Manon Lescaut

A seventeen-year-old chevalier meets a girl being sent to a convent against her will, and throws over his family, his studies and eventually his honour to keep her — repeatedly, each time worse. Prévost was a Benedictine who twice fled his order; the book was burned in Paris and read everywhere, and gave opera two of its warhorses. Its cruelty is that neither lover can be blamed and neither can stop.