in the way he would have
liked. Hi3 obsession with his inability to resolve his mixed feelings
and unravel the mysteries of this enigmatic charmer drives his
narrative.

One of his most balanced assessments of her seems to occur
after their money disappears during the fire at Chaillot. Des Grieux
worries that ”quelque fidele et quelque attachee qu'elle [lui] fut dans
la bonne fortune, il ne fallait pas compter sur elle dans la misere"
(53).

Jamais fille n'eut moins d'attachement qu'elle pour
l'argent, mais elle ne pouvait etre tranquille un moment,
avec la crainte d'en manquer. C'etait du plaisir et des
passe-temps qu'il lui fallait. [...] Elle m'aurait prefere a
toute la terre avec une fortune mediocre; mais je ne
doutais nullement qu'elle ne m'abandonnat pour quelque
nouveau B... lorsqu'il ne me resterait que de la constance
et de la fidelite a lui offrir. (61-62)
It is the portrait of a love that will always be tainted by suspicion, a
portrait that portends disappointment and betrayal. Despite this
clear-headed assessment of Manon's character, Des Grieux remains
incapable or unwilling to avert disaster.

Often his portrait of Manon resembles his self-portrait. She has
a ”tristesse extraordinaire" and is overcome by "larmes” (31). At
Saint-Sulpice, "elle confessait que son infidelite meritait ma haine"
(44), much as Des Grieux openly admits his shame to Renoncour.
Sounding every bit as dramatic as Des Grieux, she claims, "Je

pretends mourir si vous ne me rendez votre coeur, sans lequel i1

170

 

est impossible que je vive” (45). When transported for exile, shame
paralyzes Manon with despair and renders her incapable of speaking.
"Il semblait que la honte et la douleur eussent altere les organes de
sa voix” (179). She suffers more from social condemnation and
exclusion than from physical and material discomfort. This reaction
recalls the shame and humiliation that placed Des Grieux beyond
consolation at Saint-Lazare (81).

Manon describes her love as exceptional, a rhetorical device
typical of Des Grieux's discourse. "S'il n'y eut jamais d'amour tel que
le vetre, il est impossible aussi d'etre aime plus tendrement que vous
l'etes. [...] Je sens bien que je n'ai jamais merite ce prodigieux
attachement que vous avez pour moi. [...] J'ai ete legere et volage, et
meme en vous aimant eperdument, comme j'ai toujours fait, je n'etais
qu'une ingrate" (187). The polarized portrait of Manon in France
gradually shifts to a portrait of Manon in the New World that is more
consistent with a classical heroine. As he transforms her from an
unfaithful girl of dubious moral character into literary heroine
worthy of aristocratic concern, he endows her with his rhetorical
eloquence.

In her letter announcing her betrayal, Manon calls Des Grieux
"l'idole de mon coeur” (68). At the Hepital, he uses the same
expression (101), and in the end, he buries "l'idole de mon coeur"
(200). They even wear the same clothes. Helping her escape from
the prison to which the patriarchy condemned her, he ironically
gives her his own clothes, clothes of the patriarchy, to wear. And
when he buries her, he once again wraps her is his clothes, the

clothes of the aristocracy. Language and clothes blur the distinction

171

 

between Manon and Des Grieux, gradually transforming a young
woman of common birth into an aristocratic heroine.

Manon ”peche sans malice...; elle est legere et impudente, mais
elle est droite et sincere” (148), according to Des Grieux. The
Lieutenant general de Police releases Des Grieux from jail because he
sees in Des Grieux's behavior "plus d'imprudence et de legerete que
de malice" (160). As Des Grieux transforms Manon, he gradually
projects himself onto her by attributing his own qualities to her.

Another way in which he subtly shapes our perception of
Manon is by reversing the connotation of expressions used to
denigrate her. Her brother suggests that "true fille comme elle,” a girl
”ayant viole les lois de son sexe" (55), should support them (by
prostitution). When Des Grieux goes to see Manon at the young G...
M...'s, he first reproaches her. Frightened by his outburst, she
trembles as she looks at him without daring to breathe. Suddenly, he
is asking her pardon and confessing that he does not deserve to be
loved by ”une fille comme elle" (143). He has taken an expression
used derogatorily to paint Manon as a girl of loose morals and used it
to connote superiority.

Des Grieux's decision to follow Manon into exile and misery
triggers her conversion. Finally understanding what it means to love
and be loved, ”Cette pauvre fille se livre a des sentiments si tendres
et 31 douloureux" (179). On the boat Manon recognizes that Des
Grieux is continually attentive to her needs, and "cette vue, jointe au
vif ressentiment de l'etrange extremite ou je m'etais reduit pour elle,
la rendait si tendre et 31 passionnee, si attentive aussi a mes plus

legers besoins, que c'etait entre elle et moi, une perpetuelle

172

emulation de services et d'amour” (184). Again, the distinction
between them is blurred.

In le Nouvel Orleans, she is faithful, adoring and solicitous. Her
love becomes as exceptional as his, she confesses her errors and
praises his "home extreme” in forgiving her (187). Yet some
ambiguity remains. When Des Grieux suggests that they ennoble
their love through marriage, he depicts a humble Manon thrilled by
the idea--but only after a moment's hesitation: "11 me parut que ce
discours la penetrait de joie" (190 emphasis added). His doubts are
never completely eradicated. They are fundamental to his tale. Once
Manon announces, ”Je suis changee" (188), the story is over.

