mmerce," he
says, "banking, public credit, and various points in the great work
which Smith was then meditating,"[163] _i.e._ the _Wealth of Nations_.
This book had therefore by that time taken shape so far that the
author made his Paris friends aware of his occupation upon it, and
discussed with them definite points in the scheme of doctrine he was
unfolding. Morellet formed a very just estimate of him. "I regard him
still," he says, "as one of the men who have made the most complete
observations and analyses on all questions he treated of," and he gave
the best proof of his high opinion by writing a translation of the
_Wealth of Nations_ himself. Smith would no doubt derive some
assistance towards making his observations and analyses more complete
from the different lights in which the matters under consideration
would be naturally placed in the course of discussions with men like
Morellet and his friends; but whatever others have thought, Morellet
at least sets up no claim, either on his own behalf or on behalf of
his very old and intimate college friend Turgot, or of any other of
the French economists, of having influenced or supplied any of Smith's
ideas. The Scotch inquirer had been long working on the same lines as
his French colleagues, and Morellet seems to have thought him, when
they first met, as he thought him still, when he wrote those memoirs,
as being more complete in his observations and analyses than the
others.

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, a