Moral Ambiguities in Prévost, pt. 1: Examples

When we say that someone is a moral example, what exactly do we mean?  How skilled are we at discerning the supposed moral virtue to be emulated?  These are questions that I was prompted to consider recently while reading some European fiction and that I think are of abiding relevance. 

In the Foreward to his delightful novel Manon Lescaut (rev. 1753; orig. 1731), Abbé Prévost describes “the subject of the picture I will present” as “an ambiguous character, a mixture of virtues and vices, a perpetual contrast between good impulses and bad actions.”  Prévost envisions the narrative “as an aid to moral instruction.” Specifically, one “will see, in Des Grieux’s conduct, a terrible example of the power of passions…” (Manon Lescaut, 3, although Prévost’s sincerity here is questionable given the text’s history of censorship).  What remains narratively ambiguous is the nature, or content, of the moral instruction supposedly intended.  Is it traditional or unusual?  Without resolving that question, it seems to me that in seeking empathy from other characters Des Grieux highlights how feelings influence, and usually soften, moral judgment.

A tension exists within Des Grieux:  on the one hand, blindness to the powerful influence that his own feelings for Manon have on his shameful moral actions (he lies, steals, murders) and, on the other hand, his keen awareness of the powerful influence that pity can have to alter other people’s moral assessment of him.  Scenes in which Des Grieux calculatingly targets pity so as to lessen the severity of another’s judgment occur repeatedly.  Two scenes in particular illustrate the pattern.

First, when Des Grieux explains to Father Superior in Saint-Lazare why he had attacked M. de G…M…, Des Grieux quickly shifts his emotional disposition from anger to sadness.  The ploy seems to be to channel the monk’s goodness, which is coordinated with pity, into his helping Des Grieux:  “Oh, he has pierced me to the heart!  I will never recover. I will tell you everything, I added, sobbing.  You are good, you will pity me” (60).  Des Grieux, who had no scruple about defrauding M. de G…M… realizes at some level the baseness of his behavior, and so he positively spins his narrative to get what he wants by eliciting compassion:  “I gave him an abridged account of my long and unconquerable passion for Manon… I presented all of this, it is true, in a light as favourable to us as was possible” (60).

Antoine François Prévost d'Exiles (1697-1763)

Father Superior is moved by pity both to alter his moral judgment of Des Grieux and to intercede for him with the Lieutenant-General:  “The good Father, seeing me so grievously afflicted, tried to comfort me; he told me he had never quite understood my story in the way I had just told it… what I had just told him put my affairs in a completely different light, and he was in no doubt that the faithful account he meant to make of it to the Lieutenant-General of Police would contribute to my release” (60, 61).

Second, Des Grieux later also spins his narrative to make it less morally condemnable to his father.  “A father’s heart is nature’s finest work,” Des Grieux recognizes.  Accordingly, Des Grieux appeals to him to “spare a little compassion.”  The result:  his father “could not hide from me this change of feeling. My poor Chevalier, he said, come here and embrace me.  I pity you.  I embraced him. I could tell from the way he held me what was happening in his heart.”  His father asks for a full account to be better able to secure his release from Châtelet, a prison for moral and other social miscreants.  Once again, Des Grieux, aware that pity is softening his father’s moral stance, recounts his exploits craftily, “[h]oping to make my own faults seem less shameful” (60).

Des Grieux manipulates other characters’ feelings to secure approbation or diminish condemnation.  If the “whole work is a moral treatise” (5), what is the moral example to be shunned or emulated?  Is one to avoid (being duped into) compromising one’s moral judgment because of compassion, or, positively, to pity a libertine and lighten punishment?  Is one to recognize that pity is a virtue but that manipulating it for self-gain and moral license, as Des Grieux does, is a vice? 

Manon Lescaut is replete with these moral ambiguities and contrasts that stem from human sentiment.  Its narrative significance lies in depicting them so vividly and raising questions about where virtue resides.