His portrait of Manon remains as a tribute to her charms. Even
when she is in filthy degrading conditions, Des Grieux describes the
woman who has betrayed and ruined him as ”cette figure capable de
ramener l'univers a l'idolatrie" (178). The woman his tale
immortalizes is thus metamorphosed into a mythical goddess capable
of toppling nations. As nineteenth-century reception, capped by
Massenet's Manon, demonstrates, Des Grieux so successfully
celebrates the charms of this enchanting figure who inspires his
obsessive, blind adoration, that she captures the imagination and
stimulates the fantasies of centuries of readers to come.

Renoncour commented early in the novel on the ”caractere
incomprehensible des femmes" (15). Des Grieux's story explores this
dimension of mystery in life and the confusion wrought by the
incomprehensible. Memories of Manon still unleash troubling,
terrifying, incomprehensible tremors of desire, but they are calmed

as he fuses them with memories of classical literary heroines.

173

Combining the two he creates a new heroine, new values, and a new
genre. His love affair pits him against established authority. He
wants to affirm his value as an individual and the validity of his
experience without relinquishing his class privilege. To do so, he
depicts himself as an extraordinary individual living a unique
experience. His love and devotion are exceptional. No one has loved
more tenderly than Des Grieux and Manon (187). His experience is
unparalleled: ”J'etais dans une agitation que je ne saurais comparer a
rien parce qu'il n'y en eut jamais d'egale" (194). His insistence on the
uniqueness of his situation is characteristic of the new genre Prevost
is creating. It is one the earliest novels written in the first person
and ”reflects one of the fundamental beliefs upon which the modern
novel form is predicated, that individual experience is always
original and not simply the most recent expression of a never-
changing natural order" (Josephs 187).

One of the forces contributing to the popularity of first-person
narratives in the eighteenth century was the public demand for
realism coupled with a demand for moral idealism. By using a first-
person narrative, the author could say, ”This is what actually
happened," or "this is the story told to me."58 Then he would add a
preface in which he argued that no reader would want to repeat the
experiences of his protagonist. So, too, in the "Avis de l'auteur"

introducing Manon Lescaut, we read, "[Le public] verra dans la

 

‘53 Later in the century, in novels such as Laclos's Les Liaisons
dangereuses, the first-person narrative will often take the form of an
epistolary novel, and the author's justification will be, ”These are the letters
that came into my possession.”

174

 

conduite de M. des Grieux, un exemple terrible de la force des
passions" (4). "On y trouvera peu d'evenements qui ne puissent
servir a l‘instruction des moeurs” (5). Prefatory promises to the
contrary, the novel suggests an ideal more appealing than virtue:
passion with all its intolerable suffering offers glorious delights to
those who submit to its irresistible forces.

We have seen that Prevost's mixing of tenses establishes a
close identity between the protagonist and narrator that sometimes
makes it difficult to know who is speaking. This ambiguity of voice
also makes it difficult to identify Prevost's voice. Speaking through
Renoncour, the author seems to suggest how the story might be read
when he concludes that Des Grieux "etait ne quelque chose, et qu'il
meritait ma liberalite" (15). Des Grieux suggests a similar reading of
his tale when he admits to misdeeds and shameful weaknesses, then
quickly adds: "Je suis stir qu'en me condamnant, vous ne pourrez pas
vous empecher de me plaindre” (16). By yielding authorial control to
his narrator, Prevost's position on the established moral and social
order becomes even more ambiguous. He seems to be in complicity
with his hero. Neither the didactic claims of the preface nor Des
Grieux's moralizing afterthoughts are ever given the dramatic life
needed to challenge the power of illicit passion so profoundly felt
throughout the rest of the novel.

One might have expected that Des Grieux would tell Tiberge his
full story. Instead he chooses two relative strangers, two
interlocutors with no firsthand information about what has
happened, an audience unlikely to counter his version of events with

personal knowledge of people and events. He is aware that he has

175

 

transformed reality. Recounting his adventures, Des Grieux edits and
embellishes his experiences to make them appear more tragic, his
characters more noble and extraordinary. His is a complex tale with
several layers of meaning. He carefully controls and gradually
elevates the tone throughout his narrative, interjecting commentary
as needed to guide our assessment of characters and events. He
consciously crafts his narrative to pique and maintain our interest.
It is a story contrived for dramatic effect. From the outset we know
that something devastating has befallen our hero. He promises to
reveal '[ses] malheurs, [ses] peines, [ses] desordres, et [ses] plus
honteuses faiblesses" (16). Arguing he was born ”pour les courtes
joies et les longues douleurs" (75), he unfurls a plot structure in
which waves of increasingly serious trials and tribulations are
relieved by brief moments of happiness.69 Continual foreshadowing
of fatality builds to the dramatic climax in the Louisiana ”desert."
Only then, at the very end of a long and emotionally exhausting
story, do we learn that Manon is dead.

