Memoires et avantures d'un homme de qualité qui s'est retiré du monde. Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux & de Manon Lescaut

New edition, the first complete collective edition dating from 1731 and not from 1733 as is often erroneously stated. The first publications of the novel and its sequel were spread from 1728 to 1731. Title pages in red and black. All first editions of this novel are rare, unlike those published after 1750.
Contemporary full brown mottled sheep binding. Smooth decorated spine. Red morocco title and volume labels. A tear with loss to the lower joint at the foot of volume II. One cm lacking on the lower board of volume I (wormhole damage). Rubbing. Fine copy, very fresh. The last 2 leaves of volume IV shorter in margins. Lacking the half-title in volume 2. Two wormholes, then one in volume VI, from the first leaf to the 159th.
19th-century armorial bookplate: Des Chesnes Lambrecht.
Abbé Prévost was one of the principal agitators of letters with Lesage in the first part of the 18th century, and certainly one of the best novelists. His prolixity and facility were criticized but he left with L'histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut one of the immortal masterpieces of French literature, a sequel that would be condemned to the fire by the Parliament in Paris. It is moreover due to his forced exile, in Holland and England, that the author took this name of d'Exiles. Beyond this, the Memoirs had a profound and lasting success, the subject of a man formerly withdrawn, shaken by his passions and disorders, living his adventures throughout all Europe, with even a chapter in Brazil, knew how to move numerous readers through their novelty, the narrator dwelling at length on the differences in customs. The work testifies to a change in sensibility in letters that Rousseau and Diderot would later recognize.