duct and the single tax, merely, as he
confesses, to secure the doctor's word with Madame de Pompadour about
an appointment he wanted, writes that "while storms gathered and
dispersed again underneath Quesnay's _entre-sol_, he wrought at his
axioms and his calculations in rural economy as calmly and with as
much indifference to the movements of the court as if he were a
hundred leagues away. Below they discussed peace and war, the choice
of generals, the dismissal of ministers, while we up in the entre-sol
reasoned about agriculture and calculated the net product, or
sometimes dined gaily with Diderot, D'Alembert, Duclos, Helvetius,
Turgot, Buffon; and Madame de Pompadour, not being able to get that
company of philosophers to descend into her salon, used to come up
there herself to see them at table, and have a talk with them."[183]
None of the famous men mentioned here were members of the sect except
Turgot.

The year 1766 was a year of exceptional activity in this economist
camp. Turgot, as we have seen, was writing an important work, and
Mercier de la Riviere another. The other members of the group were
busy too, for they had just for the first time secured an organ in the
press in the _Journal de l'Agriculture du Commerce et des Finances_,
of which their youngest convert, Dupont de Nemours, was made editor
in June 1765, and in which Quesnay himself wrote an article almost
every month till Dupont's dismissal in November 1766. The Government,
moreover, which had thrown Mirabeau into prison for his first book and
had suppressed his second only a year or two before, now ceased from
troubling, and gave even a certain official countenance to the
_Journal de l'Agriculture_, for after the war it no longer shut its
eyes to the distress that prevailed, and began to give an ear to
remedies. They were making converts too, among others the Abbe
Baudeau, who used to write them down in his journal, the _Ephemerides
du Citoyen_, but now offered to make it their organ when they lost the
_Journal de l'Agriculture_. They were thus in the first flush of their
active propaganda, which in a year or two more made political economy,
Grimm says, the _science de la mode_ in France, and won converts to
the single tax among the crowned heads of Europe. Quesnay too had
taken apartments in town in the house of a disciple to be nearer his
friends for pushing the propaganda, so that Smith had especially
abundant opportunities of seeing him and th