Des Grieux paints his protagonists as he pictures them to
himself and as he would like others to see them. He offers a positive
interpretation of their basest behavior and defuses the gravity of
their transgressions with ironic humor. Sordid realities play but a
comic role in his narrative. Manon's manners and morals reflect her
common birth, but words like courtisane, grisette, and fille de joie

are not part of his lofty rhetoric. Manon is a reine, his chere

 

59 See Appendix A for an outline of the novel's undulating plot
structure in which waves of increasingly serious offenses and misfortunes are
relieved by brief moments of happiness.

176

 

maitresse, and la premiere princesse du monde. Learning that she
has been sent to the Hopital, Des Grieux reacts in horror but does not
detail the realities of confinement in the infamous prison. Rather he
paints Manon as a sad, demure, domestically-occupied young woman
who attracts the compassionate attention of her guard.

She does not die a lonely and forgotten death following a
ridiculous duel over a deported prostitute in a distant land. Rather,
she dies a lyricized death that forever marks a young French
nobleman's heart. Nor does she die a faded courtesan. She dies
while still young and beautiful. That is the image that captures the
chevalier’s imagination and ours. Nineteenth-century fascination
with Manon testifies to the enduring power of that image.

As Des Grieux crafts his tale, he forgets what it suits him to
forget. He convinces himself that a lie is not a lie, that modifications
and embellishments create a story that more accurately conveys the
essence of his tale. As Jeanne Monty remarks, ”There is present
throughout the work a leitmotif of admiration for Manon which
relegates any of her actions, as well as those committed at her
instigation, to a level of secondary importance, of merely transitory
relevancy. What are essential and constant are her charm and
beauty, her capacity for inspiring at all times men's respect and
admiration. That is the 'real' Manon” (152).

Telling his story allows Des Grieux to idealize and savor the
magic of Manon. ”Je trouve encore de la douceur dans un souvenir
qui me represente 3a tendresse et les agrements de son esprit" (119).
Recounting his long adventure to virtual strangers demonstrates his

need to talk about, to try to articulate, his experience of this

177

mystifying enchantress. His analysis often goes in circles, revealing
only that reason and analysis sometimes fail in the presence of love.
The workings of the human heart remain a mystery, and the hope
that retelling his tale will give shape and meaning to his experience
remains largely unrealized.

His polarized portrait of his beloved reflects his soul's anguish
and confusion over a woman and an experience that have opened his
heart to joys and sorrows previously unknown to him. The
inconstant, unworthy Manon is essential to the originality of the
creation and of the particular drama, intellectual, imaginative and,
above all, loving, that constitutes Des Grieux's story. Responding
creatively to the spontaneous and irrational, he imagines her
apotheosis in the New World, an act by which he also elevates his
own soul for Manon represents a part of his being that still leaves
him troubled and uncomprehending. Apotheosizing Manon is his
uneasy truce with his inner conflict, a truce between purity and
desire, between a yearning for the excitement of sensuality and the
order of tranquillity.

Finally, Des Grieux attempts to dignify and give meaning to his
experience by arguing for a new nobility of the heart, values that
will later be expressed in works like La Nouvelle Heloise. He depicts
an old nobility that often appears ridiculous, capricious and
vindictive. Yet origins exert a strong pull, and he remains a young
man proud of his birth and education and anxious to gain the
approbation of an homme de qualité. While his story takes him to
the New World, it closes on the Old World as he literally follows

Tiberge, his ”Mercury,” a representative of the Old World, back to the

178

Old World. As he stands in Calais recounting his story, he is
remembering the New World, but heading into the Old World. He? has
opened the door to new possibilities, but appears hesitant to cross
the threshold. That hesitancy is reflected throughout the novel in
the narrator's moral and intellectual evasiveness.

His first words to Renoncour are about Manon (13). His last are
about his family. He looks back with pride and nostalgia on his
youth in Amiens where he was admired for his "sagesse et
retenue" (19). He relates his entire experience to an homme de
qualité, a representative of the traditional Old World from which he
comes. When Des Grieux kills a servant at Saint-Lazare, he expresses
no remorse. Yet when Manon dupes the Prince of..., a man of the
established noble class, Des Grieux feels pity for "un homme de
considerationz” ”Je me sentais porte a reparer ce petit outrage par
mes politesses" (123). His aristocratic sensibilities remain intact.

His reactions suggest that his sympathies remain with the Old
World tradition, or at least with its class system for it is to the social
order, not the moral order, that he returns. "Mais le Ciel, apres
m'avoir puni avec tant de rigueur, avait dessein de me rendre utiles
mes malheurs et ses chatiments. Il m'eclaira de ses lumieres, qui me
firent rappeler des idees dignes de ma naissance et de mon
education” (202). On the question of religion and morality, he is as
ambiguous as ever. He tells Tiberge that the seeds of virtue are
beginning to bear fruit ”pour lui causer une joie a laquelle il ne
s'attendait pas" (204). No genuine spiritual renewal appears

imminent. The ambiguity of his story lingers unresolved, and it is

179

 

that ambiguity which constitutes much of the book's power and
charm.

