Philosophical Reflection, Happiness, and Male Friendship in Prévost's Manon Lescaut

Philosophical Reflection, Happiness, and Male Friendship in Prévost's Manon Lescaut JOE JOHNSON Although there is no dearth of important texts concerning idealized male friendship in French literature in any given century, it is no exaggeration to assert that the eighteenth century was more intensely taken with the matter than any previous or subsequent era in French literature. Whether considered in the light of Ancients like Aristotle or Cicero, or French Moderns such as Montaigne, La Fontaine, and Saint-Evremond, friendship became in the Age of Enlightenment a common subject in all aspects of French cultural life and literary forms of discourse. It was much reflected upon in salons, in correspondences, and in numerous philosophical treatises. It was the inspiration for poetry, for the stage, for novels, nouvelles and contes and was grist for all of the major writers of the Enlightenment, including AntoineFran çois Prévost d'Exilés (1697-1763). Published first in 1731, and with important revisions made for the 1753 version, the Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut, or more simply, Manon Lescaut, has largely eclipsed the rest of Prévost's voluminous corpus.1 Moreover, it has gone on to become the most reprinted work of French literature with, as Jean Sgard notes, "more than two hundred and fifty editions published between 1731 and 1981"(xxxii).2 Outside the bounds of French literature classes, it is probably fair to say that, in the United States at least, the story is best known in its rather different, operatic versions by 169 170 / JOHNSON Jules Massenet (1842-1912) and Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924), both of which remain in the modern repertory. Encouraged by the operas, the predominant image of Manon Lescaut is that of its famous lovers. Joining Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristan and Yseut, Paolo and Francesca, Romeo and Juliet, Pelléas and Mélisande in the pantheon of thwarted great lovers, Manon, the "bad" girl with the "heart of gold," and Des Grieux, the young man ruined, yet exalted by his love, are an overwhelming image threatening the exclusion of all else. Perhaps this explains why the complicated figure of Tiberge disappears altogether from both operatic versions of the tale, for late-Romantic opera rarely pays much attention to the exigencies of male friendship, particularly of the exclusive sort required by Tiberge.3 Dwelling too exclusively on the overpowering image of Manon and Des Grieux does an injustice to Prévost's masterwork, for it clouds the extent to which Manon Lescaut is also one of the noteworthy treatments on male homosocial desire and idealized male friendship in the first half of the eighteenth century.4 Going against the grain of contemporary ethics that tended to oppose friendship and passion, this novel depicts friendship and passion as ambiguous doubles and finds that love is just as apt to exalt and bring about happiness as is male friendship, which, at least in Des Grieux's reformulation on the matter, best serves as a vehicle for realizing his passion for Manon. An analysis of the novel's prefatory "Avis au lecteur" will reveal the underlying, yet tenuous, connection of friendship with happiness and virtue, especially as this linkage informs the novel's manifestations of male homosocial desire in the relationship between Des Grieux and the "homme de qualité." The depiction of their relationship, which illustrates the nature of friendship posited in the "Avis," is echoed in the subsequent one of the young M. de T..., an ambiguous figure who serves as a double for Tiberge, the figure most associated in the text with idealized male friendship, yet whose brand of friendship fails at the end of the tale, despite the death of Manon. One reason Des Grieux's attempt to reformulate the idea of friendship is so striking is that eighteenth-century ethics concerning friendship pervade Prévost's text. Although written for a different context, Charles G. Smith's summation of the widespread, proverbial discourse of friendship remains appropriate for Prévost's novel and could easily figure as a synopsis of any of the more prolix treatises of friendship so common in the eighteenth century. Smith lists them as such: 1. Friendship...