Lunette pour une vuë courte, ou Bagatelle historico-physico-morale par un…

pp. 32;

[bound after:] Lunettes a éclaircir la vue, ou Aventure singulière, arrivée récemment à Paris en un Hôtel garni, & rapportée par M.D.L, sous le nom de Quidam... et la Source vraie des passions, des nécessités & des Maux des deux Sexes humain... Amsterdam et se trouve a Paris: Chez Humaire, 1769. pp. [4], 61, [1]

Two works bound together, 12mo (160 × 90 mm). Early errata corrections in manuscript. Early marbled smooth calf, gilt panelled spine, sides with palmette borders, green silk marker. Old inkstamped shelf mark to front free endpaper. Joints slightly rubbed, but a very good copy.

First editions of two rare satires purporting to offer spectacles for the short-sighted. Other than that the two works couldn’t be more different, both in tone or content.

The most significant is the Lunette pour une vuë courte apparently almost unrepresented in European or American library collections. Pseudonymous (’by a northern optician’) and with a false St Petersburg imprint it is a virulent rebuttal of the natural philosophy of Jean-Baptiste Robinet, encyclopédiste and proto-evolutionist. The work under the satirist’s lenses is Robinet’s Vue philosophique de la gradation naturelle des formes de l’étre (Amsterdam, 1768) in which the author had expounded part of his theory of the advance of nature via an active principle common to all forms, from stones to complex plants and animals. Like several other Enlightenment precursors Robinet contributed to the history of evolutionary thought later crystallised by Darwin. He envisaged links between all natural forms, only temporarily invisible, all subject to an active process of refinement and development. Our Lunetier-satirist was having none of it and dismissed the work as a tissue of bizarre dreams and a monstrous production that could only be dismissed by humour. In particular he singles our for ridicule Robinet’s discussions of shells which seem imitate female genitalia (Concha veneris) and fossil stones (priapolites) resembling the male.

The other work is a cautionary and resolutely anti-feminst verse romp through the perils facing the modernday Everyman (’Quidam’) in Paris where the vices of women lurk at every corner to ensare him. No copy of Lunette pour une vuë courte, ou Bagatelle historico-physico-morale llocated in Worldcat. Lunettes a éclaircir la vue: Gay II, 921.