At an inn in Passy, twelve women arrive chained by the waist—and one, beautiful and grieving, turns her face from the crowd. A young man in tears means to follow her across the ocean, though he can barely afford the road to the port. In eighteenth-century France, the narrator encounters the Chevalier des Grieux beside the guarded coach carrying Manon toward deportation. He has tried petitions, trickery, even force to free her; now, with his money gone and the guards barring him from her side, he can only follow. His devotion is fierce enough to carry him to America—but what brought a young nobleman and the woman he adores to this desperate pass? When chance brings the narrator face to face with des Grieux again, the story behind that heartbreaking journey begins to unfold. With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world. Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.
