The Novel

by Steven Moore

  Had Prévost stopped there, at the end of book 2, Renoncour would be a sympathetic character whose retreat from life would be understandable given all his disappointments. He anticipates the Byronic hero, the solitary sensitive soul suffering capital-R Romantic agony, as well as the Poëtic melancholic who finds morose delectation in brooding on his dead love in theatrical, Gothic surroundings. (He keeps his wife’s heart in a casket, and feels the tell-tale heart commiserates with him.) His dignified retreat recalls that of the heroine of The Princess de Clèves—one of his favorite novels, he tells us later. But when he returns to the world a few years later to chaperone the Marquis de Rosemont on his European tour, he begins to alienate us with his incessant moralizing and his insistence that young love is a poison to be avoided until one’s parents can arrange a suitable match. Despite the fact Renoncour is the son of a couple that eloped and lived happily for years, despite his passionate love for his Turksih student, despite the alternative customs he observes during his travels, the older Renoncour has become the old-maidish advocate of an antiquated code of manners at odds with human nature. Like Nick Carraway after that unpleasantness at East Egg, he wants the world to be “at a sort of moral attention forever.” Blocking his spirited young charge’s sincere affection for two admirable young women, first in Spain and later back in France, Renoncour causes nothing but misery for Rosemont, the ladies who love him, and even for himself when he rejects the honest advances of an Englishwoman whom he had helped escape from an abusive husband. Book 6 ends with everyone either dead, miserable, or in a convent.

  And yet, the alternative to Renoncour’s rigor is equally bad. Virtually every instance of young lovers who follow their heart in the novel—and the novel is full of them, culminating in the most extreme example in book 7—ends in disaster, apparently justifying society’s strict rules to avoid such misalliances. There is only one example of a suitor who follows the rules: While in England, Renoncour and Rosemont hear the story of a Swedish diplomat who patiently courts a Miss Perry with passions in check, and who, anxious “to forestall any accusations of imprudence and precipitation” (5/142), scrupulously restricts himself to acts and testimonies of friendship and esteem until he can conclude a socially sanctioned marriage. Miss Perry is lucky; in Italy Renoncour witnessed a case where a girl of 14 or 15 is engaged to a “deformed wretch” who happens to be rich, which “blinded the parents to all other considerations.” Blinded herself, “this poor young creature ran to her intended husband with the same ardor as if she had been entering into the highest state of happiness” (2/1:166–67). Among persons of Renoncour and Rosemont’s social rank, marriages were usually economic alliances, “where beauty, youth, and merit were sacrificed to riches,” as in this case, resulting in bland, loveless marriages. Renoncour is shocked at the Italian girl’s situation, yet later he unquestioningly supports the very system that encourages such alliances. Rosemont feels trapped by that system, wishing at one point he were a peasant rather than a “man of quality” so that he could follow his heart. Prévost dramatizes a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t social structure that could drive anyone to a monastery. And he knew that his readers would be torn between supporting society’s rules—the courtship of Miss Perry is proper but boring—and rooting for the young lovers—whose affairs are reckless but thrilling—forcing them to confront the legitimacy of their marriage customs.

  Renoncour is convinced his god supports the social structure of early modern Europe and refers to him often, inadvertently exposing him as a puritanical tyrant. In the beginning, Renoncour associates Adam’s fall with “extraordinary passions” (1/1:5) and is convinced his god continues to smite anyone who eats of the poisoned apple of love. (“Poison” is Renoncour’s favorite metaphor for passion.) Consequently, after experiencing a few years of illegal but satisfying love, Renoncour has a premonition of his wife’s sudden death:

  Heaven laughed at my cares and was preparing for me an abyss of misery into which I was to be plunged, and from which I was never to rise.

