go also, but, as he was not invited, he went as Hans' servant, but got
so drunk that Hans was obliged to carry him home to the tavern, after
which he returned to the wedding. In the evening, when dancing began,
the Duke reappeared, he had slept off his drunkenness and was fresh for
more entertainment. He was now recognized, and according to etiquette,
two town councillors, in robes of office and gold chains, danced
solemnly before his Highness. Hans tells us that it was customary for
all dances to be led by two persons habited in scarlet with white
sleeves, and these called the dance and set the figures, no one might
execute any figure or do anything which had not been done by the
leaders. Now as Hans vows he never saw so many pretty girls anywhere as
on that evening, he tipped the leaders with half a thaler to kiss each
other, whereupon the two solemn dancing councillors had also to kiss
each other, and the Duke, nothing loth, his partner, and Hans, with
zest, his. That evening he gave plenty of kisses, and what with the many
lights, and the music and the dancing and the pretty girls he thought
himself in Paradise. Shortly after this, the Duke was invited to dine
with Fugger, the merchant prince, who showed him his treasury, gold to
the worth of a million, and one tower lined within from top half way
down with nothing but silver thalers. The Duke's mouth watered, and he
graciously invited Fugger to lend him £5,000; this the merchant
declined, but made him a present of 200 crowns and a good horse. The
town council consented to lend the Duke £1,200 on his I.O.U. for a year;
and then to pay his host he melted up his silver mugs again, pawned his
plate and gave him a promissory note for two months.
From Augsburg the Duke went about the abbeys, trying to squeeze loans
out of the abbots, but found that they had always the excuse ready, that
they would not lend to Lutheran princes. Then he stuck on in the abbeys,
eating up all their provisions and rioting in their guest-apartments,
till the abbots were fain to make him a present to be rid of him.
All at once an opening offered for the Duke to gain both renown and
money. Henry I. of Condé was at the court of the Elector Palatine at
Heidelsberg, soliciting assistance in behalf of the Huguenots against
the King of France. The Elector agreed to send a force under his son
John Casimir, and the Duke of Liegnitz offered his services, which were
readily accepted. He was to lead the rearguard, and to receive a liberal
pay for his services. Whilst he was collecting this force and getting
underway, John Casimir and the Prince of Condé marched through Lorraine
to Metz, and Hans went with John Casimir. He trusted he was now on his
way to fortune. But it was not so to be. The Duke, his master, insisted
that he should return to him, and Hans, on doing so, found him rioting
and gambling away, at Frankfort and Nassau, the money paid him in
advance for his useless services. Almost the first duty imposed on Hans,
on his return, was to negociate a loan for £5,000 with the magistrates
of Frankfort, which was peremptorily refused; whereupon the Duke went to
Cologne and stayed there seven months, endeavouring to cajole the town
council there into advancing him money.
But we can not follow any further the miserable story of the degradation
of the Silesian Duke, till at the beginning of the new year, 1577, the
Duke ran away from the town of Emmerich, leaving his servants to pay his
debts as best they could. Hans sold the horses and whatever was left,
and then, not sorry to be quit of such a master, returned on foot to his
Silesian home.
It is, perhaps, worth while quoting Duke Henry's letter, which Hans
found in the morning announcing his master's evasion.
"Dear Hans,--Here is a chain, do what you can with it. Weigh it and
sell it, also the horses for ready money; I will not pillow my head
in feathers till, by God's help, I have got some money, to enable
me to clear out of this vile land, and away from these people. Good
morning, best-loved Hans.
"With mine own hand, HENRY, DUKE."
As he neared home, sad news reached Hans. The Ducal creditors had come
down on his father, who had made himself responsible, and had seized the
family estates; whereat the old man's heart broke, and he had died in
January. When Hans heard this, he sat for two hours on a stone beside
the road, utterly unmanned, before he could recover himself sufficiently
to pursue his journey.
In the meantime an Imperial commission had sat on the Duke, deposed
him, and appointed his brother Frederick duke in his room.
