Exposé succinct de la contestation qui s'est élevée entre M. Hume. et M. Rousseau, avec les pièces justificatives

12mo. pp. xiv, 127, [1] (blank). Signatures: a8 (-a8) A8 B4 C-F12 G4. Calf. The arrangement of fleurons on the title page is in the shape of a goblet without a stem, the interior filled with a criss-cross pattern composed of two types of ornament (cf English Short Title Catalogue Online, N71014). Tailpiece, printed footnotes.

Bound with three other works:

• Justification de J. J. Rousseau, dans la contestation qui lui est survenue avec M. Hume. London [i.e. Paris], 1766 (a forgery, see Bib# 4103201/Fr# 716 in this collection).
• Précis Pour M. J. J. Rousseau, en Réponse a l’Exposé succint de M. Hume: Suivi d’une Lettre de Madame D *** a l’Auteur de la Justification de M. Rousseau. 1767 (Bib# 4103203/Fr# 718).
• Le Docteur Pansophe, ou Lettres de Monsieur de Voltaire. London (Lyon?), 1766 (which Voltaire protested was a forgery put forth in his name, but which may be genuinely his–the protest itself being the imposture; Bib# 5968408/Fr# 1376).

First edition, distinguishable from a later [London] piracy (The Rothschild Library: A Catalogue of the Collection of Eighteenth-century Printed Books and Manuscripts Formed by Lord Rothschild. 2 vols. Cambridge, 1954, 1178) by the absence of press-marks (see W.B. Todd in The Book Collector, 7 (1958), p. 191). According to Allen Hazen, the subsequent first edition in English, A Concise and Genuine Account of the Dispute between Mr. Hume and Mr. Rousseau (London: Thomas Becket, 20 November 1766), is a retranslation of the French text, although Rothschild (1177) says it follows Hume’s original. This cause célèbre, which engendered a surprisingly large pamphlet war, began with the whimsical forgery by Horace Walpole of a letter from Frederick the Great to Rousseau, chaffingly offering him asylum, which Rousseau precipitously blamed on Hume, his host and benefactor in England. The forgery was distributed personally in manuscript by Walpole from December 1765 onward, ‘and [he wrote in January 1766] the copies have spread like wildfire’. It was first printed, without Walpole’s sanction, in the St James Chronicle for [significantly] April 1-3, 1766 (see Hazen, A Bibliography of Horace Walpole. Folkestone, 1973, pp. 160-62), but in a considerably different text, to which Rousseau indignantly objected in the next number, and the editor defended as a well-known spoof by an author ‘in The Catalogue of Noble Authors’ –Walpole’s own work. Walpole himself says that his Parisian friends, including Helvétius and Diderot, corrected the letter of ‘some faults in the [French] language’, and these variant texts must reflect deliberate revision, the ‘Hume’ version being based on what Walpole gave him earlier in the year. See also A. Thierry, Les grandes mystifications littéraires. Paris, 1913, vol. II, pp. 211-30.

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