  It is certain that man, having received from heaven life and whatever else he possesses in this world, the same being that bestowed them can take them away at his pleasure, without any imputation of injustice. The creator exercises an absolute power over whatever he has created; if he allows us the transitory enjoyment of them, it is always reserving to himself the right of disposing them as he sees proper. No one can doubt of these truths. (2/1:167)

  Throughout the novel, the creator regularly exercises his power like a sadist, to whom Renoncour submits with kiss-the-whip masochism. We should “adore the hand by which afflictions come” he says immediately after this premonition, and following a later scene of murder and mayhem, Renoncour cries out, “O heaven! how adorably awful are thy dispensations! If thou hast any further strokes in reserve, let them fall upon me and close my wretched life!” (6/2:174). Heaven does indeed give him a few more strokes, by which point the reader has difficulty taking him or his tyrannical master seriously. During book 6, several worldly characters tease him for his unworldly beliefs, Rosemont turns on him and curses him as a “barbarian, brute, a man without humanity or goodness, whose conduct and principles were quite inconsistent” (6/2:199), and he is even mocked by a sassy 16-year-old girl who has escaped a convent to join her lover. Certain to the end “that the severities of self-denial and mortification will be recompensed with a higher reward” (6/2:210), Renoncour crawls back to his monastery a broken, ridiculous man, even though he exemplifies the highest ideals of the French aristocracy and Catholicism. The novel is thus a devastating critique of both. Complicating theological matters—and Prévost complicates everything—is the tendency of his characters to blame fate or their “evil stars” for their catastrophes, equating the Catholic god with pagan Fortune and astrology, even with the Greek Furies.122

  The futility of moral instruction contributes to Renoncour’s failure, a surprising theme coming from Prévost, since he was both a preacher and a writer at a time when novels were expected to blend “profit and pleasure, at once delighting and instructing the reader,” as Horace put it, the classical authority cited by all defenders of the novel back then.123 Echoing the Roman poet, Renoncour hopes “both to divert and improve the public” with his memoirs (3/1:189), but Prévost undercuts him by littering his pages with references to edifying books that are ignored when they are most needed. As a student, Renoncour visits Dominique Bouhours—a Jesuit priest and scholar (1628–1702); the novel contains many real-life people, including Racine and Molière—and confesses he likes to read books on morality, but “whenever I come to apply them to practice, I find unsurmountable difficulties” (1/1:67). Part of the problem is that these books are unrealistic, like the heroic romances Renoncourt unsurprisingly prefers over the more realistic novels of Scarron and Furetière (3/1:239—not named but implied); his favorite novel is Fénelon’s Telemachus, a preachy novel filled with idealistic schemes and impossibly high moral standards. Renoncour certainly has his hands full with his own Telemachus, young Rosemont: after the death of a Spanish lady he fell for, Rosemont outdoes his mentor’s theatrical mourning by wearing her clothes, “which were metamorphosed into waistcoats and a nightgown, which he wore in the morning” (4/2:45–46). En route to Holland, he then falls for a 14-year-old boy, which earns him a shocked lecture on the “vicious passion” of homosexuality (4/2:76), though it’s later revealed this is not only a girl in disguise, but Renoncour’s Turkish niece Nadine. (Prévost had a weakness for heroic-romance coincidences.) The other unsurmountable difficulty of applying moral theory to practice is the egotistical exceptionalism most people possess, especially uncoachable teenagers convinced their experiences are totally unlike anyone else’s in life or literature.

  Like almost everything in the Man of Quality, this idea appears in its most concentrated form in part 7 of the novel, the wild-at-heart Story of the Chevalier des Grieux and Manon Lescaut.124 Prévost evidently intended to end the novel with book 6, aft
er the 60-year-old Renoncour retreats to the monastery; but a stroke of inspiration led him to add a coda to his long novel, and in six weeks he mounted his most powerful argument yet that young love conducted outside social boundaries is a form of madness that can only end in ruin or death. Renoncour listens in sympathetic silence as the desolate young Des Greiux tells him how, as a naïve 17-year-old who had never paid attention to the opposite sex, he encountered a 15-year-old hottie whose parents were locking her up in a convent, “doubtless to check that bent towards pleasure that had already declared itself” (13). Falling in lust at first sight with this juvenile delinquent, “I found myself suddenly aflame to the pitch of ecstasy and madness” (12); sizing him up as an easy mark, the party girl agrees to ditch her escort and run away with him, and on the road to Paris they begin fucking like bunnies. They keep at it after holing up in a furnished room in Paris, but when their money runs low after three weeks, Manon begins fucking a rich tax-collector behind Des Grieux’s back. (Pardon my French, but such language is necessary to properly convey her character, which, like Don Quixote’s, has been unduly romanticized over the centuries; her counterpart today would be a teenage stripper with a kid who milks a rich bible-college student.) Des Grieux is devastated by her betrayal, but from her lower-class perspective she’s simply taking care of business, an attitude that would make sense to Marivaux’s upstart peasant and Marianne’s linen-draper. Virtue is a luxury people of their class can’t afford. All the other misalliances in the Man of Quality are between members of the upper classes; this is the only case where a member of “quality” breaks rank to consort with a commoner, adding class conflict to the complete novel’s other irreconcilable differences.125 (Renoncour and Rosemont encounter prostitutes in Spain and England, but they don’t dream of responding to them, even as a lark.) Des Grieux’s family tracks him down and rescues him from the gold-digger, who keeps banging the tax-collector while he cools his heels under house arrest. Confined there for six months, he ironically passes the time writing “a lover’s commentary of the fourth book of the Aeneid: . . . it was of a heart such as mine that faithful Dido had need” (38), all the while plotting to return to his faithless Manon.

