The Story of Manon Lescaut and of the Chevalier des Grieux/Chapter 5

by L'Abbé Prévost

Chapter V.

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The commencement of the scholastic year was close at hand, and I agreed with Tiberge that we should enter the Seminary of St. Sulpice together—he to complete his theological studies, and I to begin mine. His merits, which were well known to the Bishop of the Diocese, obtained for him a living of considerable value from that prelate, previous to our departure.

My father, believing me to be quite cured of my passion, made no difficulty about letting me go. We duly arrived at Paris, where the ecclesiastical garb took the place of the Cross of Malta, and the title of the Abbé des Grieux that of Chevalier. I gave myself up to study with such application that I made remarkable progress within a few months. I devoted a portion of the night to it, and lost not a moment of the day. I gained so brilliant a reputation, that I was already congratulated upon the honors which it was thought I was sure of obtaining, and, without my having solicited it, my name was entered on the list for a vacant benefice. Nor was piety neglected; I was full of fervor in my attention to all religious exercises.

Tiberge was overjoyed at what he regarded as his own work, and I more than once saw him shedding tears of pure delight as he proudly contemplated what he called my conversion.

That human resolutions should be liable to change has never been a matter of astonishment to me; they are born of one passion—another passion may destroy them; but when I reflect on the sacred nature of those which had led me to St. Sulpice, and on the inward joy which Heaven allowed me to taste in carrying them out, I am appalled at the ease with which I was able to break them.

If it be true that divine aid at all times supplies a strength equal to that of the passions, thep let it be explained to me by what fatal ascendancy one finds one's self suddenly swept far from the path of duty without feeling one's self capable of the least resistance and without being conscious of the least remorse? I believed myself to be completely delivered from the frailties of love. It seemed to me that I would have preferred the perusal of a page of St. Augustine, or a quarter of an hour of Christian meditation, to all the pleasures of the senses; without excepting those which could have been offered me by Manon. Yet one unhappy moment hurled me again over the precipice; and my downfall was all the more irreparable that, finding myself all at once at a depth as profound as that from which I had risen, the new disorders into which I plunged dragged me still further toward the bottom of the abyss.

I had passed nearly a year in Paris without making any inquiries as to the doings of Manon. It had cost me a severe struggle at first to do this violence to my feelings; but the ever-present counsels of Tiberge, and my own reflections, had enabled me to gain the victory over myself. The last few months had glided by so tranquilly that I believed myself to be on the point of forgetting forever that lovely but perfidious being. The time arrived when I had publicly to maintain a thesis in the School of Theology. I extended invitations to several persons of distinction to honor me by their presence. My name was thus spread abroad in all quarters of Paris; it reached the ears of my faithless mistress. She did not feel certain in her recognition of it, under the title of Abbé; but a lingering curiosity, or, perhaps, some sense of penitence at having betrayed me (which of the two sentiments I have never been able to determine), excited her interest in a name so like mine; and she came to the Sorbonne with some other ladies. She was present during my presentation of my thesis, and doubtless had little difficulty in recognizing me.

I was entirely unconscious of her presence, for, in these places, as you know, there are private boxes reserved for ladies, in which they are hidden from view behind latticework screens. I returned to St. Sulpice, covered with glory and overwhelmed with compliments. It was then six o'clock in the evening. A few minutes after my return, I was informed that a lady desired to see me. I proceeded at once to the parlor, little suspecting the startling apparition that there awaited me. Manon! It was she—but more radiantly beautiful than I had ever seen her. She was in her eighteenth year, and words fail me to describe her loveliness. There was a delicate grace, a sweetness, a fascination about her which might have been envied by the Goddess of Love herself. To my eyes she seemed a vision of enchantment.

I was so overcome with emotion at seeing her that I could not utter a word; and, unable to conjecture what the object of her visit could be, I stood trembling and with my eyes cast down, awaiting her explanation. For some minutes her embarrassment was as great as my own, but at last, finding that I did not break the silence, she covered her face with her hands to hide the tears which were beginning to fall from her eyes, and, in a timid voice, said that she knew she deserved my hatred for her unfaithfulness, but that if I had ever really loved her, I had been very cruel to allow two years to go by without making any effort to let her know what had become of me, and that it was still more cruel not to have a word to say to her now that I saw her standing before me in such deep distress.

I cannot descrihe the tumult of feelings in my heart as I listened to her.

She sat down. I remained standing, half turned towards her, hut not daring to trust myself to look her full in the face. More than once I began a reply, but my strength failed me before I could complete it, and the words died away upon my lips. At last, by a supreme effort, I cried in a tone of anguish:

"Manon! Manon! False and heartless girl!"

Weeping bitterly, she told me once more that she had no intention of justifying her perfidious conduct.

"Then, what is your intention?" I cried.

"To die!" was her response; "unless you give me back your heart, for without it I cannot live!"

"Then ask my life, faithless girl!" I said, giving way at last to the tears which I had been vainly striving to restrain; "ask me for my life, which is the only thing left me to sacrifice to you; as for my heart, it has never ceased to be yours."

Scarcely had I uttered these last words when she sprang from her seat in a transport of joy, and ran to embrace me. She overwhelmed me with passionate caresses, and called me by all the fond names which love invents for the expression of its tenderest emotions.

I responded but languidly at first. The transition from my recent condition of mental tranquillity to the tumultuous emotions which I now felt reviving in my breast was so great and so sudden that it positively appalled me. I shuddered like a man who finds himself benighted in the midst of some solitary plain; everything around him seems to belong to a strange and unfamiliar order of things; he is seized with a nameless horror, and regains his composure only after a prolonged examination of all his surroundings.

We seated ourselves side by side, and I took her hands in mine.

