GENEVA
In the end of August Smith and his pupils left Toulouse and made what
Stewart calls an extensive tour in the South of France. Of this tour
no other record remains, but the Duke's aunt, Lady Mary Coke,
incidentally mentions that when they were at Marseilles they visited
the porcelain factory, and that the Duke bought two of the largest
services ever sold there, for which he paid more than £150 sterling.
They seem to have arrived in Geneva some time in October, and stayed
about two months in the little republic of which, as we have seen,
Smith had long been a fervent admirer. In making so considerable a
sojourn at Geneva, he was no doubt influenced as a political
philosopher by the desire to see something of the practical working of
those republican institutions which he regarded speculatively with so
much favour, to observe how the common problems of government worked
themselves out on the narrow field of a commonwealth with only 24,000
inhabitants all told, which yet contrived to keep its place among the
nations, to sit sometimes as arbiter between them, and to surpass them
all in the art of making its people prosperous. He had the luck to
observe it at an interesting moment, for it was in the thick of a
constitutional crisis. The government of the republic had hitherto
been vested in the hands of 200 privileged families, and the rest of
the citizens were now pressing their right to a share in it, with the
active assistance of Voltaire. This important struggle for the
conversion of the aristocratic into the democratic republic continued
all through the period of Smith's visit, and the city of Geneva, which
in its usual state was described by Voltaire as "a tedious convent
with some sensible people in it," was day after day at this time the
animated scene of the successive acts of that political drama.
During his stay there Smith made many personal friends, both among the
leading citizens of the commonwealth and among the more distinguished
of the foreign visitors who generally abounded there. People went to
Geneva in those days not to see the lake or the mountains, but to
consult Dr. Tronchin and converse with Voltaire. Smith needed no
introduction to Tronchin, who, as we have seen, held so high an
opinion of his abilities that he had sent his own son all the way to
Glasgow to attend his philosophical classes; and it was no doubt
through Tronchin, Voltaire's chief friend in that quarter, that Smith
was introduced to Voltaire. Smith told Rogers he had been in
Voltaire's company on five or six different occasions, and he no doubt
enjoyed, as most English visitors enjoyed, hospitable entertainment at
Ferney, the beautiful little temporality of the great literary
pontiff, overlooking the lake.
There was no living name before which Smith bowed with profounder
veneration than the name of Voltaire, and his recollections of their
intercourse on these occasions were always among those he cherished
most warmly. Few memorials, however, of their conversation remain, and
these are preserved by Samuel Rogers in his diary of his visit to
Edinburgh the year before Smith's death. They seem to have spoken, as
was very natural, of the Duke of Richelieu, the only famous Frenchman
Smith had yet met, and of the political question as to the revival of
the provincial assemblies or the continuance of government by royal
intendants. On this question Smith said that Voltaire expressed great
aversion to the States and favoured the side of the royal prerogative.
Of the Duke of Richelieu Voltaire said that he was an old friend of
his, but a singular character. A few years before his death his foot
slipped one day at Versailles, and the old marshal said that was the
first _faux pas_ he had ever made at court. Voltaire then seems to
have told anecdotes of the Duke's being bastilled and of his borrowing
the Embassy plate at Vienna and never returning it, and to have passed
the remark he made elsewhere that the English had only one sauce,
melted butter. Smith always spoke of Voltaire with a genuine emotion
of reverence. When Samuel Rogers happened to describe some clever but
superficial author as "a Voltaire," Smith brought his hand down on the
table with great energy and said, "Sir, there is only one
Voltaire."[154] Professor Faujas Saint Fond, Professor of Geology in
the Museum of Natural History in Paris, visited Smith in Edinburgh a
few years before Rogers was there, and says that the animation of
Smith's countenance was striking when he spoke of Voltaire, whom he
had known personally, and whose memory he revered. "Reason," said
Smith one day, as he showed M. Saint Fond a fine bust of Voltaire he
had in his room, "reason owes him incalculable obligations. The
ridicule and the sarcasm which he so plentifully bestowed upon
fanatics and heretics of all sects have enabled the understanding of
men to bear the light of truth, and prepared them for those inquiries
to which every intelligent mind ought to aspire. He has done much more
for the benefit of mankind than those grave philosophers whose books
are read by a few only. The writings of Voltaire are made for all and
read by all." On another occasion he observed to the same visitor, "I
cannot pardon the Emperor Joseph II., who pretended to travel as a
philosopher, for passing Ferney without doing homage to the historian
of the Czar Peter I. From this circumstance I concluded that Joseph