  He eventually forgets her and attends a seminary, achieves some fame as an outstanding student, and thus attracts the return of Manon, now 18, who puts on a big act that fools Des Grieux into cohabiting with her again. Thereafter, her flighty craving for luxury and pleasure sends the young man into a downward spiral of card-sharping and grifting; he gets involved with Manon’s shifty brother and his thuggish friends; a failed attempt to sell Manon’s ass to a rich old man lands them in jail, followed by further crimes (including murder) and a third betrayal (Christ’s score) until Manon is sentenced to be deported to Louisiana with a pack of other prostitutes. (America was Europe’s dumping ground for criminals and undesirables at this time.) ’Whipped Des Grieux follows her to Louisiana, where they live together until further troubles force them to flee New Orleans for the wilderness. There, in a conclusion that is unrealistic and egregiously melodramatic, Manon dies and Des Grieux nearly dies of grief, but is rescued by a friend (whom he had lied to and cheated) and taken back to France, a broken man of 22 whose father has just died.126

  Renoncour is speechless, and says nothing in response to this shocking story. But by the time he writes a preface to the work, his initial sympathy for Des Grieux has soured into abhorrence: “I have to paint a blind young man who turns his back on happiness to plunge of his own free will into the worst misfortunes: who with all the qualities that go to form the brightest merit, chooses an obscure and vagabond life in preference to all the advantages of fortune and of nature: who foresees his misfortunes without wishing to avoid them; . . . in short, an ambiguous character, a mixture of virtues and vices, a perpetual contrast of good sentiments and bad actions” (lvi). And Prévost paints it black, going farther than Challe—from whom he apparently took the unusual name Manon, though she acts more like Des Frans’s Silvie—in the use of sordid realism, especially money problems, and farther than Marivaux in plumbing his protagonist’s psychology. Since Des Grieux is telling the story, he tries to justify his actions by portraying Manon in the best light, and it’s fascinating to listen to his convoluted reasoning as he tries to explain away her various betrayals and convince himself that she’s anything but a conniving slut, all of which reveals more about him than her. “She was some time thinking out her reply” (172) he tells us when he asks Manon to explain why she sent him a pretty prostitute to fuck in her place while she was out turning another trick;127 he accepts her contrived explanation, but by then sharp readers know better, because Prévost has taught us to be better readers.

  This marks an important turning point in the author–reader relationship. Readers have a tendency to trust and sympathize with narrators, but it quickly becomes apparent that Des Grieux is slanting his tale in Manon’s favor while trying to convince Renoncour (and himself) that he’s giving an accurate account of their affair. Prévost reinforces this formally by having Renoncour interrupt Des Grieux’s narrative to break for supper, by which point the reader may be totally caught up in the mesmerizing story, to remind us that this is a not an impartial report and to put us back on our guard. Prévost was not the first to use an unreliable narrator—we’ve had them at least since Lazarillo of Tormes, if not earlier—but he requires the reader to pay closer attention than usual to Des Grieux’s account, sifting it for tip-offs like that “some time thinking out her reply,” in order to strip Manon of the romantic trappings he projects upon her and to hold him responsible for his self-destructive actions. Like Renoncour, like Rosemont, Des Grieux blames his evil star and/or malignant heaven for his self-inflicted tragedy—he concludes his god killed Manon to teach him a lesson!—and like them fails to learn from the moral guidance provided by his friends and favorite authors. (His case is different, you see; Manon is different from other girls, and no previous examples apply to their unique case of undying love!) Ironically, no sooner did Prévost send his manuscript to the printers than he fell for an adventuress like Manon, one who bled him dry for a decade as he committed petty crimes and alienated his friends for her sake. Des Grieux had his callow youth as an excuse; Prévost was in his thirties and had just written a 700-page novel warning against the same reckless passion he now embraced. So much for literature’s potential to instruct.