Schweinichen's fidelity to Duke Henry ensured his disfavour with Duke
Frederick, and he was not summoned to court, but was left quietly at
Mertschütz to do his best along with his brother to bring the family
affairs into some sort of order. His old master did not, however, allow
him much rest. By the Imperial decision, he was to be provided with a
daily allowance of money, food and wine. This drew Duke Henry home, and
no sooner was he back in Silesia than he insisted on Hans returning to
his service, and for some years more he led the faithful soul a troubled
life, and involved him in miserable pecuniary perplexities. This was the
more trying to Hans as he had now fallen in love with Margaret von
Schellendorff, whom he married eventually. The tenderness and goodness
of Schweinichen's heart break out whenever he speaks of his dear
Margaretta, and of the children which came and were taken from him. His
sorrows as he lingered over the sick-beds of his little ones, and the
closeness with which he was drawn by domestic bereavements and pecuniary
distresses, to his Margaretta, come out clearly in his narrative. The
whole story is far too long to tell in its entirety. Hans was a
voluminous diarist. His memoirs cease at the year 1602, when he was
suffering from gout, but he lived on some years longer.
In the church of S. John at Liegnitz was at one time his monument, with
life-sized figure of Hans von Schweinichen, and above it his banner and
an inscription stating that he died on the 23rd Aug., 1616. Alas! the
hand of the destroyer has been there. The church and monument are
destroyed, and we can no longer see what manner of face Hans wore; but
of the inner man, of a good, faithful, God fearing, and loving soul,
strong and true, he has himself left us the most accurate portrait in
his precious memoirs.
The Locksmith Gamain.
Among the many episodes of the French Revolution there is one which
deserves to be somewhat closely examined, because of the gravity of the
accusation which it involves against the King and Queen, and because a
good deal of controversy has raged round it. The episode is that of the
locksmith Gamain, whom the King and Queen are charged with having
attempted to poison.
That the accusation was believed during "the Terror" goes without
saying; the heated heads and angry hearts at that time were in no
condition to sift evidence with impartiality. Afterwards, the charge was
regarded as preposterous, till the late M. Paul Lacroix--better known as
le Bibliophile Jacob--a student of history, very careful and diligent as
a collector, gave it a new spell of life in 1836, when he reformulated
the accusation in a _feuilleton_ of the _Siècle_. Not content to let it
sleep or die in the ephemeral pages of a newspaper, he republished the
whole story in 1838, in his "Dissertations sur quelques points curieux
de l'histoire de France." This he again reproduced in his "Curiosités de
l'histoire de France," in 1858. M. Louis Blanc, convinced that the case
was made out, has reasserted the charge in his work on the French
Revolution, and it has since been accepted by popular writers--as
Décembre-Alonnier--who seek to justify the execution of the King and
Queen, and to glorify the Revolution.
M. Thiers rejected the accusation; M. Eckard pointed out the
improbabilities in the story in the "Biographie Universelle," and M.
Mortimer-Ternaux has also shown its falsity in his "Histoire de la
Terreur;" and finally, M. Le Roy, librarian of Versailles, in 1867,
devoted his special attention to it, and completely disproved the
poisoning of Gamain. But in spite of disproval the slanderous accusation
does not die, and no doubt is still largely believed in Paris.
So tenacious of life is a lie--like the bacteria that can be steeped in
sulphuric acid without destroying their vitality--that the story has
been again recently raked up, and given to the public, from Lacroix, in
a number of the Cornhill Magazine (December, 1887); the writer of course
knew only Lacroix' myth, and had never seen how it had been disproved.
It is well now to review the whole story.
François Gamain was born at Versailles on August 29, 1751. He belonged
to an hereditary locksmith family. His father Nicolas had been in the
same trade, and had charge of the locks in the royal palaces in
Versailles and elsewhere.
The love of Louis XVI. for mechanical works is well known. He had a
little workshop at Versailles, where he amused himself making locks,
assisted by François Gamain, to whom he was much attached, and with whom
he spent many hours in projecting and executing mechanical contrivances.
