David Hume: The philosopher who got rich
Scotland’s enlightened philosophers did not on the whole have an exciting time of it. Some piquant stories told about them – the infant Adam Smith kidnapped by gypsies, Adam Ferguson leading the charge at the Battle of Dettingen – seem just to have been invented by later admirers. David Hume is an exception: he had a taste for the good things of life, and during his years in Paris he made sure to enjoy them, from the cuisine that fattened him up to the flattering attentions of the licentious hostesses in the intellectual salons.