  His foolishness was seconded by later readers of Manon Lescaut, who made a romantic heroine out of the guffawing airhead—during one of their scams, Des Grieux complains that Manon “was several times on the verge of spoiling all by her bursts of laughter” (90)—and who made her the tragic star of operas, ballets, and films. (The Story of the Chevalier des Grieux and Manon Lescaut eventually was shortened to Manon in some of these, giving her solo billing.) In literature, she became the patron saint of courtesans with a heart of gold, and an alluring femme fatale: the narrator of Dumas’s Lady of the Camellias dotes on Manon Lescaut, and it is included in Lord Henry’s decadent library in Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray. Picking up on Des Grieux’s humiliating devotion to Manon even after she has repeatedly betrayed him, the protagonist of Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs perceptively recognizes him as a fellow masochist. That’s more like it, for the divavication of Manon by the others misses the point; although she eventually seems to regard Des Grieux as something more than an ATM machine in a doublet, the lady is a tramp. (Manon Lescaut is the alluring one, not Manon Lescaut.) Nor should we romanticize her lover as a devoted martyr to passion; as Montesquieu put it bluntly, it’s the story of “a scoundrel and a whore.”128

  The Story of the Chevalier des Grieux and Manon Lescaut is a brilliant conclusion to Memoirs of a Man of Quality, for it condenses the long novel’s main themes into an unforgettable finale and leaves its dichotomies unresolved in modernist ambiguity. But it’s a shame it has overshadowed the longer novel that contains it, as well as Prévost’s other novels. He broke off writing the Man of Quality t
o begin another long novel on the same theme, The English Philosopher, or the Story of Mr. Cleveland (Le Philosophe anglais, ou Histoire de Monsieur Cleveland, 1731–32, 1738–39: this too was interrupted halfway through by the easily distracted author). This huge novel expands on Renoncour’s difficulty of applying the theory of moral philosophy to actual practice in a world populated by people who don’t care a fig for virtue and rationality. Here, Prévost literalizes the search for wisdom by sending his hard-luck protagonist halfway around the world and back in search of a workable philosophy that guarantees happiness and certainty, adapting the conventions of the adventure novel to the philosophical investigations he and other members of the Enlightenment were pursuing at this time. Prévost takes over 1,000 lugubrious pages to accomplish what Voltaire did in the sprightly, 100-page Candide, yet Cleveland has some points of interest.

  Cleveland is the bastard son of Oliver Cromwell (who is portrayed as a real bastard in the colloquial sense) via one of King Charles I’s former mistresses; disgusted with the world, Mrs. Cleveland rears her boy in isolation, giving him a thorough education in stoical philosophy. Growing up in a cavern in Devonshire, young Cleveland doesn’t develop any social skills until one day he encounters another set of cave-dwellers also in hiding from Cromwell, Lord Axminster and his 10-year-old daughter Fanny. After Cleveland’s mother dies when he is 17—the same age at which Renoncour lost his—they all escape to France, where Cleveland discovers two things: his love for tween Fanny, and the limits of his mother’s philosophy, which was fine for someone living in a cave but not for one moving in society. Axminster takes over as mentor, the first of many as this young Telemachus grows up—Fénelon’s novel remains a presiding spirit—and is forced to reevaluate and readjust his worldview as he encounters things undreamt of in his mother’s philosophy. Like Renoncourt, and like many Romantic heroes to come, Cleveland believes he is more sensitive than most people, and is in fact something of a drama queen. He suffers a near unbelievable series of betrayals and setbacks in both Europe and America until he abandons his mother’s pagan stoicism for patriarchal Christianity back home in England, near the caves where his pursuit of philosophy began.