Je suis bien vaine, my dear Mr. Garrick, de pouvoir vous donner ce que je perds avec un regret trés-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. Je sui vraiment fâchée que la politesse m'oblige à lui donner ma lettre ouverte: cet usage établi retient mon coeur tout prêt à lui rendre justice, mais sa modestie est aussi grande que son mérite, et je craindrois que la plus simple vérité ne parût à ses yeux une grosse flaterie; je puis vous dire de lui, ce qu'il disoit un jour d'un autre—le métier de cet homme-là est d'être aimable. J'ajouterai,—et de mériter l'estime de tous ceux qui ont le bonheur de le connoitre.
Oh ces Ecossois! ces chiens d'Ecossois! ils viennent me plaire et m'affliger. Je suis comme ces folles jeunes filles qui écoutent un amant sans penser an 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. Les hommes supérieurs se cherchent. Rempli d'estime pour Mr. Garrick, désirant le voir et l'entretenir, Mr. Smith a voulu être introduit par moi. Il me flate infiniment par cette préférence, bien des gens se mélent de présenter un ami à un autre ami, peu sont comme moi dans le cas d'être sûre de la reconnoissance des tous deux. Adieu, mon très-aimable et très-paresseux ami. Embrassez pour moi vôtre gracieuse compagne. La mienne vous assure l'un et l'autre de sa plus tendre amitié.
Riccoboni[172]
Not content with this letter of recommendation which she gave to Smith to deliver, Madame Riccoboni at the same time sent Garrick another through the post, and shows the sincerity of the feelings of high esteem she had expressed in the open letter by expressing them again quite as decisively in the closed one:—
6 Octobre.
Aujourd'huy je vous écris uniquement pour vous prévenir sur une visite que vous recevrez à Londres. Mr. Smith, un Ecossois, homme d'un très grand mérite, aussi distingué par son bon naturel, par la douceur de son caractère que par son esprit et son sçavoir, me demande une lettre pour vous. Vous verrez un philosophe moral et pratique; gay, riant, à cent lieues de la pédanterie des nôtres. Il vous estime beaucoup et désire vous connoître particulièrement. Donnez son nom à votre porte, je vous en prie, vous perdriez beaucoup à ne pas le voir, et je serois désolée de ne pas recevoir de lui un détail du bon accueil que vous lui aurez fait.... Donnez son nom à votre porte, je vous le répète. S'il ne vous voit pas, je vous étrangle.[173]
Smith had apparently begged of her also a letter of introduction to R. Burke, and she wrote him one, but he went away without it; as she says to Garrick, in a letter of 3rd January 1767: "Ma bête de philosophe est partie sans songer à la prendre." Nor apparently had Smith as yet delivered her letter to Garrick, for she asks, "Vous ne l'avez pas encore vu Mr. Smith? c'est la plus distraite créature! mais c'est une des plus aimables. Je l'aime beaucoup et je l'estime encore d'avantage."[174] A few weeks later, on the 29th of January, she again returns to the subject of Smith, asking Garrick whether he had yet seen him, whether he was in London or had delivered her letter, and adding, "C'est un homme charmant, n'est-il pas?"[175]
Madame Riccoboni was not the only Frenchwoman who was touched with Smith's personal charms; we hear of another, a marquise, "a woman too of talents and wit," who actually fell in love with him. It was during an excursion Smith made from Paris to Abbeville, with the Duke of Buccleugh and several other English noblemen and a certain Captain Lloyd, a retired officer, who was afterwards a friend, perhaps a patient, of Dr. Currie, the author of the Life of Burns, and told the doctor this and many other anecdotes about the economist. Lloyd was, according to Currie, a most interesting and accomplished man, and his acquaintance with Smith was one of great intimacy. The party seem to have stayed some days at Abbeville—to visit Crecy, no doubt, like patriotic Englishmen, and this French marquise was stopping at the same hotel. She had just come from Paris, where she found all the world talking about Hume, and having heard that Smith was Hume's particular friend and almost as great a philosopher as he, she was bent on making so famous a conquest, but after many persistent efforts was obliged eventually to abandon the attempt. Her philosopher could not endure her, nor could he—and this greatly amused his own party—conceal his embarrassment; but it was not philosophy altogether that steeled his breast. The truth, according to Lloyd, was that the philosopher was deeply in love with another, an English lady, who was also stopping in Abbeville at the time. Of all Currie heard concerning Smith from Captain Lloyd this is the only thing he has chosen to record, and slight though it is, it contributes a touch of nature to that more personal aspect of Smith's life of which we have least knowledge. Stewart makes mention of an attachment which Smith was known to have cherished for several years in the early part of his life to a young lady of great beauty and accomplishment, whom Stewart had himself seen when she was past eighty, but "still retained evident traces of her former beauty," while "the powers of her understanding and the gaiety of her temper seemed to have suffered nothing from the hand of time." Nobody ever knew what prevented their union, or how far Smith's addresses were favourably received, but she never married any more than he. Stewart says that "after this disappointment he laid aside all thoughts of marriage"; but the Abbeville attachment seems to have been a different one from this and a later.
