In 1754 he made the acquaintance of Quesnay and of de Gournay, the political economists, who influenced not a little his life and thought. He soon began writing articles for the Encyclopædia, though he never joined in that battle-cry of the Encyclopædists, _Écrasez l’infâme_, and was wholly without sympathy for the atheism of d’Holbach and the materialism of Helvétius. Turgot, indeed, may be said to have been, in the broadest acceptation of the term, a Christian; or rather he would be called, and call himself, a Christian to-day. But his Christianity was not of Rome nor yet of Protestantism, but that in whose honest doubt there lives more faith than in half the creeds. He certainly gave little expression to it. It was the religion of the wise man--which he never tells. When he was on a geologising tour in Switzerland, in 1760, he saw the great Pontiff of the Church of Antichrist at Délices. That generous old person was warm in delight and admiration for his guest. D’Alembert had introduced him, and d’Alembert’s friends must always be welcome. And then Turgot’s article on ‘Existence’ in the Encyclopædia had made even more impression on this impressionable Voltaire than on the world of letters in general. He took this young disciple to his heart at once. Well, then, if he is not precisely a disciple, he is at least a most ‘lovable philosopher,’ and ‘much fitter to instruct me than I am to instruct him!’ It was Voltaire who was dazzled by the young man’s splendid possibilities, not the young man who was dazzled by Voltaire’s matchless fame and daring genius. Turgot was never dazzled; it was his greatness, if it was also his misfortune, to see men and the world exactly as they are. In 1761 he was made Intendant of Limoges. It was the great opportunity; he had wanted practical work--not to think, to write, or to dream. Voltaire wrote of him afterwards as one ‘qui ne chercha le vrai que pour faire le bien.’ He wanted to Do; and here was everything to be done. The picture of provincial France before the Revolution has been painted often, but the subject is one of which the painter can never tire and to which he can never do justice. The Limoges which Turgot found was one of the most beautiful districts of France--and one of the most wretched. Here, on the one side, rose the châteaux of the great absentee noblemen, who, always at Court, left behind them middlemen to wring from the poor innumerable dues, with which my lord, forsooth, must pay his debts of honour and make a fine figure at Versailles. The few nobles who did live on their country estates expected their new young Intendant to be an agreeable social light, as his predecessors had been, who would keep, for the _élite_ of the neighbourhood, an open house where one would naturally find good wine, rich fare, and delightful, doubtful company.