While Roland carried on his Bureau of Public Opinion and defended his character, Buzot, in the Convention, fought the Mountain more openly and more bitterly. He had no excuse whatever for the excesses of September; no veil to draw over the first twenty-four hours, no patience, no thought of compromise with Robespierre and Danton, the leaders of the Commune. To his mind they were murderers pure and simple, and the country was not worth saving, if it could not be saved without them. In Roland’s case there is always the feeling that if the Commune had regarded him as necessary, obeyed his directions, let him run his Public Opinion Office to suit himself, and ceased maligning his character, he would have condoned their massacre as one of the unhappy but necessary means of insuring the Revolution; that if these “misled brothers,” as he called them, had recognized their mistake, he would have opened his arms to them. Never so with Buzot. Sensitive, idealistic, indifferent to public applause, from the first he took a violent and pronounced position against the Mountain, and refused to compromise with them. It was not hatred alone of the excesses. It was sympathy with Madame Roland, who had revolted against the Revolution. From the day at Evreux, when he received a letter from her, telling of her disgust and disillusion, and setting up a new cause,—the purification of the country of agitators and rioters,—Buzot’s ideas on the policy of Terror changed. When he came up to the Convention he immediately made a violent attack on Robespierre, declared that the Mountain was the most dangerous foe of the country, that Paris was usurping the power of France, and he never ceased his war. The measure which Madame Roland had suggested a few months before to protect Paris, the patriots, and the Assembly against the aristocrats, he now proposed to thwart the activity of Paris and the Commune,—a guard drawn from all the departments for the defence of the Convention. Naturally, this drew upon him the hatred of the sections and leaders, and he was accounted in the Convention, from the 1st of October, the avowed opponent of the Terrorists.