Des Grieux cannot live apart from the social milieu in which he
was raised, nor can he forget Manon. Her death and his storytelling
reconcile those two desires by allowing him to combine the pleasure
of reliving his great passion with his duty to live a respectable,
orderly life that does not scandalize his family name. Love has
unleashed Des Grieux's verbal and literary powers. Storytelling
channels and develops them. A capacity for deceit, self-delusion and
fantasy is fashioned into literary talent. A sordid affair is sublimated
into literary art. Throughout Des Grieux's story we see the unfolding
of his burgeoning literary talents. In the beginning his stories are
rooted in his lived experience and told for practical purposes.
Developing his narrative for Renoncour, however, any pragmatic
objectives are relegated to secondary importance and creative
imagination assumes a larger role as Des Grieux wrestles with the
realization that life rarely corresponds to our visions of what it
should be. He struggles to express his fundamental angst, the conflict
between his carnal desires and his yearning for a nobility of the
spirit that nourishes his senses whilst elevating his soul. The New
World figure of Manon appears to be a crystallization of the ”other"
Manon, the classical heroine, the faithful Dido that Des Grieux has
imagined all along as worthy consort for his own fictional persona.

During his early education, his sequestration in his father's
house and his studies at Saint-Sulpice, Des Grieux reveals a natural
affinity for literature, books and study. He daydreams about a

pastoral paradise that includes "un commerce de lettres avec un ami

180

qui ferait son sejour a Paris, et qui m'informerait des nouvelles
publiques, moins pour satisfaire ma curiosite que pour me faire un
divertissement des folles agitations des hommes" (40). Recounting
his experience, he essentially plays both roles: the protagonist has his
”sejour a Paris," and the narrator composes a text on the ”folles
agitations des hommes.” When Des Grieux wants to restore order and
respectability to his life without giving up Manon, he decides he
would like to pursue his studies at the university, the only ”honnete
et... raisonnable" (114) pursuit for which he seems suited. His
yearning to meld passion with profession is not new.

"Je fis un commentaire amoureux sur le quatrieme livre de
l'E‘néide; je le destine a voir le jour, et je me flatte que le public sera
satisfait» (38). In one sentence, he moves from the past to the
present to the future: he composed his commentary three or four
years ago; he plans to publish it, and he envisions a favorable public
response to his literary effort. Other than the expectation at the end
of the novel that he will soon be reunited with his brother, this
passage is the only one in which Des Grieux voices any plans for the
future. Returning to the family fold to restore order to his life a
second time, he is contemplating the possibility of writing, just as he
did the first time. Clearly he is unsuited for the priesthood. Maybe
his story will one day be published, thus immortalizing Manon and
providing him with a vehicle for exercising his desire to write about
love. And indeed, we have the book in hand, so we know that
Renoncour will be sufficiently moved by the story to find it worth

writing down and publishing, thus making the homme de qualité a

181

reader (and writer) as well as a listener, Des Grieuxa writer, a
creator of the fiction, as well as a fictional character.

We have seen that critics were eager to explain why Manon
Lescaut stands out from the abbe Prevost's other works by declaring
it a thinly disguised autobiographical account of one of Prévost's love
affairs. The facts, however, do not bear out that theory, and the
aspect of Manon Lescaut that is most demonstrably autobiographical
is ignored--i.e., the development of the writer. Like Des Grieux,
Prevost, in Le Pour et Contre, depicts himself as seeking "consolation
[...] dans les charmes de l'etude"7° when cloistered in the monastery.
The works Des Grieux studies and comments on are texts of Classical
Antiquity. Prévost's body of work indicates that he considered
commentary and translation the most noble forms of literature
(Deloffre 38 n2). Drawing inspiration from their knowledge of
classical texts, both Des Grieux and Prevost submit their experiences
in and out of the monastery to the transforming power of
imagination.

Throughout Manon Lescaut, there is virtually no authorial
intrusion, and at the end, Des Grieux is the only character left. The
others have all disappeared. Not even the frame narrator, who opens
the tale, reappears as we might expect. Initially, the frame narrator
distances Prevost from his hero, but that barrier soon disappears,
never to reappear. Des Grieux's voice thus seems to be Prévost's.
Contrary to much critical thought over the last 250 years, Manon

Lescaut is not primarily about Manon; it is Des Grieux's story, the

 

70 From the apology of the Pour et Contre, feuille XLVIII, p. XL, cited by
Deloffre, p. 38, fnl.

182

story of a passion that, among other things, plants the seed of
literary vocation. The original title says it best--it is L'histoire du
chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut.

Early in the novel, believing that Des Grieux is "tout a fait
revenu de [sa] passion” (42), his father allows him to return to his
studies in Paris. In the end Des Grieux is literally ”revenu de sa
passion” and ready to put his life back in order. Yet his experience
has had a profound effect on him. He neither can nor wishes to
forget it. Telling his tale permits him to combine love with literary
aspirations by giving permanent imaginative life to the memory of
his great passion, a story much more poetic in the retelling than it

was in the living.

183

CONCLUSION

Depuis Manon Lescaut jusques a Dalila
Toute la fine fleur du beau sexe etait la

Pour oflrir a I'ancétre, en signe d'afiection,
En guis' de viatique, une ultime erection.

Georges Brassens, L'ancetre 7‘

Manon lives. She is part of the cultural consciousness, largely
as a result of the legends created by her representation in
nineteenth-century literature, criticism and opera. The human spirit
seeks both titillation and exaltation, and Des Grieux's lofty, eloquent
and dolorous rhetoric transforms his ignoble love for a vulgar girl
into an expression of a more universal experience, the disturbingly
magical, confusing and disgraceful experience of a fatal love. The
public responds to this image of tarnished youth, beauty and charm
immortalized by a tragic death and celebrated with lyrical eloquence
because they too need to transcend the ordinary and attach
themselves to something beautiful, meaningful and enduring.

