Manon Lescaut
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Manon Lescaut is a novel by the abbé Prévost.
Considered one of the greatest novels of the 18th century, it is very short; it is entirely free from improbable incident, it is penetrated by the truest and most cunningly managed feeling; and almost every one of its characters is a triumph of that analytic portraiture which is the secret of the modern novel. The chevalier des Grieux, the hero, is probably the most perfect example of the carrying out of the sentiment "All for love and the world well lost" that exists in fiction, at least where the circumstances are those of ordinary and probable life. Tiberge, his friend, is hardly inferior in the difficult part of mentor and reasonable man. Lescaut, the heroine's brother, has vigorous touches as a bully and Bohemian; but the triumph of the book is Manon herself. Animated by a real affection for her lover, and false to him only because her love of splendour, comfort and luxury prevents her from welcoming privation with him or for him, though in effect she prefers him to all others, perfectly natural and even amiable in her degradation, and yet showing the moral of that degradation most vividly, Manon is one of the most remarkable heroines in all fiction. She had no literary ancestress; she seems to have sprung entirely from the imagination, or perhaps the sympathetic observation, of the wandering scholar who drew her. Only the Princesse de Clèves can challenge comparison with her before or near to her own date, and in Manon Lescaut the plot is much more complete and interesting, the sentiments less artificial, and the whole story nearer to actual life than in Madame de la Fayette's masterpiece.
extract from 1911 encyclopaedia
The story is the basis for Giacomo Puccini's opera, Manon Lescaut.