Explore "The Locksmith Gamain" by Sabine Baring-Gould on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
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 _Siecle_. 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 "Curiosites 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 Decembre-Alonnier -- who seek to justify the execution of the King and Queen, and to glorify the Revolution.