A ROUSSEAUIAN EXPERIMENT GONE WRONG. 8vo. (8), 378 pp, (2). Bound in contemporary speckled boards with gilt-and-red title label on spine; an excellent copy, clean and fresh. Engraved ex-libris of the German polymath Friedrich Carl Gottlob Hirsching (1762-1800) on pastedown, with a note in his hand on the flyleaf dated 1787; earlier, lengthy note by a buyer who purchased the book on 12 March 1766 in Frankfurt also on flyleaf. One or two brief marginalia in old pencil and ink throughout; signature of Dulaurens on pastedown, but presumably in another hand. Rare first edition of this important work of the Enlightenment, in which a woman is the subject of thought-provoking yet cruel experiments by a 'rich philosopher'. Imirce tells the story of a bizarre, Rousseauian project involving a young girl who is ‘bought’ shortly after her birth, in order to confine her blindfolded in a stone cellar for 22 years. Conlon’s Ouvrages relatifs à Jean-Jacques Rousseau notes, however, that Dulauren’s preface on pp. 17-60 “is a satire of the ideas and the behavior of Rousseau”. The author, a priest, was arrested in 1767 and condemned to prison in perpetuity; he spent the last 27 years of his life declining into madness in the ‘convent-prison’ of Marienbaum. “Imirce was banned and confiscated in France for its irreligious and pornographic content… although [Dulaurens] has largely disappeared from literary history, his works were widely read in the eighteenth century. Between 1765 and 1782, Imirce caused quite a stir…” (Julia Douthwaite, The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment, pp. 125-7). OCLC shows US copies at Harvard, Princeton, and Texas A & M. * Conlon, Ouvrages français relatifs à Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1751-1799: bibliographie chronologique, #328; Conlon, Le siècle des Lumières: bibliographie chronologique, 65:760.