The story is told of the Intendant Thierry, that when one day the King
showed him a lock he had made, he replied, "Sire, when kings occupy
themselves with the works of the common people, the common people will
assume the functions of kings," but the _mot_ was probably made after
the fact.
After the terrible days of the 5th and 6th of October, 1789, the King
was brought to Paris. Gamain remained at Versailles, which was his home,
and retained the King's full confidence.
When, later, the King was surrounded by enemies, and he felt the
necessity for having some secret place where he could conceal papers of
importance which might yet fall into the hands of the rabble if the
palace was again invaded, as it had been at Versailles, he sent for
Gamain to make for him an iron chest in a place of concealment, that
could only be opened by one knowing the secret of the lock.
Unfortunately, the man was not as trustworthy as Louis XVI. supposed.
Surrounded by those who had adopted the principles of the Revolution,
and being a man without strong mind, he followed the current, and in
1792 he was nominated member of the Council General of the Commune of
Versailles, and on September 24 he was one of the commissioners
appointed "to cause to disappear all such paintings, sculptures, and
inscriptions from the monuments of the Commune as might serve to recall
royalty and despotism."
The records of the debates of the Communal Council show that Gamain
attended regularly and took part in the discussions, which were often
tumultuous.
The Queen heard of Gamain's Jacobinism, and warned the King, who,
however, could not believe that Gamain would betray him. Marie
Antoinette insisted on the most important papers being removed from the
iron chest, and they were confided to Mme. de Campan.
When the trial of the King was begun, on November 20, Gamain went to
Roland, Minister of the Interior, and told him the secret of the iron
chest. Roland, alarmed at the consequences of such a discovery, hastened
to consult his wife, who was in reality more minister than himself.
From August 10, a commission had been appointed to collect all the
papers found in the Tuileries; this commission, therefore, ought to be
made acquainted with the discovery; but here lay the danger. Mme.
Roland, as an instrument of the Girondins, feared that among the papers
in the chest might be discovered some which would show in what close
relations the Girondins stood to the Court. She decided that her husband
should go to the Tuileries, accompanied by Gamain, an architect, and a
servant. The chest was opened by the locksmith, Roland removed all the
papers, tied them up in a napkin, and took them home. They were taken
the same day to the Convention; and the commission charged the minister
with having abstracted such papers as would have been inconvenient to
him to deliver up.
When Roland surrendered the papers he declared, without naming Gamain,
that they had been discovered in a hole in the wall closed by an iron
door, behind a wainscot panel, in so secret a place "that they could not
have been found had not the secret been disclosed by the workman who
had himself made the place of concealment."
On December 24 following, Gamain was summoned to Paris by the Convention
to give his evidence to prove that a key discovered in the desk of
Thierry de Ville-d'Avray fitted the iron chest.
After the execution of the King, on January 21, 1793, the Convention
sent deputies into all the departments "to stimulate the authorities to
act with the energy requisite under the circumstances." Crassous was
sent into the department of Seine-et-Oise; and not finding the
municipality of Versailles, of which Gamain was a member, "up to the
requisite pitch," he discharged them from office; and by a law of
September 17, all such discharged functionaries were declared to be
"suspected persons," who were liable to be brought before the
revolutionary tribunal on that charge alone.
Thus, in spite of all the proofs he had given of his fidelity to the
principles of the Revolution, Gamain was at any moment liable to arrest,
and to being brought before that terrible tribunal from which the only
exit was to the guillotine. Moreover, Gamain had lost his place and
emoluments as Court locksmith; he had fallen into great poverty, was
without work, and without health.
On April 27, 1794, he presented a petition to the Convention which was
supported by Musset, the deputy and constitutional curé. "It was not
enough," said Musset from the tribune, "that the last of our tyrants
should have delivered over thousands of citizens to be slain by the
sword of the enemy. You will see by the petition I am about to read
that he was familiarised with the most refined cruelty, and that he
himself administered poison to the father of a family, in the hopes
thereby of destroying evidence of his perfidy. You will see that his
ferocious mind had adopted the maxim that to a king everything is
permissible."
