Commerce more than politics absorbed all his attention when he came back from his trip. He found time, however, to send to Madison his first estimate of the king and queen, a most unflattering portrait of poor Louis XVI. The King loves business, economy, order, and justice, and wishes sincerely the good of his people; but he is irascible and rude, very limited in his understanding, and religious, bordering on bigotry. He has no mistress, loves his queen, and is too much governed by her. She is capricious like her brother, and governed by him: devoted to pleasure and expense; and not remarkable for any other vices or virtues. Unhappily the King shows a propensity for the pleasures of the table. That for drink has increased lately, or, at least, it has become more known.[196] It was not until August that he summed up in a letter to Monroe the great improvements in the constitution of the French effected by the Assemblées des Notables. He was surprised at the great explosion of joy, which he thought unwarranted; for after all, even the unexampled boldness of the enemies of the régime was nothing but the "follies of nations in their dotage."[197] Yet writing to John Jay the next day he took a more serious view of things and declared "It is evident, I think, that a spirit of this country is advancing towards a revolution in their constitution. There are not wanting persons at the helm, friends to the progress of this spirit. The Provincial Assemblies will be the most probable instrument of effecting it."[198] But it is primarily from the American point of view that he continues to be interested, and he becomes more and more convinced that, "with all its defects, and with all those of our particular governments, the inconveniences resulting from them, are so light in comparison with those existing in every other government on earth that our citizens may certainly be considered as in the happiest political situation which exists."[199] With more intimate friends he was far more violent and outspoken, as in the letter he wrote the same day to Colonel Humphreys. It is seldom he indulges in these outbursts of passionate invective, so seldom that it may be wondered whether his expression is not stronger than his thought: From these events, our young Republic may learn useful lessons, never to call on foreign powers to settle their differences, to guard against hereditary magistrates, to prevent their citizens from becoming so established in wealth and power, as to be thought worthy of alliance ... in short to besiege the throne of heaven with eternal prayers, to extirpate from creation this class of human lions, tigers, and mammoths called Kings; from whom, let him perish who does not say, "good Lord deliver us!"[200]