"Manon Lescaut" by Abbé Prévost is a novel first published in 1731. It tells the tragic love story of a young nobleman and a common woman who choose to live together unmarried, triggering a moral descent into gambling, fraud, and crime. Their passionate relationship leads them from Paris's underworld to deportation in New Orleans, where their fate awaits in the wilderness. Narrated by the nobleman himself, this confessional tale shocked eighteenth-century readers with its realistic portrayal of scandal and became French literature's most reprinted novel by 1991.