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, as indeed he did everywhere he went, and of all the friends he met in France there was none in whose society he took more pleasure, or for whose mind and character he formed a profounder admiration, than that great thinker and statesman.  If his conversation with Morellet ran mainly on political and economic subjects, it would most probably run even more largely on such subjects with Turgot, for they were both at the moment busy writing their most important works on those subjects.  Turgot’s Formation and Distribution of Wealth was written in 1766, though it was only published three years later in the Ephemerides du Citoyen; and it cannot, I think, be doubted that the ideas and theories with which his mind was then boiling must have been the subject of discussion again and again in the course of his numerous conversations with Smith.  So also if Smith brought out various points in the work he was undertaking for discussion with Morellet, he may reasonably be inferred to have done the same with Morellet’s greater friend Turgot, and all this would have been greatly to their mutual advantage.  No vestiges of their intercourse, however, remain, though some critics profess to see its results writ very large on the face of their writings.

Professor Thorold Rogers thinks the influences of Turgot’s reasoning on Smith’s mind to be easily perceptible to any reader of the Formation and Distribution of Wealth and of the Wealth of Nations.  Dupont de Nemours once went so far as to say that whatever was true in Smith was borrowed from Turgot, and whatever was not borrowed from Turgot was not true; but he afterwards retracted that absurdly-sweeping allegation, and confessed that he had made it before he was able to read English; while Leon Say thinks Turgot owed much of his philosophy to Smith, and Smith owed much of his economics to Turgot.[164] Questions of literary obligation are often difficult to settle.  Two contemporary thinkers,