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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of An Accursed Race, by Elizabeth Gaskell
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: An Accursed Race
+
+Author: Elizabeth Gaskell
+
+Release Date: March, 2001 [eBook #2531]
+[Most recently updated: December 22, 2021]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: David Price, Jennifer Lee, Alev Akman and Andy Wallace
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AN ACCURSED RACE ***
+
+
+
+
+AN ACCURSED RACE
+Elizabeth Gaskell
+
+
+We have our prejudices in England. Or, if that assertion offends any of
+my readers, I will modify it: we have had our prejudices in England. We
+have tortured Jews; we have burnt Catholics and Protestants, to say
+nothing of a few witches and wizards. We have satirized Puritans, and we
+have dressed-up Guys. But, after all, I do not think we have been so bad
+as our Continental friends. To be sure, our insular position has kept us
+free, to a certain degree, from the inroads of alien races; who, driven
+from one land of refuge, steal into another equally unwilling to receive
+them; and where, for long centuries, their presence is barely endured,
+and no pains is taken to conceal the repugnance which the natives of
+"pure blood" experience towards them.
+
+There yet remains a remnant of the miserable people called Cagots in the
+valleys of the Pyrenees; in the Landes near Bourdeaux; and, stretching up
+on the west side of France, their numbers become larger in Lower
+Brittany. Even now, the origin of these families is a word of shame to
+them among their neighbours; although they are protected by the law,
+which confirmed them in the equal rights of citizens about the end of the
+last century. Before then they had lived, for hundreds of years,
+isolated from all those who boasted of pure blood, and they had been, all
+this time, oppressed by cruel local edicts. They were truly what they
+were popularly called, The Accursed Race.
+
+All distinct traces of their origin are lost. Even at the close of that
+period which we call the Middle Ages, this was a problem which no one
+could solve; and as the traces, which even then were faint and uncertain,
+have vanished away one by one, it is a complete mystery at the present
+day. Why they were accursed in the first instance, why isolated from
+their kind, no one knows. From the earliest accounts of their state that
+are yet remaining to us, it seems that the names which they gave each
+other were ignored by the population they lived amongst, who spoke of
+them as Crestiaa, or Cagots, just as we speak of animals by their generic
+names. Their houses or huts were always placed at some distance out of
+the villages of the country-folk, who unwillingly called in the services
+of the Cagots as carpenters, or tilers, or slaters--trades which seemed
+appropriated by this unfortunate race--who were forbidden to occupy land,
+or to bear arms, the usual occupations of those times. They had some
+small right of pasturage on the common lands, and in the forests: but the
+number of their cattle and live-stock was strictly limited by the
+earliest laws relating to the Cagots. They were forbidden by one act to
+have more than twenty sheep, a pig, a ram, and six geese. The pig was to
+be fattened and killed for winter food; the fleece of the sheep was to
+clothe them; but if the said sheep had lambs, they were forbidden to eat
+them. Their only privilege arising from this increase was, that they
+might choose out the strongest and finest in preference to keeping the
+old sheep. At Martinmas the authorities of the commune came round, and
+counted over the stock of each Cagot. If he had more than his appointed
+number, they were forfeited; half went to the commune, half to the
+baillie, or chief magistrate of the commune. The poor beasts were
+limited as to the amount of common which they might stray over in search
+of grass. While the cattle of the inhabitants of the commune might
+wander hither and thither in search of the sweetest herbage, the deepest
+shade, or the coolest pool in which to stand on the hot days, and lazily
+switch their dappled sides, the Cagot sheep and pig had to learn
+imaginary bounds, beyond which if they strayed, any one might snap them
+up, and kill them, reserving a part of the flesh for his own use, but
+graciously restoring the inferior parts to their original owner. Any
+damage done by the sheep was, however, fairly appraised, and the Cagot
+paid no more for it than any other man would have done.
