Is blind love dangerous? We explore the meaning of true love through the passionate and tragic love of Manon Lescaut.
There was an American singer named Nat King Cole who died decades ago. Although he was active in the mid-1900s, a very long time ago, there is a song of his that people still love today. It’s called “Too young”. The lyrics go like this
They try to tell us we’re too young,
Too young to really be in love.
They say that love’s a word,
A word we’ve only heard,
But can’t begin to know the meaning of.
But we’re not too young to know
This love will last though years may go,
And then someday they may recall
We were not too young
This is a great song to think of while reading Abbé Prévost’s Manon Lescaut. “In Manon Lescaut, the main characters, des Grieux and Manon, are in their late teens. They’re young. They’re young, and they’re dangerously in love. They are completely blinded by love, and they are crazy in love. To an adult, they’re really immature children.
But the two main characters are proud. Everything they do is because they love each other. Des Grieux gambles, cheats, escapes from prison, and even murders. He betrays his father’s expectations, commits infidelity, and violates the expectations of his friends. He ends up throwing away everything he has. Even as Manon sells herself for money, she says proudly, “I did it to bring back our happiness, and I thought you would understand. I did it because I love you, too.” The two end up fighting to the death. Of course, des Grieux survives, but…….
In the eyes of the protagonist’s father, his son is a pathetic wretch who has lost his reason, his honor, and everything else. In his eyes, it’s not love, it’s just playing with fire. The son is still a child when he mistakes a dangerous game of fire for love. He’s too young to be “really in love,” as Nat King Cole sang.
What does real love look like to fathers and other adults? It’s love with discernment. It’s a mature love, a love with a sense of reality. It’s not a blind love, it’s a love with two eyes open. But let’s be honest. Love, especially young love, is not like that. Love is a word that has nothing to do with maturity. Love is a word that has nothing to do with discernment. Love is something that just comes along and grabs you just like that. It’s sweet and dangerous at the same time. It makes you feel happy and painful at the same time. We lose so much because of love. But it moves us, and why? Because we all crave love. And because love is a virtuous thing in itself.
After reading Manon Lescaut, the 18th-century French philosopher Montesquieu said that it was no wonder people loved the novel. In this novel, the male protagonist, des Grieux, is a philandering con man, and the female protagonist, Manon, is a woman of ill behavior who is in and out of the art gallery, but they are driven by the noble motive of love. The fact that their actions are despicable does not detract from their nobility, Montesquieu said.
So it is. Love is noble. It is love that is higher than any other value in this world. “Isn’t there a verse in the Bible that says, “Now faith, hope, love, these three abide for ever and ever, but the greatest of these is love?”
But there are different kinds of love. Love is virtuous, but not only the love of Manon Lescaut. In a way, the most dangerous of all loves may be the love of des Grieux and Manon, but it is not right to say that it is trivial, that it is only a temporary fling, that it is not real love. It is not right to say, especially to the young, that you are too young to know real love. To say such a thing is to degrade the noble to the base.
The beauty of youth lies in its blindness. It is in the blind pursuit of the virtuous. To be honest, I want to see such a virtuous love in this world, such a passionate love, not a calculating, cold love that doesn’t take into account this and that, but a love that gives its all, so I want to say.
“How dreary is a youth that has not felt the temptation of tragic, blind love, how dreary is a youth that does not long for such love?”
“Manon Lescaut is such a crazy love song, a love song that moves us, and that’s why French novelist André Gide considers it one of the three great French love novels, along with Stendhal’s The Red and the Black and Laclau’s Dangerous Liaisons. Read this novel and feel the passion of love within you.
Abbé Prévost lived a very eventful life. He was a monk, a soldier, and a journalist. He traveled from country to country, never staying in one place, until one day he decided to write. Once he started writing, he published widely, but he didn’t have much success.
In fact, there weren’t many great writers in France in the 18th century. It’s what people call the Age of Enlightenment. The Enlightenment simply refers to the idea that knowledge should be widely disseminated to the masses to bring them out of ignorance. To put it another way, the Enlightenment was a time when many intellectuals worked to illuminate the world with the bright light of reason.
Naturally, the leading figures of the era were intellectuals and philosophers. Philosophers of the era also wrote novels, but usually in the form of novels to disseminate their ideas. Therefore, it was a difficult atmosphere for great writers to be born.
Abbé Prévost, a diligent writer, wrote 20 novels under the title Memoirs and Adventures of a Man of Quality. Manon Lescaut, published in 1731, is the seventh of these novels and the only one that brought him fame. “With the publication of Manon Lescaut, Abbé Prévost is recognized as the first writer to show a fateful love, a fateful passion, in a simple, non-eloquent style. And many later generations do not hesitate to consider this work as one of the greatest masterpieces of love and passion.
The novel has influenced other artistic fields as well. In particular, the French composer Jules Massenet was inspired by the work to compose the five-act opera Manon (1884), and the Italian composer Giacomo Puccini’s four-act opera Manon Lescaut (1893) is very famous.