Early in the nineteenth century, a reincarnated Manon is given
a new locus in middle class France. Successive bourgeois images of
pathological or unnatural heroines attempt to distance, contain and
control the femme fatale. This is a world that thinks and experiences
life in concrete terms. They tend to imagine Manon at one extreme
or the other, either as an angel or as a devil. In Prévost's novel,
Manon is often a phantom-like figure. In the nineteenth century she
is represented in much more concrete images. Even as a vampire,

she has a greater physical presence than Prévost's heroine. No

 

71 Poemes et chansons, page 216.

184

 

longer experienced as an abstract ideal, she symbolizes a concrete
threat to male mastery.

Critics react in broad strokes, offering virtually no textual
analysis and often straying far from the novel in their introductions
to it. Because Manon has name recognition, the mere mention of her
name conjures up a body of ideas. Yet because Des Grieux's tale is
characterized by ambiguity and ambivalence, Manon is a suggestive,
malleable heroine easily adapted to nineteenth-century interests and
tastes. Critics use Manon as a symbol of contemporary problems,
their essays as a foray into social issues. These new approaches to
criticism open the door to new avenues of interpretation. Manon
Lescaut challenges us to read in new ways precisely because we see
how it troubled nineteenth-century readers. Finally, critics recognize
what the authors of the variants implicitly recognized: Manon is a
muse capable of stimulating dreams and fantasies that permanently
enrich our lives. That is the mythical Manon, the Manon that lives.
A less mystifying, less wayward Manon would no longer be the
heroine we love. In the end, the nineteenth century audience simply
submits to the power of her story without asking many questions of
the text. Massenet's opera deals with an idealized Manon and
minimizes the other, "more real” Manon. Already a literary legend,
she is a more lyricized and universal figure. Massenet celebrates her
power of enchantment while also providing an avenue for the French
to revel in their glorious past.

The loving, demonic, dangerous, and redeeming potential in
Manon's character is brought into sharper relief for those who read

Leone Leoni, "La Morte amoureuse," and La Dame aux camélias as

185

rewritings of Manon Lescaut. Though often represented by critics
and novelists as a loving, repentant courtesan or as a man-eating
femme fatale, she is neither in Prevost's novel. Yet those
representations, incited by and attached to Prévost's heroine, create
a rich complex of images that make it impossible to see her ever
again as simply a rather naturally beguiling, amoral and insouciant
young beauty.

Above all, representation of Manon reflects widespread male
insecurity about masculinity in nineteenth-century France. Though
critics identify with Des Grieux, their own insecurities cause them to
focus on Manon. Confusing the heroine with the novel, they lose
sight of Prévost's focus. Manon is a literary figure, not just as
heroine of Prévost's novel, but also as heroine of Des Grieux's
narrative. This is Des Grieux's story, a vision of Manon based on his
needs and influenced by his reading of classical literature.

His story is grounded in imagination and influenced by a
literary experience and a literary tradition ill-equipped to account
for the common, the affective, and the irrational. Carving out a new
language, Manon Lescaut expresses an emotional truth, a subjective
and yet a universal truth. It hovers on newness as it demonstrates
the human yearning for transcendence and the power of imagination
and rhetoric to transform reality, to poeticize our lives and to explain

even our basest behavior "dans un sens honorable.”

186

 

APPENDIX A

 

An Outline of the Novel's Plot
The undulating structure of 'Des Grieux's account alternates brief
periods of happiness with increasingly serious misfortunes.
FORTUNE MISFORTUNE

(4 Rivals)

 

Des Grieux and Manon meet at Amiens and
enjoy approximately two weeks of bliss
together.

Des Grieux finds Manon with M. de 3.... Soon
thereafter, he is abducted by his father's
lackeys and sequestered in his father's house
for about six months.

 

Des Grieux returns to the seminary. Just as
he is to take orders, Manon appears at Saint-

Manon's brother begins his parasitical
relationship with the couple, and a fire at

 

Sulpice and their passion is re-ignited. Chaillot ruins them.

Fleeing together, they install themselves in

an idyllic retreat at Chaillot.

Des Grieux borrows 100 pistoles from Their servants steal everything they own, and

Tiberge for cardsharping at the Hetel de
Transylvanie.

Manon leaves Des Grieux for M. de G... M....

 

Manon passes Des Grieux off as her brother
at M. de G... M...'s. Then she and Des Grieux
run off together with the money she received
frornG...M....

M. de G... M... has them arrested and
imprisoned, Des Grieux at Saint-Laure and
Manon at the Hépital General.

 

Des Grieux escapes from Saint-Lazare and,
with the help of M. de T... fils, frees Manon
from the Hepital.

Manon's brother is killed.

 

The protagonists once again
days at Chaillot.

spend happy

Manon takes up with the young G... M....

 

Manon and Des Grieux have the young G... M...
detained while they enjoy themselves at his
house.

Alerted by a servant, the old G... M... has
Manon and Des Grieux arrested.

 

Des Grieux is released from Chatelet.

Manon is deported to the New World. Failing
to free her from the group of filles de joie
being transported to Le Havre, Des Grieux
decides to follow Manon into exile.

