French · Advanced
Read Manon Lescaut in Frenchwith every sentence explained
Abbé Prévost · 1731
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About the book
Manon Lescaut by Abbé Prévost was first published in 1731. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked advanced and filed under romance. It runs to about 57,300 words.
He was seventeen, with a brilliant future ahead. Then he saw her step down from a coach.
In the courtyard of an inn at Amiens, the young Chevalier des Grieux, a model student about to return to his father, notices a beautiful girl being sent to a convent against her will. Her name is Manon Lescaut. Within a day they have run away together to Paris, and his whole life is turned upside down.
Manon loves him, truly, but she also loves pleasure, fine clothes and money, and money soon runs out. Between gambling, deceptions, rich rivals and Manon's shady brother, the chevalier slides from scandal to scandal, unable to stop loving her. He tells the story himself, to a stranger who first met him following a convoy of women about to be deported to America.
Abbé Prévost's novel shocked and thrilled 18th-century France. It inspired operas by Massenet and Puccini and remains one of the great love stories.
- Author
- Abbé Prévost
- First published
- 1731
- Language
- French
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Romance
- Length
- About 57,300 words
How it opens
Je suis obligé de faire remonter mon lecteur au temps de ma vie où je rencontrai pour la première fois le chevalier des Grieux. Ce fut environ six mois avant mon départ pour l'Espagne. Quoique je sortisse rarement de ma solitude, la complaisance que j'avais pour ma fille m'engageait quelquefois à divers petits voyages, que j'abrégeais autant qu'il m'était possible. Je revenais un jour de Rouen, où elle m'avait prié d'aller solliciter une affaire au Parlement de Normandie pour la succession de quelques terres auxquelles je lui avais laissé des prétentions du côté de mon grand-père maternel.
Reading Manon Lescaut in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in French. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate French book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
