Historic Oddities and Strange Events

by S. Baring-Gould

After reading the petition Musset added: "I hold in my hands the certificate of the doctors, that testifies to the bad state of the health of the citizen petitioner.

"Citizens! If wickedness is common to kings, generosity is the prerogative of the free people. I demand that this petition be referred to the Committee of Public Assistance to be promptly dealt with. I demand that after the request all the papers relating to it be deposed in the national archives, as a monument of the atrocity of tyrants, and be inserted in the bulletin, that all those who have supposed that Capet did evil only at the instigation of others may know that crime was rooted in his very heart." This proposition was decreed. On May 17, 1794, the representative Peyssard mounted the tribune, and read the report of the Committee, which we must condense.

"Citizens! At the tribunal of liberty the crimes of the oppressors of the human race stand to be judged. To paint a king in all his hideousness I need name only Louis XVI. This name sums in itself all crimes; it recalls a prodigy of iniquity and of perfidy. Hardly escaped from infancy, the germs of the ferocious perversity which characterise a despot appeared in him. His earliest sports were with blood, and his brutality grew with his years, and he delighted in wreaking his ferocity on all the animals he met. He was known to be cruel, treacherous, and murderous. The object of this report is to exhibit him to France cold-bloodedly offering a cup of poison to the unhappy artist whom he had just employed to construct a cupboard in which to conceal the plots of tyranny. It was no stranger he marked as his victim, but a workman whom he had employed for five-and-twenty years, and the father of a family, his own instructor in the locksmith's art. Monsters who thus treat their chosen servants, how will they deal with the rest of men?"

The National Convention thereupon ordered that "François Gamain, poisoned by Louis Capet on May 22, 1792, should enjoy an annual pension of the sum of 1,200 livres, dating from the day on which he was poisoned."

It will be noticed by the most careless reader that the evidence is nil. Gamain does not feel the colic till some hours after he has drunk the wine; he had eaten or drunk other things besides during the day; and finally the testimony of the doctors is, not that he was poisoned, but that, at the time of his presenting the petition, he was in a bad state of health. Accordingly, all reasonable historians, unblinded by party passion, have scouted the idea of an attempt on Gamain's life by the King. Thus the matter would have remained had not M. Paul Lacroix taken it up and propped the old slander on new legs. We will take his account, which he pretends to have received from several persons to whom Gamain related it repeatedly. This is his mise en scène.

"The old inhabitants of Versailles will remember with pity the man whom they often encountered alone, bowed on his stick like one bent with years. Gamain was aged only fifty-eight when he died, but he bore all the marks of decrepitude."

Here is a blunder, to begin with; he died, as the Versailles registers testify, on May 8, 1795, and was accordingly only forty-four years old,—that is, he died one year after the grant of the annuity. M. Parrott, in his article on Gamain in the "Dictionnaire de la Révolution Française," says that he died in 1799, five years after having received his pension; but the Versailles registers are explicit.

M. Lacroix goes on: "His hair had fallen off, and the little that remained had turned white over a brow furrowed deeply; the loss of his teeth made his cheeks hollow; his dull eyes only glared with sombre fire when the name of Louis XVI was pronounced. Sometimes even tears then filled them. Gamain lived very quietly with his family on his humble pension, which, notwithstanding the many changes of government, was always accorded him. It was not suppressed, lest the reason of its being granted should again be raked up before the public."

As we have seen, Gamain died under the Government which granted the pension. M. Lacroix goes on to say "that the old locksmith bore to his dying day an implacable hatred of Louis XVI., whom he accused of having been guilty of an abominable act of treachery."

"This act of treachery was the fixed and sole idea in Gamain's head, he recurred to it incessantly, and poured forth a flood of bitter and savage recriminations against the King. It was Gamain who disclosed the secret of the iron chest in the Tuileries, and the papers it contained, which furnished the chief accusation against Louis XVI.; it was he, therefore, who had, so to speak, prepared the guillotine for the royal head; it was he, finally, who provoked the decree of the Convention which blackened the memory of the King as that of a vulgar murderer. But this did not suffice the hate of Gamain, who went about everywhere pursuing the dead beyond the tomb, with his charge of having attempted murder as payment of life-long and devoted service. Gamain ordinarily passed his evenings in a cafe at Versailles, the name of which I have been told, but which I do not divulge lest I should make a mistake. He was generally in the society of two old notaries, who are still alive (in 1836), and of the doctor Lameyran, who attended him when he was poisoned. These three persons were prepared to attest all the particulars of the poisoning which had been proved at the procès verbal. Gamain, indeed, lacked witnesses to establish the incidents of the 22nd May, 1792, at the Tuileries; but his air of veracity and expression of pain, his accent of conviction, his face full of suffering, his burning eyes, his pathetic pantomime, were the guarantees of good faith."