was but a man of inferior mind."[155]
One of the warmest of Smith's Swiss friends was Charles Bonnet, the
celebrated naturalist and metaphysician, who, in writing Hume ten
years after the date of this visit, desires to be remembered "to the
sage of Glascow," adding, "You perceive I speak of Mr. Smith, whom we
shall always recollect with great pleasure."[156] On the day this
letter was written by Bonnet to Hume, another was written to Smith
himself by a young Scotch tutor then in Geneva, Patrick Clason, who
seems to have carried an introduction from Smith to Bonnet, and who
mentions having received many civilities from Bonnet on account of his
being one of Smith's friends. Clason then goes on to tell Smith that
the Syndic Turretin and M. Le Sage also begged to be remembered to
him. The Syndic Turretin was the President of the Republic, and M. Le
Sage was the eminent Professor of Physics, George Louis Le Sage, who
was then greatly interested in Professor Black's recent discoveries
about latent heat and Professor Matthew Stewart's in astronomy, and
was one of a group who gathered round Bonnet for discussions in
speculative philosophy and morals, at which, it may be reasonably
inferred, Smith would have also occasionally assisted. Le Sage seems
to have met Smith first, however, and to have been in the habit of
meeting him often afterwards, at the house of a high and distinguished
French lady, the Duchesse d'Enville, who was living in Geneva under
Tronchin's treatment, and whose son, the young and virtuous Duc de la
Rochefoucauld, who was afterwards stoned to death in the Revolution,
was receiving instruction from Le Sage himself. Le Sage writes the
Duchesse d'Enville on 5th February 1766, "Of all the people I have met
at your house, that is, of all the _élite_ of our good company, I have
only continued to see the excellent Lord Stanhope and occasionally Mr.
Smith. The latter wished me to make the acquaintance of Lady Conyers
and the Duke of Buckleugh, but I begged him to reserve that kindness
for me till his return."[157]
This letter shows that Smith was so much taken with Geneva that he
meant to pay it a second visit before he ended his tutorial
engagement, but the intention was never fulfilled, in consequence of
unfortunate circumstances to be presently mentioned.
The Duchesse d'Enville, at whose house Smith seems to have been so
steady a guest, was herself a Rochefoucauld by blood, a grand-daughter
of the famous author of the _Maxims_, and was a woman of great
ability, who was popularly supposed to be the inspirer of all Turgot's
political and social ideas, the chief of the "three Maries" who were
alleged to guide his doings. Stewart tells us that Smith used to speak
with very particular pleasure and gratitude of the many civilities he
received from this interesting woman and her son, and they seem on
their part to have cherished the same lively recollection of him. When
Adam Ferguson was in Paris in 1774 she asked him much about Smith, and
often complained, says Ferguson in a letter to Smith himself, "of your
French as she did of mine, but said that before you left Paris she had
the happiness to learn your language."[158] After two and a half
years' residence in France, Smith seems then to have been just
succeeding in making himself intelligible to the more intelligent
inhabitants in their own language, and this agrees with what Morellet
says, that Smith's French was very bad. The young Duc de la
Rochefoucauld, who, like his mother, was a devoted friend of Turgot,
became presently a declared disciple of Quesnay, and sat regularly
with the rest of the economist sect at the economic dinners of
Mirabeau, the "Friend of Man." When Samuel Rogers met him in Paris
shortly after the outbreak of the Revolution, he expressed to Rogers
the highest admiration for Smith, then recently dead, of whom he had
seen much in Paris as well as Geneva, and he had at one time begun to
translate the _Theory of Moral Sentiments_ into French, abandoning the
task only when he found his work anticipated by the Abbé Blavet's
translation in 1774. The only surviving memorial of their intercourse
is a letter from the Duke, which will be given in its place, and in
which he begs Smith to modify the opinion pronounced in the _Theory_
on the writer's ancestor, the author of the _Maxims_.
The Earl Stanhope, whom Smith used to meet at the Duchess's, and with
whom he established a lasting friendship, was the second Earl, the
editor of Professor Robert Simson's mathematical works, and himself a
distinguished mathematician. He took no part in public life, but his
opinions were of the most advanced Liberal order. He had come to
Geneva to place his son, afterwards also so distinguished in science,
under the training of Le Sage. The Lady Conyers, to whom the Scotch
was so anxious to introduce the Swiss philosopher, was the young lady
who a few years afterwards ran away from her husband, the fifth Duke
of Leeds, with the poet Byron's father, whom she subsequently married,
and by whom she became the mother of the poet's sister Augusta.
FOOTNOTES:
[154] Clayden's _Early Life of Samuel Rogers_, p. 110.
[155] Faujas Saint Fond, _Travels in England, Scotland, and the
Hebrides,_ ii. 241.
[156] _Hume Correspondence_, R.S.E. Library.
[157] Prevost, _Notice de la Vie et des écrits de George Louis Le Sage
de Geneva_, p. 226.
[158] Small's _Biographical Sketch of Adam Ferguson_, p. 20.