+
+Did a Cagot leave his poor cabin, and venture into the towns, even to
+render services required of him in the way of his trade, he was bidden, by all
+the municipal laws, to stand by and remember his rude old state. In all
+the towns and villages the large districts extending on both sides of the
+Pyrenees--in all that part of Spain--they were forbidden to buy or sell
+anything eatable, to walk in the middle (esteemed the better) part of the
+streets, to come within the gates before sunrise, or to be found after
+sunset within the walls of the town. But still, as the Cagots were good-
+looking men, and (although they bore certain natural marks of their
+caste, of which I shall speak by-and-by) were not easily distinguished by
+casual passers-by from other men, they were compelled to wear some
+distinctive peculiarity which should arrest the eye; and, in the greater
+number of towns, it was decreed that the outward sign of a Cagot should
+be a piece of red cloth sewed conspicuously on the front of his dress. In
+other towns, the mark of Cagoterie was the foot of a duck or a goose hung
+over their left shoulder, so as to be seen by any one meeting them. After
+a time, the more convenient badge of a piece of yellow cloth cut out in
+the shape of a duck's foot, was adopted. If any Cagot was found in any
+town or village without his badge, he had to pay a fine of five sous, and
+to lose his dress. He was expected to shrink away from any passer-by,
+for fear that their clothes should touch each other; or else to stand
+still in some corner or by-place. If the Cagots were thirsty during the
+days which they passed in those towns where their presence was barely
+suffered, they had no means of quenching their thirst, for they were
+forbidden to enter into the little cabarets or taverns. Even the water
+gushing out of the common fountain was prohibited to them. Far away, in
+their own squalid village, there was the Cagot fountain, and they were
+not allowed to drink of any other water. A Cagot woman having to make
+purchases in the town, was liable to be flogged out of it if she went to
+buy anything except on a Monday--a day on which all other people who
+could, kept their houses for fear of coming in contact with the accursed
+race.
+
+In the Pays Basque, the prejudices--and for some time the laws--ran
+stronger against them than any which I have hitherto mentioned. The
+Basque Cagot was not allowed to possess sheep. He might keep a pig for
+provision, but his pig had no right of pasturage. He might cut and carry
+grass for the ass, which was the only other animal he was permitted to
+own; and this ass was permitted, because its existence was rather an
+advantage to the oppressor, who constantly availed himself of the Cagot's
+mechanical skill, and was glad to have him and his tools easily conveyed
+from one place to another.
+
+The race was repulsed by the State. Under the small local governments
+they could hold no post whatsoever. And they were barely tolerated by
+the Church, although they were good Catholics, and zealous frequenters of
+the mass. They might only enter the churches by a small door set apart
+for them, through which no one of the pure race ever passed. This door
+was low, so as to compel them to make an obeisance. It was occasionally
+surrounded by sculpture, which invariably represented an oak-branch with
+a dove above it. When they were once in, they might not go to the holy
+water used by others. They had a benitier of their own; nor were they
+allowed to share in the consecrated bread when that was handed round to
+the believers of the pure race. The Cagots stood afar off, near the
+door. There were certain boundaries--imaginary lines on the nave and in
+the aisles which they might not pass. In one or two of the more tolerant
+of the Pyrenean villages, the blessed bread was offered to the Cagots,
+the priest standing on one side of the boundary, and giving the pieces of
+bread on a long wooden fork to each person successively.
+
+When the Cagot died, he was interred apart, in a plot burying-ground on
+the north side of the cemetery. Under such laws and prescriptions as I
+have described, it is no wonder that he was generally too poor to have
+much property for his children to inherit; but certain descriptions of it
+were forfeited to the commune. The only possession which all who were
+not of his own race refused to touch, was his furniture. That was
+tainted, infectious, unclean--fit for none but Cagots.
