The little apartment in the Rue de la Harpe was waiting them. To leave the Hôtel of the Interior was no trial to them privately. No one could have been more indifferent to considerations of position and surroundings. Their convictions of their own right-doing made them superior to all influences which affect worldly and selfish natures. It is impossible for such people as the Rolands to “come down” in life. Material considerations are so external, so mere an incident, that they can go from palace to hut without giving the matter a second thought. But retirement did not mean relief. Roland’s reports which he had made to the Convention, and which he felt justly were a complete answer to the charges against him, were unnoticed. He begged the body repeatedly to examine them. He urged his ill-health and his desire to leave Paris as a reason, but no notice was taken of him. To Roland this neglect seemed insolence. He felt that he deserved honorable recognition. He craved it, and was irritated and discouraged when he did not receive it. It was evident, too, that his retirement from office had not made his enemies forget him. They followed him as they had priests, _émigrés_, and nobles, and Marat repeatedly denounced him as connected with the opposition to the Mountain. It was horrible for them to watch day after day the struggle going on in the Convention between Gironde and Mountain. Day by day the condition of the former grew more desperate, their defeat and the triumph of the policy of vengeance more certain. The most tragic part of the gradual downfall of the Gironde was not defeat, however. It was disillusion—the slow-growing and unconfessed suspicion that their dream had been an error. It was Buzot who felt this most deeply. In his Memoirs he confesses that gradually he grew convinced that France was not fitted for the Republic they had dared to give it, and that often he had been at the point of owning his mistake: