"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, beginning a moral descent into gambling, fraud, and crime. Their passionate relationship leads them from Paris to imprisonment and ultimately to deportation in New Orleans. Narrated retrospectively by the Chevalier des Grieux, this confessional tale shocked eighteenth-century readers with its realistic depiction of society's underbelly and became one of French literature's most reprinted classics.