+
+When such were, for at least three centuries, the prevalent usages and
+opinions with regard to this oppressed race, it is not surprising that we
+read of occasional outbursts of ferocious violence on their part. In the
+Basses-Pyrenees, for instance it is only about a hundred years since,
+that the Cagots of Rehouilhes rose up against the inhabitants of the
+neighbouring town of Lourdes, and got the better of them, by their
+magical powers as it is said. The people of Lourdes were conquered and
+slain, and their ghastly, bloody heads served the triumphant Cagots for
+balls to play at ninepins with! The local parliaments had begun, by this
+time, to perceive how oppressive was the ban of public opinion under
+which the Cagots lay, and were not inclined to enforce too severe a
+punishment. Accordingly, the decree of the parliament of Toulouse
+condemned only the leading Cagots concerned in this affray to be put to
+death, and that henceforward and for ever no Cagot was to be permitted to
+enter the town of Lourdes by any gate but that called Capdet-pourtet:
+they were only to be allowed to walk under the rain-gutters, and neither
+to sit, eat, nor drink in the town. If they failed in observing any of
+these rules, the parliament decreed, in the spirit of Shylock, that the
+disobedient Cagots should have two strips of flesh, weighing never more
+than two ounces a-piece, cut out from each side of their spines.
+
+In the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries it was considered
+no more a crime to kill a Cagot than to destroy obnoxious vermin. A
+"nest of Cagots," as the old accounts phrase it, had assembled in a
+deserted castle of Mauvezin, about the year sixteen hundred; and,
+certainly, they made themselves not very agreeable neighbours, as they
+seemed to enjoy their reputation of magicians; and, by some acoustic
+secrets which were known to them, all sorts of moanings and groanings
+were heard in the neighbouring forests, very much to the alarm of the
+good people of the pure race; who could not cut off a withered branch for
+firewood, but some unearthly sound seemed to fill the air, nor drink
+water which was not poisoned, because the Cagots would persist in filling
+their pitchers at the same running stream. Added to these grievances,
+the various pilferings perpetually going on in the neighbourhood made the
+inhabitants of the adjacent towns and hamlets believe that they had a
+very sufficient cause for wishing to murder all the Cagots in the Chateau
+de Mauvezin. But it was surrounded by a moat, and only accessible by a
+drawbridge; besides which, the Cagots were fierce and vigilant. Some
+one, however, proposed to get into their confidence; and for this purpose
+he pretended to fall ill close to their path, so that on returning to
+their stronghold they perceived him, and took him in, restored him to
+health, and made a friend of him. One day, when they were all playing at
+ninepins in the woods, their treacherous friend left the party on
+pretence of being thirsty, and went back into the castle, drawing up the
+bridge after he had passed over it, and so cutting off their means of
+escape into safety. Them, going up to the highest part of the castle, he
+blew a horn, and the pure race, who were lying in wait on the watch for
+some such signal, fell upon the Cagots at their games, and slew them all.
+For this murder I find no punishment decreed in the parliament of
+Toulouse, or elsewhere.
+
+As any intermarriage with the pure race was strictly forbidden, and as
+there were books kept in every commune in which the names and habitations
+of the reputed Cagots were written, these unfortunate people had no hope
+of ever becoming blended with the rest of the population. Did a Cagot
+marriage take place, the couple were serenaded with satirical songs. They
+also had minstrels, and many of their romances are still current in
+Brittany; but they did not attempt to make any reprisals of satire or
+abuse. Their disposition was amiable, and their intelligence great.
+Indeed, it required both these qualities, and their great love of
+mechanical labour, to make their lives tolerable.
+
+At last, they began to petition that they might receive some protection
+from the laws; and, towards the end of the seventeenth century, the
+judicial power took their side. But they gained little by this. Law
+could not prevail against custom: and, in the ten or twenty years just
+preceding the first French revolution, the prejudice in France against
+the Cagots amounted to fierce and positive abhorrence.
