ndition of the working class in
Bordeaux and their condition in Toulouse, as he had already been
struck with the same contrast between Glasgow and Edinburgh. In
Bordeaux they were in general industrious, sober, and thriving; in
Toulouse and the rest of the parliament towns they were idle and poor;
and the reason was that Bordeaux was a commercial town, the _entrepot_
of the wine trade of a rich wine district, while Toulouse and the rest
were merely residential towns, employing little capital more than was
necessary to supply their own consumption. The common people were
always better off in a town like Bordeaux, where they lived on
capital, than in a town like Toulouse, where they lived on
revenue.[145] But while he speaks as if he thought the people of
Bordeaux more sober as well as more industrious than the people of
Toulouse, he looked upon the inhabitants of the southern provinces of
France generally as among the soberest people in Europe, and ascribes
their sobriety to the cheapness of their liquor. "People are seldom
guilty of excess," he says, "in what is their daily fare." He tells
that when a French regiment came from some of the northern provinces
of France, where wine was somewhat dear, to be quartered in the
southern, where wine was very cheap, the soldiers were at first
debauched by the cheapness and novelty of good wine; but after a few
months' residence the greater part of them became as sober as the rest
of the inhabitants. And he thinks the same effect might occur in this
country from a reduction of the wine, malt, and ale duties.[146]

Besides seeing the places, they visited some of the notabilities, to
whom the Earl of Hertford had sent them the letters of introduction
for which Smith had asked through Hume. The governor of the province
was away from home at the time, however; but Smith hoped to see him on
a second visit to Bordeaux he was presently to pay to meet his pupil's
younger brother on his way round from Paris to Toulouse. But they
found the Duke of Richelieu at home, and the gallant old
field-marshal, the hero of a hundred fights and a thousand scandals,
seems to have received them with great civility and even distinction.
Smith used to have much to say ever afterwards of this famous and
ill-famed man.

The excursion to Bordeaux in August was so agreeable that they made
another--probably in September--up to the fashionable watering-place
Bagneres de Bigorre, and in October, when Smith wrot