et desire vous connoitre particulierement.  Donnez son nom a votre porte, je vous en prie, vous perdriez beaucoup a ne pas le voir, et je serois desolee de ne pas recevoir de lui un detail du bon accueil que vous lui aurez fait....  Donnez son nom a votre porte, je vous le repete.  S’il ne vous voit pas, je vous etrangle.[173]

Smith had apparently begged of her also a letter of introduction to R. Burke, and she wrote him one, but he went away without it; as she says to Garrick, in a letter of 3rd January 1767:  “Ma bete de philosophe est partie sans songer a la prendre.”  Nor apparently had Smith as yet delivered her letter to Garrick, for she asks, “Vous ne l’avez pas encore vu Mr. Smith? c’est la plus distraite creature! mais c’est une des plus aimables.  Je l’aime beaucoup et je l’estime encore d’avantage."[174] A few weeks later, on the 29th of January, she again returns to the subject of Smith, asking Garrick whether he had yet seen him, whether he was in London or had delivered her letter, and adding, “C’est un homme charmant, n’est-il pas?"[175]

Madame Riccoboni was not the only Frenchwoman who was touched with Smith’s personal charms; we hear of another, a marquise, “a woman too of talents and wit,” who actually fell in love with him.  It was during an excursion Smith made from Paris to Abbeville, with the Duke of Buccleugh and several other English noblemen and a certain Captain Lloyd, a retired officer, who was afterwards a friend, perhaps a patient, of Dr. Currie, the author of the Life of Burns, and told the doctor this and many other anecdotes about the economist.  Lloyd was, according to Currie, a most interesting and accomplished man, and his acquaintance with Smith was one of great intimacy.  The party seem to have stayed some days at Abbeville—­to visit Crecy, no doubt, like patriotic Englishmen, and this French marquise was stopping at the same hotel.  She had just come from Paris, where she found all the world talking about Hume, and having heard that Smith was Hume’s particular friend and almost as great a philosopher as he, she was bent on making so famous a conquest, but after many persistent efforts was obliged eventually to abandon the attempt.  Her philosopher could not endure her, nor could he—­and this greatly amused his own party—­conceal his embarrassment; but it was not philosophy altogether that steeled his breast.  The truth, according to Lloyd, was that the philosopher was deeply in love with another, an English lady, who was also stopping in Abbeville at the time.  Of all Currie heard concerning Smith from Captain Lloyd this is the only thing he has chosen to record, and slight though it is, it contributes a touch of nature to that more personal aspect of Smith’s life of which we have least knowledge.  Stewart makes mention of an attachment which Smith was known to have cherished for several years in the early part of his life to a young lady of great beauty and accomplishment, whom Stewart had himself seen