Amid all this gaiety of salons and playhouses Smith found a graver retreat with the philanthropic sect of the economists in the apartments of the king’s physician, Dr. Quesnay, in Paris and Versailles.  Dupont de Nemours told J.B.  Say that he had often met Smith at their little meetings, and that they looked on him as a judicious and simple man, and apparently nothing more, for, he adds, Smith had not at that time shown the stuff he was made of.[179] If they did not then recognise his paramount capacity as they afterwards did, there were some things about his opinions which Dupont thought they learnt better then than they could from the great work in which he subsequently expounded them.  In a note to one of Turgot’s works, of which he was editor, Dupont appeals from an opinion expressed, or understood to be expressed, by Smith in his published writings, to the opinion on the same subject which he used to hear from Smith’s own lips in the unreserved intercourse of private life.  “Smith at liberty,” he says, “Smith in his own room or in that of a friend, as I have seen him when we were fellow-disciples of M. Quesnay, would not have said that."[180]

Though Smith met with them, and was indeed their very close scientific as well as personal associate, it is of course impossible, strictly speaking, to count him, as Dupont does, among the disciples of Quesnay.  He was no more a disciple of Quesnay than Peter was a disciple of Paul, although, it is true, Paul wrote first.  He neither agreed with all the creed of the French economists, nor did he acquire the articles he agreed with from the teaching of their master.  He had been for sixteen years before he met them teaching the two principal truths which they set themselves to proclaim:  (1) that the wealth of a country does not consist in its gold and silver, but in its stock of consumable commodities; and (2) that the true way of increasing it is not by conferring privileges or imposing restraints, but by assuring its producers a fair field and no favour.  He had taught those truths in 1750, and Quesnay had not written anything bearing on them till 1756.  Moreover, much in their system on which they laid most stress he has publicly repudiated.  Still he speaks both of their system and of their master with a veneration which no disciple could easily surpass.  He pronounces the system to be, “with all its imperfections, perhaps the nearest approximation to the truth that has yet been published upon the subject of political economy,” and the author of the system to be “ingenious and profound,” “a man of the greatest simplicity and modesty, who was honoured by his disciples with a reverence not inferior to that of any of the ancient philosophers for the founders of their respective systems."[181] He might not, like the Marquis de Mirabeau, call Quesnay a greater than Socrates, or the Economic Table a discovery equal to the invention of printing or of money, but he thought him so clearly the head of the economic inquirers of the world that he meant to have dedicated the Wealth of Nations to Quesnay had the venerable French economist been alive at the time of its publication.  Smith was therefore a very sympathetic associate of this new sect, though not a strict adherent.