That is the title of my most recent work-in-progress with Alain Alcouffe (University of Toulouse). Below the fold is our revised introduction (footnotes omitted):

Building on our previous work (Guerra-Pujol & Alcouffe 2025; Guerra-Pujol 2023) as well as an 18th-century map of Paris (the Plan de Turgot, a part of which is pictured below), this paper charts Adam Smith’s proximity to several of the celebrated salons of pre-revolutionary Paris. Among other things, these situs of luxury were famous for being presided by women and for being the spatial center of French Enlightenment circles, and as it happens, the Scottish moral philosopher and political economist was not only in Paris for several months in 1766; correspondence and journal entries to or from several of Smith’s close contacts at the time—including his fellow Scotsmen, Seignelay Colbert de Castlehill (the Abbé Colbert) and David Hume, as well as the English aesthete Horace Walpole—confirm that he met at least three of the leading salonnières of Paris during his 1766 sojourn in Paris: the Comtesse de Boufflers, Madame du Deffand, and the Duchesse d’Enville. Furthermore, as this paper will show, Smith’s principal place of residence in 1766 was located in close proximity to these salons. But was he guest at any of these famed salons, and why does it matter if he was?

The remainder of this paper is thus organized as follows: Part 2 will provide some historical background regarding our primary source, the 1739 Plan de Turgot. Next, using several close-ups of the Turgot map for reference, the following four parts of the paper (Parts 3 to 6), will map the location of Adam Smith’s place of residence in 1766, the Rue de Colombier (Part 3); the location of the salon of the Duchesse d’Enville, the hôtel de la Rochefoucauld (Part 4); the location of the salon of Madame du Deffand on the grounds of the convent and orphanage of Saint-Joseph de-la-Providence (Part 5); as well as Le Temple, a compound on the Rue du Temple, where the Comtesse de Boufflers and her consort, the Prince de Conti, convened their salon (Part 6). By way of digression, Part 7 identifies a few other noteworthy places in Paris that the Scottish philosopher visited during his 1766 sojourn in the City of Light, and last but not least, Part 8 concludes with a question—Why does it matter whether Adam Smith visited any of the salons of pre-revolutionary Paris?—and with a suggestion for further research. Simply put, while Smith may have already written an “early draft” of The Wealth of Nations prior to his travels in France, he had not seen anything like the opulence and luxury of the salons of pre-revolutionary Paris until his extended sojourn in Paris in 1766.