Samuel Rogers, meeting Smith a year before his death, happened to remark of some writer that he was rather superficial, a Voltaire. “Sir!” cried Smith, incensed by this use of the indefinite article, striking the table with his hand, “there has been but one Voltaire.” Voltaire, on his side, probably thought well of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, for his intimate friend, Dr. Tronchin, the famous physician of Geneva, had sent his son to attend Smith’s classes at Glasgow. Rogers’s visit fell in the year of the French Revolution, and the question of king against parliaments was being debated. Smith mentioned that Voltaire had an aversion to the States, and was attached to the royal authority. Voltaire had talked about the Duke of Richelieu, whom the party had met at Toulouse, as a singular character. The duke had slipped down at Versailles, a few years before his death, “the first faux pas he had ever made at Court.” When Saint-Fond, who visited Edinburgh in 1784, called on Adam Smith, he was shown a fine bust of Voltaire; and Smith discoursed upon the incalculable obligations that Reason owed to the Philosopher of Ferney. “The ridicule and sarcasms which he lavished upon fanatics and hypocrites of all sects have enabled the understandings of men to bear the light of truth,” and prepared them for research. “He has done much more for the benefit of mankind than those grave philosophers whose books are read by a few only. The writings of Voltaire are made for all and read by all.” Smith said he could not pardon Joseph the Second of Austria, “who pretended to travel as a philosopher,” for passing Ferney without doing homage to the historian of Peter the Great. He concluded from this circumstance that Joseph “was but a man of inferior mind.”[22]
Smith kept no journal during his French tour, and as usual wrote as few letters as possible, though he must have made extensive notes. Most of his letters were probably to report progress to Charles Townshend. I have in my possession part of an abstract of one of these, which, though of no importance in itself, serves to show that he took his tutorship very seriously. From sidelights in the correspondence of Charles Bonnet the naturalist, and Le Sage, and Adam Ferguson, we know that he enjoyed the best company in Geneva, particularly at the house of the Duchesse d’Enville, who was there under Dr. Tronchin’s treatment with her son, the ill-fated Duc de la Rochefoucauld. In 1774 Adam Ferguson wrote to Smith that his own bad French reminded the Duchesse d’Enville of her old difficulties with Smith, “but she said that before you left Paris she had the happiness to learn your language.” Two years later Bonnet wished Hume to remember him to “the Sage of Glascow, ... whom we shall always recollect with great pleasure.”
The tutor with his two pupils, for the Duke had been joined at Bordeaux by a younger brother, left Geneva for Paris early in December 1765, promising, however, to return to republican soil before they left the continent. Hume, now a rich man with a pension of £900 a year, was just leaving the Embassy, and relinquishing his sovereignty of philosophy and society; but the two friends had a few days together before he crossed the Channel with poor, wayward, irresolute Rousseau, hunted or haunted by the furies. Adam Smith was soon in a whirlpool of gaiety and philosophy. Friendship with Hume was enough to ensure a friendly reception from Parisian society, where science and letters were still fashionable. But Smith was known and valued for his own sake; his Theory of Moral Sentiments was so much read, praised, and talked about that several translators, among them the young Duc de Rochefoucauld, were competing to repair the badness of the first attempt, published in 1764 by Dous at the instance of Holbach. That of the Abbé Blavet was, Smith thought, but indifferently executed. The best translation, it is said, was that published in 1798 by Condorcet’s widow.
For ten months Smith suffered and enjoyed enough dissipation for a lifetime, if we may judge from the Hume correspondence, which shows that in one week of July 1766 he was at Baron Holbach’s conversing with Turgot, at the Comtesse de Boufflers’, and in the salon of Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse. In fact, as Mr. Rae says, he seems to have been a regular guest in almost all the famous salons of Paris. Thus we find Hume writing in March to the Countess de Boufflers: “I am glad you have taken my friend Smith under your protection. You will find him a man of true merit, though perhaps his sedentary recluse life may have hurt his air and appearance as a man of the world.” She replies in May that she has made the acquaintance of Mr. Smith, and for love of Hume has given him a very hearty welcome; that she is reading the Theory of Moral Sentiments, and believes it will please her. Six years later she talked of translating the book, and said that Smith’s doctrine of Sympathy was supplanting Hume’s philosophy as the fashionable opinion, especially with the ladies! Smith was a keen playgoer in Paris, and made the acquaintance of Madame Riccoboni, who had been a great actress but had abandoned the stage for the novel, and was almost as popular as Richardson. When he left France she gave him a charming letter of introduction to Garrick:—
“Je suis bien vaine, my dear Mr. Garrick, de pouvoir vous donner ce que je perds avec un regret très vif, le plaisir de voir Mr. Smith. Ce charming philosopher vous dira combien il a d’esprit, car je le défie de parler sans en montrer.... Oh ces Écossois! ces chiens d’Écossois! ils viennent me plaire et m’affliger. Je suis comme ces folles jeunes filles qui écoutent un amant sans penser au regret, toujours voisin du plaisir. Grondez-moi, battez-moi, tuez-moi: mais j’aime Mr. Smith, je l’aime beaucoup. Je voudrois que le diable emportât tous nos gens de lettres, tous nos philosophes, et qu’il me rapportât Mr. Smith.”