 

Passing themselves off as man and wife,
Manon and Des Grieux lead a tranquil
existence in la Nouvel Orleans and decide to
legitimize their union through marriage.

Learning that Manon and Des Grieux are not
married, the governor of Louisiana refuses
them permission to marry because his
nephew Synnelet is secretly in love with
Manon.

 

 

Synnelet and Des Grieux fight a duel which
Des Grieux wins.

 

Believing he has killed Synnelet, he and

Manon flee. Manon dies in flight.

 

187

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

188

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Original Works

Dumas fils, Alexandre. La Dame aux camélias. ”A propos de La
Dame aux camélias. "Note sur le drame." Introduction by Henri
Behar. ”Mademoiselle Marie Duplessis" by Jules Janin. Paris:
Pocket, 1994.

Gautier, Theophile. ”La Morte amoureuse." Récits fantastiques.
Introduction by Marc Eigeldinger. Paris: Flammarion, 1981.
117-150.

Massenet. Manon (program). Opera National de Paris, 1997. 91-
127.

Merimee, Prosper. Carmen et autres nouvelles. Tome 11. Paris:
Librairie Generale Francaise, 1983. 177-247. 2 vols.

Prévost, Antoine-Francois. Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de
Manon Lescaut. Introduction by Frederic Deloffre and
Raymond Picard. Paris: Garnier Freres, 1965.

Sand, George. Leone Leoni et autres grandes histoires d'amour.

Paris: J'ai lu, n.d. 3-136.

11. Nineteenth-Century Prefaces and Introductions to

Manon Lescaut (in alphabetical order)

Anonymous. ”Notice sur la vie et les ecrits de l'abbe Prévost."
Histoire de Manon Lescaut et du Chevalier des Grieux. 2 vols.

Paris: Dauthereau, I827. i-xiv.

189

 

Anonymous. "Notice sur l'abbe Prévost." Histoire de Manon Lescaut.
Paris, au bureau des Editeurs, 1830. 5-14.

(Much of this material was taken from Palissot de Montenoy's
eighteenth-century study of Prevost.)

Anonymous. "L'abbe Prevost." Histoire de Manon Lescaut et du
Chevalier des Grieux. Paris: Delarue, 1875. vii-x.

Anonymous. ”Manon Lescaut et l'abbe Prevost.” Histoire de Manon
Lescaut et du Chevalier des Grieux. Paris: Amould, 1886. i-vii.

Dumas fils, Alexandre. Preface. Histoire de Manon Lescaut et du
Chevalier des Grieux. Accompagnee de variantes et d'une
notice par Anatole de Montaiglon. Paris: Glady freres, 1875.
XIX-XLIX.

France, Anatole. ”Les Aventures de l'abbe Prevost.” Histoire de
Manon Lescaut. Paris: Lemerre, 1878. I-XL.

G. H. Preface. Manon Lescaut. 2 vols. Paris: Roy et Geffroy, 1893.
v-vii.

Heilly, Georges d'. "L'abbe Prevost.” Manon Lescaut. Paris: Jouaust,
1867. xiii-xxiii.

Houssaye, Arsene. "Manon Lescaut et l'abbe Prevost." Histoire de
Manon Lescaut et du Chevalier des Grieux. 2 vols. Paris:
Librairie des Bibliophiles, 1874. i-xxxii.

Janin, Jules. Notice historique sur l'auteur. Histoire de Manon
Lescaut et du Chevalier des Grieux. Edition illustree par Tony
Johannot. Paris: Bourdin, 1839. i-xii (placed after the”Avis de
l'auteur").

Jannet, Pierre. Preface. Histoire de Manon Lescaut et du Chevalier

des Grieux. Paris: Picard, 1867. v-viii.

190

L.P. "Notice biographique sur l'auteur de Manon Lescaut." Histoire
de Manon Lescaut et du Chevalier des Grieux. 2 vols. Paris:
Werdet, 1825. Vol. 1, v-vxi.

Lemoinne, John. "Etude sur Manon Lescaut." Histoire de Manon
Lescaut et du Chevalier des Grieux. Paris: Michel Levy freres,
1860. i-xiii.

(First published in ”Lemoinne's Etudes critiques et
biographiques, Paris, 1852.)

Lescure, Pierre de. "L'Histoire dans le roman de Manon Lescaut."
Manon Lescaut. Paris: Quantin, 1879. 1-62.

Maupassant, Guy de. Preface. Histoire de Manon Lescaut et du
Chevalier des Grieux. Paris: Launette, 1885. ix-xvi.

Montaiglon, Anatole de. Notice bibliographique [sic]. Histoire de
Manon Lescaut et du Chevalier des Grieux. Precedee d'une
preface par Alexandre Dumas fils et accompagnee de variantes.
Paris: Glady freres, 1875. 297-349.

Planche, Gustave. Une appreciation de Manon Lescaut. Histoire de
Manon Lescaut et du Chevalier des Grieux. Nouvelle edition,
precedee d'une notice sur la vie et les ouvrages de l'abbe
Prévost, par M. Sainte-Beuve. Paris: Charpentier, 1839. 269-
293.

Sainte-Beuve. Notice sur la vie et les ouvrages de l'abbe Prevost.
Histoire de Manon Lescaut et du Chevalier des Grieux. Nouvelle
edition, suivie d'une appreciation de Manon Lescaut, par M.
Gustave Planche. Paris: Charpentier, 1839. III-L.

