Abbé Prévost

Prévost was born in 1697 at Hesdin, in Artois, and spent his youth unable to choose between the cloister and the world. Taught by the Jesuits, he began training for the religious life, broke off to enlist as a soldier, returned, was apparently tricked into enlisting a second time, and deserted. By 1720 he had joined the Benedictines of Saint-Maur and was ordained a priest — and then, restless again, he fled the order in 1728 and left France for the Dutch Republic and England. The "d'Exiles" he attached to his name was his own addition, and earned.

He wrote enormously. There was the sprawling Mémoires et aventures d'un homme de qualité, the vast novel Cleveland, a translation of Richardson that helped carry the English novel into French, and the London journal Le Pour et Contre. Only one part outlasted its own century's neglect: Manon Lescaut, published in 1731 as the seventh and last volume of the Mémoires, a short and ruinous love story that has outlived everything else he made.

He eventually made his peace with the Church, held a chaplaincy, and settled near Chantilly to write a history of the House of Condé. He died there in 1763. The lurid story that a surgeon cut him open alive during a premature autopsy is a legend, repeated for two centuries; the likelier cause was a ruptured aneurysm, and much of what his enemies said of him has proved equally apocryphal.