+
+At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Cagots of Navarre
+complained to the Pope, that they were excluded from the fellowship of
+men, and accursed by the Church, because their ancestors had given help
+to a certain Count Raymond of Toulouse in his revolt against the Holy
+See. They entreated his holiness not to visit upon them the sins of
+their fathers. The Pope issued a bull on the thirteenth of May, fifteen
+hundred and fifteen--ordering them to be well-treated and to be admitted
+to the same privileges as other men. He charged Don Juan de Santa Maria
+of Pampeluna to see to the execution of this bull. But Don Juan was slow
+to help, and the poor Spanish Cagots grew impatient, and resolved to try
+the secular power. They accordingly applied to the Cortes of Navarre,
+and were opposed on a variety of grounds. First, it was stated that
+their ancestors had had "nothing to do with Raymond Count of Toulouse, or
+with any such knightly personage; that they were in fact descendants of
+Gehazi, servant of Elisha (second book of Kings, fifth chapter, twenty-
+seventh verse), who had been accursed by his master for his fraud upon
+Naaman, and doomed, he and his descendants, to be lepers for evermore.
+Name, Cagots or Gahets; Gahets, Gehazites. What can be more clear? And
+if that is not enough, and you tell us that the Cagots are not lepers
+now; we reply that there are two kinds of leprosy, one perceptible and
+the other imperceptible, even to the person suffering from it. Besides,
+it is the country talk, that where the Cagot treads, the grass withers,
+proving the unnatural heat of his body. Many credible and trustworthy
+witnesses will also tell you that, if a Cagot holds a freshly-gathered
+apple in his hand, it will shrivel and wither up in an hour's time as
+much as if it had been kept for a whole winter in a dry room. They are
+born with tails; although the parents are cunning enough to pinch them
+off immediately. Do you doubt this? If it is not true, why do the
+children of the pure race delight in sewing on sheep's tails to the dress
+of any Cagot who is so absorbed in his work as not to perceive them? And
+their bodily smell is so horrible and detestable that it shows that they
+must be heretics of some vile and pernicious description, for do we not
+read of the incense of good workers, and the fragrance of holiness?"
+
+Such were literally the arguments by which the Cagots were thrown back
+into a worse position than ever, as far as regarded their rights as
+citizens. The Pope insisted that they should receive all their
+ecclesiastical privileges. The Spanish priests said nothing; but tacitly
+refused to allow the Cagots to mingle with the rest of the faithful,
+either dead or alive. The accursed race obtained laws in their favour
+from the Emperor Charles the Fifth; which, however, there was no one to
+carry into effect. As a sort of revenge for their want of submission,
+and for their impertinence in daring to complain, their tools were all
+taken away from them by the local authorities: an old man and all his
+family died of starvation, being no longer allowed to fish.
+
+They could not emigrate. Even to remove their poor mud habitations, from
+one spot to another, excited anger and suspicion. To be sure, in sixteen
+hundred and ninety-five, the Spanish government ordered the alcaldes to
+search out all the Cagots, and to expel them before two months had
+expired, under pain of having fifty ducats to pay for every Cagot
+remaining in Spain at the expiration of that time. The inhabitants of
+the villages rose up and flogged out any of the miserable race who might
+be in their neighbourhood; but the French were on their guard against
+this enforced irruption, and refused to permit them to enter France.
+Numbers were hunted up into the inhospitable Pyrenees, and there died of
+starvation, or became a prey to wild beasts. They were obliged to wear
+both gloves and shoes when they were thus put to flight, otherwise the
+stones and herbage they trod upon and the balustrades of the bridges that
+they handled in crossing, would, according to popular belief, have become
+poisonous.
