the place of my future abode for life.  Paris is the most agreeable town in Europe, and suits me best, but it is a foreign country.  London is the capital of my own country, but it never pleased me much.  Letters are there held in no honour; Scotsmen are hated; superstition and ignorance gain ground daily.  Edinburgh has many objections and many allurements.  My present mind this forenoon, the 5th of September, is to return to France.  I am much press’d also to accept of offers which would contribute to my agreeable living, but might encroach on my independence by making me enter into engagements with Princes and great lords and ladies.  Pray give me your judgment."[159]

Events soon settled the question for him.  He was appointed Under Secretary of State in London by Lord Hertford’s brother, General Conway, and left Paris, as I have just said, early in January 1766.  Rousseau had been in Paris since the 17th of December waiting to accompany Hume to England, and Smith must no doubt have met Rousseau occasionally with Hume during that last fortnight of 1765, though there is no actual evidence that he did.  Before leaving, moreover, Hume would have time to introduce his friend to the famous men of Paris itself, and to initiate him into those literary and fashionable circles in which he had moved like a demigod for the preceding two years.  The philosophe was then king in Paris, and Hume was king of the philosophes, and everything that was great in court or salon fell down and did him obeisance.  “Here,” he tells Robertson, “I feed on ambrosia, drink nothing but nectar, breathe incense only, and walk on flowers.  Every one I meet, and especially every woman, would consider themselves as failing in the most indispensable duty if they did not favour me with a lengthy and ingenious discourse on my celebrity.”  Hume could, therefore, open to his friend every door in Paris that was worth entering, but Smith’s own name was also sufficiently known and esteemed, at least among men of letters, in France to secure to him a cordial welcome for his own sake. The Theory of Moral Sentiments had been translated, at the suggestion of Baron d’Holbach, by E. Dous, and the translation had appeared in 1764 under the title of Metaphysique de l’Ame.  It was unfortunately a very bad translation, for which Grimm makes the curious apology that it was impossible to render the ideas of metaphysics in a foreign language as you could render the images of poetry, because every nation had its own abstract ideas.[160] But though the book got probably little impetus from this translation, it had been considerably read in the original by men of letters when it first came out, and many of them had then formed, as Abbe Morellet says he did, the highest idea of Smith’s sagacity and depth, and were prepared to meet the author with much interest.