Adam Smith came home to Kirkcaldy in the spring of 1767, at forty-three, having resigned a professorship at Glasgow to travel through France as tutor to a young duke. He had met Voltaire at Ferney and Quesnay and Turgot in Paris. He came back to a small port town with a life pension and a manuscript, and stayed roughly six years.⁴ The letters from those years are the letters of a man in difficulty.