When the young nobleman Des Grieux lays eyes on the beautiful and charming Manon Lescaut, he immediately falls in love with her, and they elope to Paris, incurring the wrath of his family and forfeiting his inheritance. However, he struggles to satisfy her taste for luxury, frittering away the little he has left, and his domestic bliss finally disintegrates when he finds out that Manon has betrayed him for a rich lover.

Although causing scandal on its initial publication in 1731 and subsequently being banned, Manon Lescaut proved very popular with eighteenth-century readers, and remains one of literature's finest and most evocative depictions of obsessive love.