Abbé Prévost

Prévost spent his life oscillating between the cloister and the road: a Jesuit novice who ran off to the army more than once, a Benedictine monk who fled his monastery for London and Holland, chased across borders at various points by debt, scandal, and unresolved vows.

Manon Lescaut first appeared in 1731 as the final volume of a long, now-forgotten memoir-novel, and immediately eclipsed everything around it: banned in France for its frank treatment of obsessive desire, it became one of the century's most reprinted and most operatically adapted love stories. He kept writing prolifically for another three decades, translating Richardson into French among dozens of other projects, none of which matched Manon's impact.

He died in 1763, reportedly collapsing in a forest near Chantilly.