Madame Roland’s antipathy to Danton was intensified by her love for a man who was in every way his opposite. The reserved, cold dignity of the one made her despise the tempestuous oratory of the other. His ideals and theories made Danton’s acts and riots more odious. His refinement and melancholy put in insupportable contrast the brutality and joviality of the great Commune leader. She could not see Danton’s importance to the success of the Second Revolution, when absorbed in a personality so different. All political tactics and compromises seemed to her insignificant, trivial, unworthy in connection with her great passion. Undoubtedly, too, she hoped to see her lover take a position in the new legislature,—the Convention,—of which he was a member, which would make the Gironde so strong that it would not need Danton. X BUZOT AND MADAME ROLAND In the spring and summer of 1791, which the Rolands spent at the Hôtel Britannique, they formed many relations which lasted throughout the Revolution. In this number was a member of the Constitutional Assembly, François-Nicolas-Léonard Buzot, a young man thirty-one years of age, coming from Evreux, in Normandy. Buzot had had the typical Gironde education, had been inspired by the Gironde heroes, and had adopted their theories. Like Manon Phlipon at Paris, Vergniaud at Bordeaux, Barbaroux at Marseilles, Charlotte Corday at Caen, Buzot had lived an intensely sentimental life, nourishing himself on dreams of noble deeds and relations; like them, he had become devoted to a theory of complete regeneration; and like them, he had proudly flung himself into the Revolution, aspiring, inexperienced, impassioned, and confident. Son of a member of the court of Evreux, Buzot became a lawyer in that town, and took an active interest with the liberal and enlightened part of the community in the political struggles of the Revolution. When the notables were called together in 1787, he was elected one of them. He aided in naming the deputies to the States-General, in preparing the petition which the Third Estate sent to that body, and later was elected a deputy. But his real political cares began in the Constituent Assembly, where he sat with the extreme Left. His attitude towards the confiscation of the property of the clergy is a specimen of his radicalism at this period. “In my judgment,” he declared, “ecclesiastical property belongs to the nation,” and this was at a moment when the right of the clergy to hold property had not been seriously questioned. When the Rolands came up to Paris in the spring of 1791, they found Buzot allied with that part of the Assembly most sympathetic to them and he supported, during the time they spent in the city, the measures which they advocated.