(Reprint of his 1831 article on Prevost.)

191

 

Stephen, Ch[arles]. "Une etude sur l'abbe Prévost et sur son siecle."

Histoire de Manon Lescaut. Lyon: Cajani, 1856. v-xxvii.

III. Nineteenth-Century Prefaces and Introductions to

Manon Lescaut (in chronological order)

Histoire de Manon Lescaut et du Chevalier des Grieux. 2 vols. Paris:
Werdet, 1825. "Notice biographique sur l'auteur de Manon
Lescaut,” signed L.P.

Histoire de Manon Lescaut et du Chevalier des Grieux. 2 vols. Paris:
Dauthereau, 1827. "Notice sur la vie et les ecrits de l'abbe
Prevost" (anonymous).

Histoire de Manon Lescaut. Paris, au bureau des Editeurs, 1830.
"Notice sur l'abbe Prévost" (anonymous).

Histoire de Manon Lescaut et du Chevalier des Grieux. Edition
illustree par Tony Johannot, precedee d'une notice historique
sur l'auteur, par Jules Janin. Paris: Bourdin, 1839.

Histoire de Manon Lescaut et du Chevalier des Grieux. Nouvelle
edition, precedee d'une notice sur la vie et les ouvrages de
l'abbe Prévost, par M. Sainte-Beuve, suivie d'une appreciation
de Manon Lescaut, par M. Gustave Planche. Paris: Charpentier,
1839.

Histoire de Manon Lescaut. Precedee d'une etude sur l'abbe Prevost
et sur son siecle par Ch[arles] Stephen. Lyon: Cajani, 1856.
Histoire de Manon Lescaut et du Chevalier des Grieux. Nouvelle

edition, precede d'une etude par John Lemoinne. Paris: Michel

Levy freres, 1860.

192

 

Histoire de Manon Lescaut et du Chevalier des Grieux. Precedee
d'une notice et suivie de notes par M. Pierre Jannet. Paris:
Picard, 1867.

Manon Lescaut. Paris: Jouaust, 1867. "L'abbe Prévost" by Georges
d'Heilly.

Histoire de Manon Lescaut et du Chevalier des Grieux. Precedee
d'une Etude (« Manon Lescaut et l'abbe Prevost ») par Arsene
Houssaye. 2 vols. Paris: Librairie des Bibliophiles, 1874.

Histoire de Manon Lescaut et du Chevalier des Grieux. Paris: Delarue,
[1875]. « L'abbe Prevost » (anonymous).

Histoire de Manon Lescaut et du Chevalier des Grieux. Precedee
d'une preface par Alexandre Dumas fils . . . accompagnee de
variantes et d'une notice par Anatole de Montaiglon. Paris:
Glady freres, 1875.

Histoire de Manon Lescaut. Paris: Lemerre, 1878. « Les Aventures
de l'abbe Prevost » by Anatole France.

Manon Lescaut. Paris: Quantin, 1879. « L'Histoire dans le roman de
Manon Lescaut » by Pierre de Lescure.

Histoire de Manon Lescaut et du Chevalier des Grieux. Preface de
Guy de Maupassant. Paris: Launette, 1885.

Histoire de Manon Lescaut et du Chevalier des Grieux. Paris: Amould,
1886. « Manon Lescaut et l'abbe Prévost » (anonymous).
Manon Lescaut. 2 vols. Paris: Roy et Geffroy, 1893. « Preface »,

signed G.H.

193

 

IV. CRITICISM

Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western
Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. 1953.

Behar, Henri. Introduction. La Dame aux camélias. By Alexandre
Dumas fils. Paris: Pocket, 1994. 11—21.

Bernheimer, Charles. Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution
in Nineteenth-Century France. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989.

Branger, Jean-Christophe. "Genese et enjeux de Manon.” Manon
(program). Opera National de Paris, 1997. 29-35.

Cellier, L. "Le Mythe de Manon et les romantiques francais." L'Abbé
Prévost: Actes du Colloque d'Aix-en-Provence. No. 50. Aix-en-
Provence: Editions Ophrys, 1965. 255-268.

Conde, Gerard. ”De la beaute du Diable, on ne parle qu'a mots
couverts.” Manon (program). Opera National de Paris, 1997.
37-41.

---. "Massenet.” Manon (Massenet). Opera Guide 25, English
National Opera and The Royal Opera. New York: Riverrun Press,

1984. 7-15.
Coulet, Henri. Le Roman jusqu'a la revolution. Paris: Armand Colin,
1965.

Deloffre, Frederic, and Raymond Picard. Introduction. Histoire du
Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut. By Abbe Prevost.
Paris: Garnier Freres, 1965. I-CLXXVII

Dottin-Orsini, Mireille. Cette femme qu'ils disent fatale: Textes et
images de la misogynie fin-de-siecle. Paris: Bernard Grasset,
1993.

194

 

Eduardo, Leigh. "The Lady of the Camellias." France. Vol. 7. No. 2
(Summer 1996). 47-51.

Gautier, Theophile. Histoire de l'art dramatique en France depuis
vingt-cinq ans, 2e serie, 1/1859. Geneve: Slatkine Reprints,
1968. Vol. 2.

