Hume writes to her from Wootton on the 22nd of March 1766:  “I am glad you have taken my friend Smith under your protection.  You will find him a man of true merit, though perhaps his sedentary recluse life may have hurt his air and appearance as a man of the world.”  The Comtesse writes Hume on the 6th of May:  “I think I told you that I have made the acquaintance of Mr. Smith, and that for the love of you I had given him a very hearty welcome.  I am now reading his Theory of Moral Sentiments.  I am not very far advanced with it yet, but I believe it will please me.”  And again on the 25th of July, in the same year, when Hume’s quarrel with Rousseau was raging, she appends to a letter to Hume on that subject a few words about Smith, who had apparently called upon her just as she had finished it:  “I entreated your friend Mr. Smith to call upon me.  He has just this moment left me.  I have read my letter to him.  He, like myself, is apprehensive that you have been deceived in the warmth of so just a resentment.  He begs of you to read over again the letter to Mr. Conway.  It does not appear that he (Rousseau) refuses the pension, nor that he desires it to be made public."[161] The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which she had then begun to read, grew more and more in favour with her, and a few years after this—­in 1770—­when the two sons of Smith’s friend, Sir Gilbert Elliot, visited her, they found her at her studies in her bedroom, and talking of translating the book, if she had time, because it contained such just ideas about sympathy.  She added that the book had come into great vogue in France, and that Smith’s doctrine of sympathy bade fair to supplant David Hume’s immaterialism as the fashionable opinion, especially with the ladies.[162] The vogue would probably be aided by Smith’s personal introduction into French literary circles, but evidence of its extent is found in the fact that although one French translation of the work had already appeared, three different persons were then preparing or contemplating another—­the Abbe Blavet, who actually published his; the Due de la Rochefoucauld, who discontinued his labour when he found himself forestalled by the Abbe; and the Comtesse de Boufflers who perhaps did little more than entertain the design.  The best translation was published some years after by another lady, the widow of Condorcet.

The Baron d’Holbach’s weekly or bi-weekly dinners, at one of which it has been mentioned Smith had a conversation with Turgot, were, as L. Blanc has said, the regular states-general of philosophy.  The usual guests were the philosophes and encyclopedists and men of letters—­Diderot, Marmontel, Raynal, Galiani.  The conversation ran largely towards metaphysics and theology, and, as Morellet, who was often there, states, the boldest theories were propounded, and things spoken which might well call down fire from heaven.  It was there that Hume observed he had neither seen an atheist, nor did he believe one existed, and was informed by his host in reply, “You have been a little unfortunate; you are here at table with seventeen for the first time.”