PRÉVÔST D'EXILES, ANTOINE-FRANÇOIS. — French writer, born in Hesdin in Artois on 1 April 1697, died at St-Firmin near Chantilly on 29 November 1763.
The son of a king’s procurator, he was a novice in the Society of Jesus and, after an interlude of military service (1716–19), joined the Benedictines, where he professed his vows and received Holy Orders. Sent as a preacher to Evreux and Paris, in October 1728 he took refuge in England and Holland, where he published (1731) the last three volumes of the Mémoires d'un homme de qualité qui s'est retiré du monde: the first four volumes had already appeared in Paris before his flight. The last of the fifteen narratives included in them, the Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut, enjoyed wide and immediate success; the passion that irresistibly binds the two protagonists, breaking every moral bond, is portrayed without the romantic and rhetorical digressions found in other works by the writer, who, however, is obliged to warn of the frequent presence of « descriptions trop tendres et d'une certaine licence de sentiments et d'expression... qui ne laissent pas d'avoir quelque danger pour un lecteur inconsideré qui s'en occupe trop et qui en est excessivement attendri ».
In England P. undertook the publication of a journal, Pour et contre, which helped make British customs known in France between 1733 and 1740. In the autumn of 1734, P. was readmitted to the Order and returned to France; the following year he entered the service of the prince de Conti as chaplain. He continued to publish his voluminous novels: besides numerous translations from English, seventeen volumes of an'Histoire générale des voyages (1745–61), and a French lexicon.