Gilroy, James P. The Romantic Manon and Des Grieux: Images of
Prévost's Heroine and Hero in Nineteenth-Century French
Literature. Sherbrooke, PQ: Editions Naaman, 1980.

Hiss, Clyde Simons. "Abbe Prévost's Manon Lescaut as Novel,
Libretto, and Opera.” Diss. U of Illinois, 1967.

Hutcheon, Linda and Michael. Opera: Desire, Disease, Death. Lincoln
and London: U of Nebraska P, 1996.

Hughes-Hallet, Lucy. ”The Beautiful Corpse." Violetta and Her Sisters:
The Lady of the Camellias: Responses to the Myth. Ed. Nicholas
John. London: Faber and Faber, 1994. 93-99.

Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979.

---. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction
from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974.

Janin, Jules. "Mademoiselle Marie Duplessis” in La Dame aux
camélias. By Alexandre Dumas fils. Paris: Pocket, 1994. 355-
366.

Jauss, Hans Robert. Toward an aesthetic of reception. Trans.
Timothy Bahti. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1982.

John, Nicholas, Ed. Violetta and Her Sisters: The Lady of the
Camellias: Responses to the Myth. London: Faber and Faber,
1994.

195

 

Joly, Jacques. ”Massenet et la memoire du XVIIIe siecle: Manon, Le
Portrait de Manon, Chérubin.” Opera, theatre: une mémoire

imaginaire. Ed. Georges Banu. Paris: Herne, 1990. 53-76.

Josephs, Herbert. ”Manon Lescaut: A Rhetoric of Intellectual
Evasion.” The Romanic Review, Vol. LIX, No. 3, Oct. 1968. pp.
185-197.

Lacombe, Herve. "L'opera-comique.” Manon (program). Opera

National de Paris, 1997. 43-46.

---. Les voies de l'opéra francais au XIXe siécle. Paris: Fayard, 1997.

Macdonald, Hugh. "A Musical Synopsis." ‘ ”Massenet.” Manon
(Massenet). Opera Guide 25, English National Opera and The
Royal Opera. New York: Riverrun Press, 1984. 17-27.

May, Georges. Le dilemme du roman au xvme siecle. New Haven:
Yale UP, 1963.

Monty, Jeanne. "Narrative Ambiguity in Manon Lescaut," in
Enlightenment Studies in Honor of Lester G. Cracker, ed. Alfred
J. Bingham and Virgil W. Topazio. Oxford: The Voltaire
Foundation at the Taylor Institution, 1979.

Morrison, Shawn. "Women in the Novels of George Sand.” Diss.
Michigan State U, 1998.

Musset, Alfred de. "Namouna.” Poésies completes. Paris: Gallimard,
1957. 239-270.

Mylne, Vivienne. "Prevost and 'Manon Lescaut.” Manon (Massenet).
Opera Guide 25, English National Opera and The Royal Opera.
New York: Riverrun Press, 1984. 29-38.

Parent-Duchatelet, Alexandre. De la prostitution dans la ville de
Paris. 2 vols. Paris: Bailliere, 1836.

196

Pasco, Allan H. Allusion: A Literary Graft. Toronto: U of Toronto P,
1994.

Perrot, Michelle, ed. From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War.
Vol. 4 of A History of Private Life. 4 vols. Transl. Arthur
Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 1990.

Porter, Laurence M. The Crisis of French Symbolism. Ithaca and
London: Cornell UP, 1990.

Rashkin, Esther. "The Phantom's Voice." A New History of French
Literature. Ed. Denis Hollier. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,
1994. 801-806.

Ray, William. Story and History: Narrative Authority and Social
Identity in the Eighteenth-Century French and English Novel.
Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990.

Riggs, Larry W. ”Class, Gender and Performance in George Sand's
Leone Leoni. George Sand Studies 10 (1990-91): 50-59.

Rosso, Corrado. "De Manon Lescaut a La Dame aux Camelias: alcbve
ouverte et prostitution vertueuse.” Lettres et realities:
Mélanges de littérature générale et de critique romanesque
ofierts au Professeur Henri Coulet pas ses amis. Ed. Aix-en-
Provence: U de Provence, 1988. 339-353. [349-353 are notes]
[Preface by Marguerite Rossi]

Sade, Marquis de. Idée sur le roman. Geneve: Slatkine Reprints,
1967.

Sand, George. Impressions littéraires. Paris, 1862.

Segal, Naomi. The Unintended Reader: Feminism and Manon Lescaut.

Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986.

197

 

Sgard, Jean. L'abbe Prévost: Labyrinthes de la mémoire. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1986.

Silvestris, Bernardus. Commentary on the First Six Books of Virgil's
Aeneid. Trans. Earl G. Schreiber and Thomas E. Maresca.
Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1979.

Starobinski, Jean. "L'unique objet d'amour." Manon (program).
Opera National de Paris, 1997. 49-59.

Todorov, Tzvetan. Introduction a la littérature fantastique. Paris:

Seuil, 1970.
V. Other Literary Works
Baudelaire, Charles. Oeuvres completes. Paris: Gallimard, 1961.

Brassens, Georges. Poemes et chansons. Paris: Editions du Seuil.

1993.
Challes, Robert. Les Illustres fiancaises. Geneva: Droz, 1991.

198

 

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