Before You Begin

Before you begin.

In the France of the Regency, a boy of seventeen — well-born, devout, and destined for the Church — sees a girl step down from the coach at Amiens, and throws away his whole ordered life in a single afternoon. Her name is Manon Lescaut; his is the Chevalier des Grieux; and the passion that seizes him will carry the two of them through the pleasures of Paris and the shame of its prisons, and at last across the ocean to a lonely grave in the Louisiana desert.

The Abbé Prévost published his little masterpiece in 1731, and it remains one of the first true novels of the human heart. Manon is fickle, extravagant, and faithless whenever poverty presses — and utterly irresistible; des Grieux loves her past all reason, ruin, and honour. It is a book that refuses to condemn its lovers, and dares the reader to condemn them either: tender one moment and criminal the next, it asks how far a heart may fall for love, and whether such a love is a curse or a kind of grace.

Told by des Grieux himself, years afterward, to a sympathetic stranger, the story moves with the headlong logic of obsession — each escape from disaster only the doorway to the next — until pleasure, crime, and grief run together into one of the most affecting endings in all fiction.

This illustrated edition opens with a gallery of the cast, the map of their flight from Amiens to the New World, and its great scenes; and as you read, the story unfolds in six visual movements — recap plates you unlock along the way, each gathering together the tale so far, with never a glimpse of what lies ahead. Turn the page, and follow des Grieux to the inn-yard at Amiens.