Economists -- Great Britain -- Biography; Smith, Adam, 1723-1790
A frequent resort of Smith in Paris was the salon of Mademoiselle de
l'Espinasse, which differed from the others by the greater variety of
the guests and by the presence of ladies. The hostess--according to
Hume, one of the most sensible women in Paris--had long been Madame du
Deffand's principal assistant in the management of her famous salon,
but having been dismissed in 1764 for entertaining Turgot and
D'Alembert on her own account without permission, she set up a rival
salon of her own on improved principles, with the zealous help of her
two eminent friends; and to her unpretending apartments ambassadors,
princesses, marshals of France, and financiers came, and met with men
of letters like Grimm, Condillac, and Gibbon. D'Alembert indeed lived
in the house, having come there to be nursed through an illness and
remaining on afterwards, and as D'Alembert was one of Smith's chief
friends in Paris, his house was naturally one of the latter's chief
resorts. Here, moreover, he often met Turgot, as indeed he did
everywhere he went, and of all the friends he met in France there was
none in whose society he took more pleasure, or for whose mind and
character he formed a profounder admiration, than that great thinker
and statesman. If his conversation with Morellet ran mainly on
political and economic subjects, it would most probably run even more
largely on such subjects with Turgot, for they were both at the moment
busy writing their most important works on those subjects. Turgot's
_Formation and Distribution of Wealth_ was written in 1766, though it
was only published three years later in the _Ephemerides du Citoyen_;
and it cannot, I think, be doubted that the ideas and theories with
which his mind was then boiling must have been the subject of
discussion again and again in the course of his numerous conversations
with Smith. So also if Smith brought out various points in the work he
was undertaking for discussion with Morellet, he may reasonably be
inferred to have done the same with Morellet's greater friend Turgot,
and all this would have been greatly to their mutual advantage. No
vestiges of their intercourse, however, remain, though some critics
profess to see its results writ very large on the face of their
writings.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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