has adopted the principles and the doctrines of our French economists?"[i-224] Before attempting to appraise the real indebtedness of Franklin to the physiocrats, it is well to seek to learn how he came in contact with their ideas, and especially why by the year 1767 he was acutely susceptible to their doctrine. In the summer of 1767, in the company of Sir John Pringle, Franklin went to Paris, not an unknown figure to the French savants, who were acquainted with his scientific papers already translated into French by D'Alibard. That he was feted by the Newtons of the physiocrats, François Quesnay and the elder Mirabeau, as "le Savant, le Geomètre, le Physicien, l'homme à qui la nature permet de dévoiler ses secrets,"[i-225] we are assured, when to De Nemours (July 28, 1768) he writes regretfully: "Be so good as to present my sincere respect to that venerable apostle, Dr. Quesnay, and to the illustrious Ami des Hommes (of whose civilities to me at Paris I retain a grateful remembrance)...."[i-226] Having missed Franklin in Paris (1767), De Nemours had sent Franklin "un recueil des principaux traités économiques du Docteur Quesnay" and his own _Physiocratie_ (1768), which cast him in the role "of a propagandist of Physiocratie doctrines."[i-227] Franklin admitted, "I am perfectly charmed with them, and wish I could have stayed in France for some time, to have studied in your school, that I might by conversing with its founders have made myself quite a master of that philosophy."[i-228] That Franklin was not before 1767 unacquainted with the Économistes we learn when he tells Dupont de Nemours that Dr. Templeman had shown him the De Nemours-Templeman correspondence when the latter was Secretary of the London Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce. A second trip to Paris (in 1769) to confer with Barbeu Dubourg, an avowed physiocrat, concerning his forthcoming translation of Franklin's works, served to acquaint him still further with the doctrines of the new school.