Manon Lescaut (First Limited Edition, Numbered)

Manon Lescaut first appeared in 1731 as the seventh and final volume of Prévost's sprawling Mémoires et aventures d'un homme de qualité, a modest enough origin for one of the most enduring stories in European literature.

The tale of the Chevalier des Grieux and his catastrophic passion for Manon struck readers from the first as something qualitatively different from the fiction around it: more honest about desire, more ruthless about consequence, more modern in its treatment of money as the mediating force in human relationships.

It was seized and condemned in Paris, which ensured its popularity. It has been set as an opera twice, by Massenet and by Puccini, and it remains in print in dozens of languages nearly three centuries after its composition. John Austen brings to it twelve colour plates of considerable charm, their languorous, mannered beauty in perfect sympathy with the novel's own atmosphere of gilded ruin.

First edition thus. Number 488 of 500 numbered copies. Royal Quarto. Quarter vellum and blue cloth boards. Spine lettered and decorated in gilt. Top edge gilt, others uncut. [vi], x, 144 pp., with coloured frontispiece and 11 further colour plates, black-and-white title page vignette, pictorial head and tailpieces, and decorative blue border to title, all text, and colophon throughout. Some markings to vellum. Spine a trifle darkened. Very mild rubbing and toning to cover corners. Binding sound: square and tight. Contents good with foxing and toning present throughout, stronger to preliminaries.

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Catalogue Number: HH000461