During his stay there Smith made many personal friends, both among the leading citizens of the commonwealth and among the more distinguished of the foreign visitors who generally abounded there.  People went to Geneva in those days not to see the lake or the mountains, but to consult Dr. Tronchin and converse with Voltaire.  Smith needed no introduction to Tronchin, who, as we have seen, held so high an opinion of his abilities that he had sent his own son all the way to Glasgow to attend his philosophical classes; and it was no doubt through Tronchin, Voltaire’s chief friend in that quarter, that Smith was introduced to Voltaire.  Smith told Rogers he had been in Voltaire’s company on five or six different occasions, and he no doubt enjoyed, as most English visitors enjoyed, hospitable entertainment at Ferney, the beautiful little temporality of the great literary pontiff, overlooking the lake.

There was no living name before which Smith bowed with profounder veneration than the name of Voltaire, and his recollections of their intercourse on these occasions were always among those he cherished most warmly.  Few memorials, however, of their conversation remain, and these are preserved by Samuel Rogers in his diary of his visit to Edinburgh the year before Smith’s death.  They seem to have spoken, as was very natural, of the Duke of Richelieu, the only famous Frenchman Smith had yet met, and of the political question as to the revival of the provincial assemblies or the continuance of government by royal intendants.  On this question Smith said that Voltaire expressed great aversion to the States and favoured the side of the royal prerogative.  Of the Duke of Richelieu Voltaire said that he was an old friend of his, but a singular character.  A few years before his death his foot slipped one day at Versailles, and the old marshal said that was the first faux pas he had ever made at court.  Voltaire then seems to have told anecdotes of the Duke’s being bastilled and of his borrowing the Embassy plate at Vienna and never returning it, and to have passed the remark he made elsewhere that the English had only one sauce, melted butter.  Smith always spoke of Voltaire with a genuine emotion of reverence.  When Samuel Rogers happened to describe some clever but superficial author as “a Voltaire,” Smith brought his hand down on the table with great energy and said, “Sir, there is only one Voltaire."[154] Professor Faujas Saint Fond, Professor of Geology in the Museum of Natural History in Paris, visited Smith in Edinburgh a few years before Rogers was there, and says that the animation of Smith’s countenance was striking when he spoke of Voltaire, whom he had known personally, and whose memory he revered.  “Reason,” said Smith one day, as he showed M. Saint Fond a fine bust of Voltaire he had in his room, “reason owes him incalculable obligations.  The ridicule and the sarcasm which he so plentifully bestowed upon fanatics and heretics of all sects have