Morellet mentions that it was at the table of Helvetius, the philosopher, he himself first met Smith.  Helvetius was a retired farmer-general of the taxes, who had grown rich without practising extortion, and instead of remaining a bachelor, as Smith says other farmers-general in France did, because no gentlewoman would marry them, and they were too proud to marry anybody else, he had married a pretty and clever wife, an early friend of Turgot’s, who helped to make his Tuesday dinners among the most agreeable entertainments in Paris.  He had recently returned from a long sojourn in England, so enchanted with both country and people that d’Holbach, who could find nothing to praise in either, declared he could really have seen nothing in England all the time except the persecution for heresy which he had shortly before suffered in France, and would have escaped in our freer air; and he was always very hospitable to English celebrities, so that it may be inferred that Smith enjoyed many opportunities of conversation with this versatile and philosophical financier during his stay in Paris.

Morellet, whose acquaintance Smith made at Helvetius’ house, became one of his fastest friends in France, and on leaving Paris Smith gave him for a keepsake his own pocket-book,—­a very pretty English-made pocket-book, says the Abbe, which “has served me these twenty years.”  Morellet, besides being an advanced economist, whose views ran in sympathy with Smith’s own, was the most delightful of companions, uniting with strong sense and a deep love of the right an unfailing play of irony and fun, and ever ready, as Fanny Burney found him still at eighty-five, to sing his own songs for the entertainment of his friends.  The Abbe was a metaphysician as well as an economist, but, according to his account of his conversations with Smith, they seem to have discussed mainly economic subjects—­“the theory of commerce,” he says, “banking, public credit, and various points in the great work which Smith was then meditating,"[163] i.e. the Wealth of Nations.  This book had therefore by that time taken shape so far that the author made his Paris friends aware of his occupation upon it, and discussed with them definite points in the scheme of doctrine he was unfolding.  Morellet formed a very just estimate of him.  “I regard him still,” he says, “as one of the men who have made the most complete observations and analyses on all questions he treated of,” and he gave the best proof of his high opinion by writing a translation of the Wealth of Nations himself.  Smith would no doubt derive some assistance towards making his observations and analyses more complete from the different lights in which the matters under consideration would be naturally placed in the course of discussions with men like Morellet and his friends; but whatever others have thought, Morellet at least sets up no claim, either on his own behalf or on behalf of his very old and intimate college friend Turgot, or of any other of the French economists, of having influenced or supplied any of Smith’s ideas.  The Scotch inquirer had been long working on the same lines as his French colleagues, and Morellet seems to have thought him, when they first met, as he thought him still, when he wrote those memoirs, as being more complete in his observations and analyses than the others.