"Ah, Manon!" said I, gazing at her sadly; "little did I foresee the base treachery with which you have repaid my love! It was an easy thing for you to deceive a heart over which you reigned in absolute sovereignty, and which found all its happiness in obeying you and gratifying your every wish. Tell me, have you found any other so tender and so devoted? No, no! Nature casts but few in the same mould as mine! But tell me this, at least; have you ever thought of that loving heart with regret? How far am I to rely on this revival of affection which has brought you back to-day to console it? You are more beautiful than ever—that I see only too well; but, in the name of all the pangs I have suffered for your sake, tell me, Manon, my lovely girl, whether you will be more constant also?"

She replied with such pathetic expressions of her penitence, and pledged herself to constancy by such earnest vows and protestations, that I was moved beyond all words.

"Dearest Manon," I said to her, with a profane mingling of the phrases of love and of theology, "you are a divinity; no created being could inspire such adoration as I feel for you! My heart is swelling with triumph and beatitude. Let them talk of free-will as they please at St. Sulpice, 'tis but a chimera! I am going to sacrifice fortune and reputation for your sake; I foresee it plainly; I read my destiny in your bright eyes; but where is the sacrifice for which your love would not richly compensate me? I care nothing for the favors of fortune; glory seems to me but an idle vapor; all my projects of a life devoted to the service of the Church were vain imaginings. All joys, in short, save those which I hope to taste with you, are unworthy of a thought, since they could not hold their own in my heart for a single moment against one glance from you!"

While I promised to bury all her past faults in oblivion, I could not resist the desire to know how it was that she had yielded to the seductions of B———. She told me that he had caught sight of her at her window, and, becoming deeply enamoured of her, had declared his passion in a business-like manner, eminently characteristic of a farmer-general; that is to say, by sending her a letter in which he informed her that payment would be made in proportion to favors received. She had coquetted with him at first, but only in the hope of getting money enough from him to enable us to live in comfort. He had dazzled her by such magnificent promises, however, that her constancy had been gradually undermined; yet I might judge how great her compunction had been, she said, by the grief she had betrayed to me on the eve of our separation. In spite of the luxury in which he had maintained her, she had never been happy with him; not only because she found him lacking in the delicacy of feeling and amiability of manner which characterized me, but also because, even in the midst of the pleasures which he continually provided for her, her inmost heart was filled with the memory of my love and with remorse for her own infidelity. She spoke of Tiberge, and of the deep confusion into which his visit had thrown her. "Had a sword pierced my heart," added she, "the pang would have been less keen than the one I felt. I turned my back upon him, finding myself unable to bear his presence for even a moment."

She then went on to relate how she had learned of my residence in Paris, of my change of profession, and of my examination at the Sorbonne. So great had been her agritation, she assured me, during the disputation of my thesis, that she had found it difficult not merely to refrain from tears, but from giving vent to the moans and cries which had more than once been on the point of breaking from her lips. Finally, she told me that in order to hide her emotion she had been the last to leave the hall; and that then, consulting only the impulse of her heart, she had yielded to her impetuous longing, and had come straight to the Seminary, with the resolution of there putting an end to her life unless she found me willing to forgive her. Where is the barbarian who would not have been moved by a penitence so deep and touching as this? As for myself, I felt at that moment that I would have sacrificed all the bishoprics in Christendom for Manon's sake. I asked her what new arrangement of our affairs she proposed that we should adopt. She replied that our first concern must be to escape from the Seminary, and that we must postpone all deliberation as to our further movements until we had reached a place of greater safety. I yielded without demur to all her wishes. She stepped into her coach and drove off to await me at the corner of the street. I slipped out a few moments after, successfully eluding the vigilance of the porter at the door, and sprang into the coach beside her. We drove to a clothier's shop in the Fripperie^[1] where I donned once more a laced coat and sword. Manon paid for them, as I had not a penny about me, and, in her fear lest I might encounter some obstacle to my flight from St. Sulpice, she had opposed my returning to my room for a moment to get my money. My purse, moreover, was but scantily filled, and the munificence of B——— had made her rich enough to despise the small sum which she had persuaded me to leave behind.

Before we left the clothier's shop we held a consultation as to the course we should pursue. With a view of enhancing in my eyes the completeness of her sacrifice of B——— for my sake, she determined to act without the least consideration for him.

"I will leave him his furniture," she said, "for it belongs to him; but I shall take with me, as I am entitled to do, all the jewelry and about sixty thousand francs, which I have received from him during the past two years. I have given him no rights over me," she added; "so that we can safely remain in Paris, and take a comfortable house, where we will live happily together."

I reminded her that, though there might be no danger for her in this plan, there would be a great deal for me; as I must inevitably be recognized sooner or later, and would be continually exposed to the recurrence of just such a mishap as had befallen me once already. She frankly owned that she would be very reluctant to leave Paris, and I was so anxious not to cross her wishes in any respect, that there was no risk which I would not gladly have faced in order to please her. However, we hit upon a sensible compromise, which was to take a house in some village near Paris, from which we could readily reach town when pleasure or business called us there. We decided upon Chaillot, which is within easy distance of Paris.

Manon then hastened to her house, and I proceeded to the smaller gate of the Tuileries Gardens to await her coming. She returned about an hour later, in a hackney-coach, accompanied by a maid-servant, and bringing with her two or three trunks in which were packed her clothes and everything of value which she possessed.

We lost no time in getting to Chaillot, where we put up for the first night at the inn, in order to gain time to look about us for a house, or, at all events, for comfortable lodgings. We found an apartment to our liking the very next day.

1. La Fripperie was the neighborhood in old Paris in which were situated the shops of the venders of cheap and second-hand clothing, and corresponded to the "Monmouth Street" of London.—Translator.