After this preamble Musset read the petition of Gamain, which is as
follows: "François Gamain, locksmith to the cabinets and to the
laboratory of the late King, and for three years member of the Council
General of the Commune of Versailles, declares that at the beginning of
May 1792 he was ordered to go to Paris. On reaching it, Capet required
him to make a cupboard in the thickness of one of the walls of his room,
and to fasten it with an iron door; and he further states that he was
thus engaged up to the 22nd of the said month, and that he worked in the
King's presence. When the chest was completed, Capet himself offered
citizen Gamain a large tumbler of wine, and asked him to drink it, as
he, the said Gamain, was very hot.
"_A few hours later_ he was attacked by a violent colic, which did not
abate till he had taken two spoonfuls of elixir, which made him vomit
all he had eaten and drunk that day. This was the prelude to a terrible
illness, which lasted fourteen months, during which he lost the use of
his limbs, and which has left him at present without hope of recovering
his full health, and of working so as to provide for the necessities of
his family."
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."
These three men, the notaries and the doctor, which latter M. Lacroix
hints was living when he wrote, were his authorities for what follows.
The notaries he does not name, nor the café where they met. His account
published in the _Siècle_ at once attracted attention, and M. Lacroix
was challenged to produce his witnesses. As for M. Lameyran, the doctor,
he had died in 1811; consequently his testimony was not to be had in
1836. The other doctor who had attended Gamain was M. Voisin, who died
in 1823, but M. Le Roy asserts positively that in 1813 M. Voisin told
him, "Never was Gamain poisoned. Lameyran and I had long attended him
for chronic malady of the stomach. This is all we testified to in our
certificate, when he applied for a pension. In our certificate we stated
that he was in weak health--not a word was in it about poisoning, which
existed only in his fancy."
These certificates are no longer in existence. They were not preserved
in the archives of the Convention. Even this fact is taken as evidence
in favour of the attempt. M. Emile Bonnet, in an article on Gamain in
the "Intermédiaire des Chercheurs," declares that they have been
substracted since the Restoration of Charles;[8] but there is no trace
in the archives of them ever having been there. Moreover, we have M. Le
Roy's word that M. Voisin assured him he had not testified to poisoning,
and, what is more important, we have Musset's declaration before the
Convention that the certificate of the doctors "asserted the ill-health
of the claimant." If there had been a word about poison in it, he would
assuredly have said so.
M. Lacroix was asked to name his authorities--the two advocates who, as
M. Lameyran was dead, were alive and would testify to the fact that they
had heard the story from the lips of Gamain. He remained silent. He
would not even name the café where they met, and which might lead to the
identification. M. Eckard, who wrote the notice on Gamain in the
"Biographie Universelle," consulted the family of the locksmith on the
case, and was assured by them that the bad health of Gamain was due to
no other cause than disappointment at the loss of his fortune, the
privations he underwent, and, above all, his terror for his life after
his dismissal from the Communal Council.
We will now continue M. Lacroix's account, which he proceeds, not a
little disingenuously, to put into the mouth of Gamain himself, so that
the accusation may not be charged on the author.
"On May 21, 1792," says Gamain, according to the "Bibliophile Jacob,"
"whilst I was working in my shop, a horseman drew up at my door and
called me out. His disguise as a carter did not prevent me from
recognising Durey, the King's forge assistant. I refused. I
congratulated myself that evening at having done so, as the rumour
spread in Versailles that the Tuileries had been attacked by the mob,
but this did not really take place till a month later. Next morning
Durey returned and showed me a note in the King's own hand, entreating
me to lend my assistance in a difficult job past his unaided powers. My
pride was flattered. I embraced my wife and children, without telling
them whither I was going, but I promised to return that night. It was
not without anxiety that they saw me depart with a stranger for Paris."
We need merely point out that Durey was no stranger to the family: he
had been for years associated daily with Gamain.