In a separate letter to Garrick the novelist again describes her friend: “Mr. Smith, un Écossois, homme d’un très grand mérite, aussi distingué par son bon naturel, par la douceur de son caractère que par son esprit et son savoir, me demande une lettre pour vous. Vous verrez un philosophe moral et pratique; gay, riant à cent lieus de la pédanterie des nôtres.”[23] Of the Rochefoucaulds we have already heard at Geneva. They seem to have been at Paris during Smith’s stay there, for “from Madame d’Enville,” writes Dugald Stewart, “the respectable mother of the late excellent and much lamented Duke of Rochefoucauld, he received many attentions which he always recollected with particular gratitude.” A story is told of another lady, a marquise of talent and wit, who was so overcome by his personal charms that she fell in love with him at Abbeville, where Smith and the Duke of Buccleuch stopped on one of their excursions from Paris. A Captain Lloyd, who was with the party, doubtless on a patriotic visit to the field of Creçy, told the story to Dr. Currie, the biographer of Burns. The philosopher could neither endure these addresses nor conceal his embarrassment, for the reason, said Lloyd, that he was deeply in love with an English lady who was also at Abbeville. But Dugald Stewart only mentions an early attachment with a lady who remained single, and at eighty years of age still retained evident traces of her former beauty, and adds that “after this disappointment he laid aside all thoughts of marriage.”
Susan Curchod, that “inestimable treasure” for whom Gibbon sighed as a lover, had married Necker, then only a successful banker, while Smith and his party were at Toulouse. The mother of Madame de Stäel, as we learn from her first admirer, united elegant manners and lively conversation with wit, beauty, and erudition. No wonder then that her new home was already a centre of Parisian life. The Neckers were very hospitable, and were intimate with Morellet and others of the economic sect. Adam Smith’s impressions of Necker are mentioned by Sir James Mackintosh in the ever admirable though recanted Defence of the French Revolution. He had, as we there read, no very high opinion of the future minister, speaking of him as a man probably upright and not illiberal, but narrow, pusillanimous, and entangled by the habit of detail. He predicted that Necker’s fame would fall when his talents should be brought to the test, and always said emphatically, “He is a man of detail.” Mackintosh adds: “At a time when the commercial abilities of Lord Auckland were the theme of profuse eulogy, Dr. Smith characterised him in the same words.”
Dugald Stewart mentions that Smith was also acquainted with D’Alembert, Helvétius, and Marmontel. It was at the house of Helvétius that he first met the great Turgot and the excellent Abbé Morellet. “He talked our language very badly,” writes the Abbé in his memoirs; “but his Theory of Moral Sentiments had given me a great idea of his depth and sagacity, and in fact I still look upon him as one who made most comprehensive observations and analyses of all the questions that he dealt with. M. Turgot, who was as fond of metaphysics as I was, held a high opinion of his genius. We saw him often; he was presented at the house of Helvétius: we discussed the theory of commerce, banking, loans, and many points in the great book he was then composing. He gave me a very pretty pocket-book which he used and which has served me for twenty years.”
Turgot’s Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth, which were written about this time, remained unpublished till 1769, when they began to appear in the Éphémérides du Citoyen. It is noteworthy as bearing upon the question of mutual obligation between Smith and Turgot that it was the Wealth of Nations, not the Reflections, which gave topics for their economic discussions. It has been supposed, on the authority of Condorcet, that a correspondence was subsequently carried on between Smith and Turgot. But the publication quite recently of a letter written by Smith to the young Duke of Rochefoucauld has removed all doubt upon the subject. Rochefoucauld had written to inquire of Smith if he possessed any letters from Turgot, and this is the answer:—
“I should certainly have been very happy to have communicated to your Grace any letters which the ever to be regretted Mr. Turgot had done me the honour to write to me; and by that means to have the distinguished honour of being recorded as one of his correspondents. But tho’ I had the happiness of his acquaintance and, I flattered myself, even of his friendship and esteem, I never had that of his correspondence. He was so good as to send me a copy of the Procès Verbal of what passed at the bed of justice upon the registration of his six edicts which did so much honour to their Author, and, had they been executed without alteration, would have proved so beneficial to his country. But the present (which I preserve as a most valuable monument of a person whom I remember with so much veneration) was not accompanied with any letter.”