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.”