Smith seems to have shown Hume’s letter to their common friends in Paris, and while deeply interested, as was only natural, in the quarrel, they with one consent took Hume’s side, the only possible view of the transaction.  The subject continued to furnish matter of conversation and conference among Hume’s French literary friends during the whole time of Smith’s residence in Paris.  Hume sent Smith another letter a little later on in the month of July, which he asked him specially to show to D’Alembert.  This Smith did on the 21 st, when he met D’Alembert at dinner at Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse’s, in company with Turgot, Marmontel, Roux, Morellet, Saurin, and Duclos; and on the same evening D’Alembert wrote Hume that he had just had the honour of seeing Mr. Smith, who had shown him the letter he had received, and that they had talked much together about Hume and his affairs.  Apparently Smith’s objections to Hume publishing anything on the quarrel were now overcome; at all events, the result of this consultation of Hume’s French friends was to advise publication; and accordingly a week or two later Hume sent on a complete narrative of his relations with Rousseau, together with the whole correspondence from first to last, to D’Alembert, with full permission to make any use of it he thought best, and he wrote Smith at the same time asking him to go and get a sight of it.  “Pray tell me,” he adds, “your judgment of my work, if it deserves the name.  Tell D’Alembert I make him absolute master to retrench or alter what he thinks proper in order to suit it to the latitude of Paris."[171]

On the 27th of July Turgot writes Hume, mentioning that he had that day met Smith at Baron d’Holbach’s, and they had discussed the Rousseau affair together.  Smith had told him of the letter from Rousseau to General Conway, which he had been shown on the 25th by the Comtesse de Boufflers, and had repeated to him the same interpretation of that letter which he had already expressed to the Comtesse, viz. that Rousseau had not made the secrecy a ground for refusing the pension, but merely regretted that that condition made it impossible for him adequately to show his gratitude.  Smith was thus inclined to give Rousseau the benefit of a better construction when a better construction was possible, but Hume writes Turgot on the 5th of August that Smith was quite wrong in that supposition.

One of those two letters of Smith’s on the Rousseau affair mentions the name of Madame Riccoboni among those of Hume’s friends with whom he had been in communication on the subject, and Madame Riccoboni about the same date writes Garrick that Smith and Changuion, the English ambassador’s private secretary, were her two great confidants on the business of this famous quarrel.  Madame Riccoboni had been a popular actress, but giving up the stage for letters, had become the most popular novelist in France.  Her Letters of Fanny Butler and her History of Miss Jenny