the
honour of seeing Mr. Smith, who had shown him the letter he had
received, and that they had talked much together about Hume and his
affairs. Apparently Smith's objections to Hume publishing anything on
the quarrel were now overcome; at all events, the result of this
consultation of Hume's French friends was to advise publication; and
accordingly a week or two later Hume sent on a complete narrative of
his relations with Rousseau, together with the whole correspondence
from first to last, to D'Alembert, with full permission to make any
use of it he thought best, and he wrote Smith at the same time asking
him to go and get a sight of it. "Pray tell me," he adds, "your
judgment of my work, if it deserves the name. Tell D'Alembert I make
him absolute master to retrench or alter what he thinks proper in
order to suit it to the latitude of Paris."[171]

On the 27th of July Turgot writes Hume, mentioning that he had that
day met Smith at Baron d'Holbach's, and they had discussed the
Rousseau affair together. Smith had told him of the letter from
Rousseau to General Conway, which he had been shown on the 25th by the
Comtesse de Boufflers, and had repeated to him the same interpretation
of that letter which he had already expressed to the Comtesse, viz.
that Rousseau had not made the secrecy a ground for refusing the
pension, but merely regretted that that condition made it impossible
for him adequately to show his gratitude. Smith was thus inclined to
give Rousseau the benefit of a better construction when a better
construction was possible, but Hume writes Turgot on the 5th of August
that Smith was quite wrong in that supposition.

One of those two letters of Smith's on the Rousseau affair mentions
the name of Madame Riccoboni among those of Hume's friends with whom
he had been in communication on the subject, and Madame Riccoboni
about the same date writes Garrick that Smith and Changuion, the
English ambassador's private secretary, were her two great confidants
on the business of this famous quarrel. Madame Riccoboni had been a
popular actress, but giving up the stage for letters, had become the
most popular novelist in France. Her _Letters of Fanny Butler_ and her
_History of Miss Jenny_ were dividing the attention of Paris with the
novels of our own Richardson; and Smith, in the 1790 edition of his
_Theory_, brackets her with Racine, Voltaire, and Richardson as
instructors in "the refinements and delicacies of love