Prévost, ABBÉ. Antoine François Prévost d'Exiles, commonly called the Abbé Prévost, and immortal as the author of Manon Lescaut, was born of good family at Hesdin in Artois, 1st April 1697. He was educated by the Jesuits at Hesdin, and at the Collège d'Harcourt in Paris, at sixteen volunteered for service as the last war of Louis XIV. was drawing to its close, but soon returned to the Jesuits, and indeed had almost joined the order when a fresh temptation drew his impulsive and restless nature once more to the soldier's life. Of this second period of soldiering little is known, but it is certain that at twenty-four he joined the Benedictines of St Maur, and spent the next six years in a round of religious duties, in study, and in writing a volume of Gallia Christiana. About the year 1727, being anxious to be transferred to Cluny, where the rule was less austere, he discounted his permission, and so found himself unexpectedly guilty of the sin of disobedience. He fled to Holland, and spent six years of exile in that country and in England, and there is even a dim story of a love entanglement against which he strove for a while in vain. In 1728 he published the first and best of his long novels, the Mémoires d'un Homme de Qualité, to which indeed Manon Lescaut (apparently first published at Amsterdam in 1733) forms a kind of supplement. His fluent pen employed itself in further novels—Cléveland, fils naturel de Cromwel; Le Doyen de Killerrine—in translations, and in Le Pour et Contre (1733–40), a periodical review of life and letters, modelled on the Spectator, and showing an excellent appreciation of English books. By 1735 he was back in France by royal permission, and allowed to wear the dress of the secular priesthood. He was befriended by Cardinal de Bissy, and the Prince de Conti, whose chaplain he became, and for thirty years he wrote assiduously over a hundred volumes of compilations, including a voluminous Histoire générale des Voyages (of which vol. i., 1746, contains a fine portrait by Schmidt), histories, moral essays, translations of Pamela and Clarissa Harlowe, and at least one novel—Histoire d'une Grecque Moderne. In 1741 a literary service thoughtlessly rendered to a satirical novelist drove him from France to Brussels, thence to Frankfort; but he was soon forgiven by M. de Maurepas, and allowed to return. He lived in a cottage at Saint-Firmin near Chantilly, walked much in the woods there, and died of the rupture of an aneurysm, 23d November 1763. The story was long current that after he was thought to have died of apoplexy, a stupid surgeon, in haste to begin a post-mortem examination, both brought him to life and killed him with a single thrust of his knife; but this hideous romance first appeared about 1782, and was completely disproved by Harrisse (see his L'Abbé Prévost, 1896). Many other legends have clustered round Prévost's romantic life. Of these the most remarkable is a perfectly baseless calumny that he killed his own father, who had caught him in an intrigue, by throwing him downstairs.
Prévost's is one of the names lifted securely above the flood of time by one book written in a moment of happy inspiration. Manon Lescaut remains fresh, charming, and perennial, from its perfect and unaffected simplicity, the stamp of reality and truth throughout, and a style so flowing, easy, and natural, that the reader forgets it altogether in the overpowering pathetic interest of the story. The half-dozen figures portrayed have the likeness of life itself: the young Cavalier des Grieux, the hero, is a lover of the noblest pattern, absolutely forgetful of self, and idealising even the unworthiness of his mistress; Tiberge is an admirable type of the sensible and faithful friend, Lescaut, Manon's brother, of the ruffian and bully; but the triumph of the book is Manon herself, charming, light-hearted, shallow, incapable of a love that she will not sacrifice for luxury, yet ever moved with a real affection for her lover, constant even in her inconstancy and her degradation, the goodness ever shining through the guilt, and at last purified by love and suffering. One feels in this unique book that it is impossible to say where reality ends and fiction begins, and indeed it remains to this day unequalled as a truthful realisation of one over-mastering passion. From beginning to end a careful reader detects the traces of a sad experience, for its author had himself a sensitive heart and warm imagination, joined to a weak and vacillating character. Both a Tiberge and a Des Grieux met in himself, for his character and ideals were pure and elevated, despite the weaknesses that grew out of his passionate and impulsive soul. Compounded, like his hero, at once of weakness and of strength, he is not to be regarded with admiration so much as sympathy and affection, for, if his sensitive and impressionable heart opened a door to frailties ill-befitting the habit that he wore, these frailties at least were natural and not dissimulated, and did not corrupt his heart any more than they did his heroine's.
There is no complete edition of Prévost's works. His Œuvres Choisies were collected at Amsterdam (39 vols. 1783–85). Of his one masterpiece the editions are numberless, and there is at least one fair English translation, by D. C. Moylan (1841; reprinted 1886). See the biography prefixed to Prévost's Pensées (1764), and Sainte-Beuve in Portraits Littéraires, vols. i. and iii., and Causeries du Lundi, vol. ix.