According to the initial account, Van Gogh had become depressed, borrowed the firearm from an innkeeper, took it out into a field, shot himself with it, returned to the inn, went to his room, and died a day and a half later.
Another account, based on testimony recently unearthed, is that two boys found the thing and shot the artist accidentally. That version is supported by forensic psychoanalytical study of the artist's final works that failed to note any evidence of depression.
The pinfire revolver is so called because each cartridge had its own firing pin.
That made the cartridges extremely dangerous to handle, and partly because each cartridge had a hole in it, and partly because the guns were not very robust at all, the power was extremely limited.
I examined a fair-sized collection of them in a home in Wilmette, IL, in the mid 1960s.
Thousands upon thousands of them were made in Belgium, and also in Austria and Italy. Several armies used the larger ones. The Confederacy bought thousands.
That little 7mm? "You'll shoot your eye out!"
If I had been an innkeeper then, I would have preferred a dagger.
The smallest Lefaucheaux pinfire revolvers had a bore of 2mm.
A pinfire revolver figured in Rudyard Kipling's story The Light that Failed. Dick and Maisie liked to practice target shooting with one.
It had nothing to do with Dick's becoming blind, but somehow I have associated pinfire revolvers with blindness ever since I read the book in high school.
Funny, how that can happen.
Personally, I would not want to handle a loaded black-powder pinfire cartridge of any size.
Like Van Gogh, Dick was an artist.