While in Paris Smith was a very steady playgoer. He was always a great admirer of the French dramatists, and now enjoyed very much seeing their plays actually represented on the stage, and discussing them afterwards, we may be sure, with an expert like Madame Riccoboni.
Speaking of his admiration for the great French dramatists, Dugald Stewart states that "this admiration (resulting originally from the general character of his taste, which delighted more to remark that pliancy of genius which accommodates itself to general rules than to wonder at the bolder flights of an undisciplined imagination) was increased to a great degree when he saw the beauties that had struck him in the closet heightened by the utmost perfection of theatrical exhibition."[176] The French theatre, indeed, gave him much material for reflection. In his later years his thoughts and his conversation often recurred to the philosophy of the imitative arts. He meant had he lived to have written a book on the subject; he has actually left us a single essay, one of the most finished pieces of work he ever did; and among his friends he was very fond in those days of speaking and theorising on that topic, and supporting his conclusions by illustrations from his wide reading and his observation of life. These illustrations seem to have been drawn frequently from his experiences of the French theatre.
The Earl of Buchan says that Smith had no ear for music, but there are few things he seems to have nevertheless enjoyed better than the opera, both serious and comic. He thought the "sprightly airs" of the comic opera, though a more "temperate joy" than "the scenes of the common comedy," were still a "most delicious" one.'[177] "They do not make us laugh so loud, but they make us smile more frequently." And he held the strongest opinion that music was always on virtue's side, for he says the only musical passions are the good ones, the bad and unsocial passions being, in his view, essentially unmelodious. But he thought scenery was much abused on the French operatic stage. "In the French operas not only thunder and lightning, storms and tempests, are commonly represented in the ridiculous manner above mentioned, but all the marvellous, all the supernatural of epic poetry, all the metamorphoses of mythology, all the wonders of witchcraft and magic, everything that is most unfit to be represented upon the stage, are every day exhibited with the most complete approbation and applause of that ingenious nation."[178]
Amid all this gaiety of salons and playhouses Smith found a graver retreat with the philanthropic sect of the economists in the apartments of the king's physician, Dr. Quesnay, in Paris and Versailles. Dupont de Nemours told J.B. Say that he had often met Smith at their little meetings, and that they looked on him as a judicious and simple man, and apparently nothing more, for, he adds, Smith had not at that time shown the stuff he was made of.[179] If they did not then recognise his paramount capacity as they afterwards did, there were some things about his opinions which Dupont thought they learnt better then than they could from the great work in which he subsequently expounded them. In a note to one of Turgot's works, of which he was editor, Dupont appeals from an opinion expressed, or understood to be expressed, by Smith in his published writings, to the opinion on the same subject which he used to hear from Smith's own lips in the unreserved intercourse of private life. "Smith at liberty," he says, "Smith in his own room or in that of a friend, as I have seen him when we were fellow-disciples of M. Quesnay, would not have said that."[180]