Antoine François Prévost d'Exiles biography

Dromo's Den

Antoine François Prévost d'Exiles Biography

PRÉVOST D'EXILES, Antoine François (1697–1763). A French novelist, best known as the author of Manon Lescaut (q.v.). Prévost was born at Hesdin, April 1, 1697. His father was a petty official. Antoine had been by turns a student of the Jesuits, a novice among them, a soldier (1713–14), a Jesuit, a soldier again, and, as "the unhappy end of a too tender attachment," a Benedictine (1721–28). Then we hear of him as wanted by the police for a libel on the Duke of Tuscany and for alleged breaches of conventual discipline. It was a fateful period in the history of the French novel when Prévost sought refuge in England (1728), where he remained for two or three years and, after a hasty and not wholly voluntary departure, returned thither in 1733 famous as author of the Mémoires d'un homme de qualité, the seventh volume of which is his greatest and shortest novel, Manon Lescaut (1731). Prévost remained once more two years in England, viewed askance by the Huguenot colony, and so thrown more with the English, the result of which appears in Cléveland, ou le philosophe anglais (8 vols., 1731–38); Les mémoires de M. de Montcal; and an Irish novel, Le doyen de Killerine (6 vols., 1735–40), which he followed after his return with a story based on the life of the fascinating Greek girl, Mademoiselle Aïsse, then a reigning Parisian celebrity. He died at Chantilly, Nov. 23, 1763.

Prévost wrote two other novels besides those already mentioned, Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de Malte and Mémoires d'un honnête homme; but the later years of his life were devoted almost wholly to translations of the novels of Richardson, begun in 1742, by which he influenced literature even more than by Manon Lescaut, propagating an undiscriminating interest in England and the English, whose democratic spirit inspired him to warm enthusiasm. Thus he helped to shake French confidence and pride of social and intellectual superiority and to pave the way both for a cosmopolitan literary spirit and for Rousseau.

His average work closely resembles the lesser novels of Defoe, but Manon affected radically the novels of Rousseau and Diderot, and can be traced through Hugo and Dumas and George Sand to the present day. Prévost himself tells us that the story is "a terrible example of the force of passion." In Richardson Prévost found a fuller expression of himself than he had yet been able to attain. Pamela in English began to appear in 1740. Prévost recognized its value instantly, and in 1742 his French version appeared in London. The English Clarissa is of 1748–49, the French of 1751. Richardson begins Grandison in 1753; Prévost, while awaiting its completion, busies himself in an attempt to spread English and German literature in France through founding with Rousseau a Journal Etranger. Prévost's work was that of editor as much as translator, and Richardson greatly profited by the process. Prévost's Œuvres choisies appeared in 39 volumes (Amsterdam, 1783–85, 1806). Of Manon Lescaut the editions are many.

The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XIX (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 195.