The revolt she experienced against Danton’s brutality made her unwilling that the insurrectionary force should be longer recognized. She suddenly became conservative, as the radical who has gotten what he wants always must. She was jealous, too, for her party. They were the patriots, and they must be the ruling element in the new government. It would be a shame to share their power with so terrible a Hydra. It was but a little time before Roland under her influence was at cross-purposes with Danton in the Council. Roland was destined to run athwart a more relentless and savage enemy than Danton could ever be,—Marat, _l’Ami du Peuple_; that Marat the destruction of whose journal by the “satellites of Lafayette” Madame Roland had complained of but a year ago. The most violent and uncontrolled type of the Revolutionary fury, Marat had won his following by his daring _l’Ami du Peuple_, where in turn he had bombarded every personality of the Revolution who seemed to him to favor anything but absolute equality, who worked to preserve any vestige of the old régime, or who hesitated at any extreme of terrorism. In the spring of 1792, the “Brissotine faction” had been his target. His complaint against it was the making of the war. Roland he had practically ignored, for until now Roland had been the defender of Marat’s methods. The 11th of August Marat had had his people carry off from the national printing office four presses,—his due, he claimed, for those that the old régime had confiscated. It was a bit of lawlessness that Roland felt he should rebuke. It was a first point against the minister. Soon after the Department of the Interior received a large amount of money for printing useful matter. Marat considered his productions of the highest importance to the country. He asked for fifteen thousand livres. Roland replied wisely that it was too large a sum for him to give without knowledge of the object to which it was to be put, but that if Marat would send him his manuscripts he would submit them to a council to see if they were suitable to be published at the expense of the nation. But this was questioning the purity of Marat’s patriotism, submitting to scrutiny the spokesman of the people, and Marat was angry. He felt, as Roland had since the beginning of the Revolution, that the right to cry out against all that he suspected, and to voice all the terrors that swarmed in his head, was unlimited and divine. Thus Roland had antagonized the Commune, Danton, and Marat, before the September massacres, but he had done nothing to show the public that he would not support their policy. On the second day of the massacres, however, acting on the advice of Madame Roland, he put himself in open conflict with them.