Abbé Prévost / André-E. Marty - Manon Lescaut - 1941

Manon Lescaut, by Abbé Prévost – Illustrations by André-Édouard Marty

Limited edition on Hermine vellum from Papeteries Boucher

The Story of the Knight des Grieux and Manon Lescaut – full title – first appeared in 1731 as the seventh volume of Mémoires et aventures d’un homme de qualité, before being revised and enlarged by the author in 1753 in the edition that now holds authority. The novel traces, in the form of memoirs dictated by des Grieux to a passing narrator, the devastating passion of a young man of good family for Manon Lescaut – a young woman of exceptional beauty, forever oscillating between the sincere love she bears for des Grieux and the irrepressible need for luxury that pushes her toward other protectors. This fatal love leads des Grieux to moral and social ruin: he leaves the seminary, deceives his family, becomes involved in fraud, experiences prison and degradation. Manon, condemned for immoral conduct and deported to Louisiana, dies there in des Grieux’s arms at the end of a desperate escape across a desert – a denouement of shocking sobriety. Montesquieu, reading the novel in April 1734, formulates its central paradox: the hero is a rogue and the heroine a courtesan, yet all their actions are motivated by love – which is always a noble motive, even if the conduct is base.

Abbé Antoine François Prévost d’Exiles (1697-1763), a defrocked Benedictine, journalist and prolific novelist, is one of the most singular figures of eighteenth-century French letters. Manon Lescaut, seized and condemned to be burned in 1733 and 1735, remains his most read and most loved work, translated around the world and adapted to opera by Auber (1856) and Puccini (1893).

André-Édouard Marty (Paris, 1882 – 1974) is one of the great illustrators of the French Art Deco period. Trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Fernand Cormon’s studio, he is one of only four artists to have contributed to every year of La Gazette du Bon Ton (1912-1925), contributed to Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Vanity Fair, and illustrated around fifty literary works – Baudelaire, Flaubert, Maupassant, Colette, Proust. His innate sense of sartorial elegance and of fashionable spectacle, his luminous palette and his compositions with color blocks added to the stencil make him the natural choice to illustrate a novel whose historical period – the reign of Louis XV – and the social settings – alcoves, coaches, promenades – perfectly correspond to his graphic sensibility.

Paris, Éditions du Rameau d’Or, completed printing on 15 April 1941. 8vo square [20 × 14 cm], stitched, color illustrated cover with flapped boards, 221 pages. Very good interior and exterior condition."