Prevost d'Exiles, Antoine-François

PREVOST D'EXILES, ANTOINE-FRANÇOIS. - French writer, b. at Hesdin in Artois on 1 April 1697, d. at St-Firmin near Chantilly on 29 November 1763.

The son of a king's prosecutor, he was a novice in the Society of Jesus and, after an interlude of military life (1716-19), among the Benedictines, where he pronounced his vows and received holy orders. Sent as a preacher to Evreux and to Paris, in October 1728 he took refuge in England and in 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 tomes had already seen the light in Paris before his flight. The last of the fifteen tales included in it, the Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut, enjoyed a broad and immediate success; the passion that irresistibly binds the two protagonists, breaking every moral tie, is portrayed without the novelistic and oratorical digressions of other works by the writer, who, however, is forced 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. set his hand to the publication of a journal, Pour et contre, which helped to 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 as chaplain in the service of the prince of Conti. 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.

Enzo Bottasso