+
+And all this time, there was nothing remarkable or disgusting in the
+outward appearance of this unfortunate people. There was nothing about
+them to countenance the idea of their being lepers--the most natural mode
+of accounting for the abhorrence in which they were held. They were
+repeatedly examined by learned doctors, whose experiments, although
+singular and rude, appear to have been made in a spirit of humanity. For
+instance, the surgeons of the king of Navarre, in sixteen hundred, bled
+twenty-two Cagots, in order to examine and analyze their blood. They
+were young and healthy people of both sexes; and the doctors seem to have
+expected that they should have been able to extract some new kind of salt
+from their blood which might account for the wonderful heat of their
+bodies. But their blood was just like that of other people. Some of
+these medical men have left us a description of the general appearance of
+this unfortunate race, at a time when they were more numerous and less
+intermixed than they are now. The families existing in the south and
+west of France, who are reputed to be of Cagot descent at this day, are,
+like their ancestors, tall, largely made, and powerful in frame; fair and
+ruddy in complexion, with gray-blue eyes, in which some observers see a
+pensive heaviness of look. Their lips are thick, but well-formed. Some
+of the reports name their sad expression of countenance with surprise and
+suspicion--"They are not gay, like other folk." The wonder would be if
+they were. Dr. Guyon, the medical man of the last century who has left
+the clearest report on the health of the Cagots, speaks of the vigorous
+old age they attain to. In one family alone, he found a man of seventy-
+four years of age; a woman as old, gathering cherries; and another woman,
+aged eighty-three, was lying on the grass, having her hair combed by her
+great-grandchildren. Dr. Guyon and other surgeons examined into the
+subject of the horribly infectious smell which the Cagots were said to
+leave behind them, and upon everything they touched; but they could
+perceive nothing unusual on this head. They also examined their ears,
+which according to common belief (a belief existing to this day), were
+differently shaped from those of other people; being round and gristly,
+without the lobe of flesh into which the ear-ring is inserted. They
+decided that most of the Cagots whom they examined had the ears of this
+round shape; but they gravely added, that they saw no reason why this
+should exclude them from the good-will of men, and from the power of
+holding office in Church and State. They recorded the fact, that the
+children of the towns ran baaing after any Cagot who had been compelled
+to come into the streets to make purchases, in allusion to this
+peculiarity of the shape of the ear, which bore some resemblance to the
+ears of the sheep as they are cut by the shepherds in this district. Dr.
+Guyon names the case of a beautiful Cagot girl, who sang most sweetly,
+and prayed to be allowed to sing canticles in the organ-loft. The
+organist, more musician than bigot, allowed her to come, but the
+indignant congregation, finding out whence proceeded that clear, fresh
+voice, rushed up to the organ-loft, and chased the girl out, bidding her
+"remember her ears," and not commit the sacrilege of singing praises to
+God along with the pure race.
+
+But this medical report of Dr. Guyon's--bringing facts and arguments to
+confirm his opinion, that there was no physical reason why the Cagots
+should not be received on terms of social equality by the rest of the
+world--did no more for his clients than the legal decrees promulgated two
+centuries before had done. The French proved the truth of the saying in
+Hudibras--
+
+    He that's convinced against his will
+    Is of the same opinion still.
+
+And, indeed, the being convinced by Dr. Guyon that they ought to receive
+Cagots as fellow-creatures, only made them more rabid in declaring that
+they would not. One or two little occurrences which are recorded, show
+that the bitterness of the repugnance to the Cagots was in full force at
+the time just preceding the first French revolution. There was a M.
+d'Abedos, the curate of Lourdes, and brother to the seigneur of the
+neighbouring castle, who was living in seventeen hundred and eighty; he
+was well-educated for the time, a travelled man, and sensible and
+moderate in all respects but that of his abhorrence of the Cagots: he
+would insult them from the very altar, calling out to them, as they stood
+afar off, "Oh! ye Cagots, damned for evermore!" One day, a half-blind
+Cagot stumbled and touched the censer borne before this Abbe de Lourdes.
+He was immediately turned out of the church, and forbidden ever to re-
+enter it. One does not know how to account for the fact, that the very
+brother of this bigoted abbe, the seigneur of the village, went and
+married a Cagot girl; but so it was, and the abbe brought a legal process
+against him, and had his estates taken from him, solely on account of his
+marriage, which reduced him to the condition of a Cagot, against whom the
+old law was still in force. The descendants of this Seigneur de Lourdes
+are simple peasants at this very day, working on the lands which belonged
+to their grandfather.
+
+This prejudice against mixed marriages remained prevalent until very
+lately. The tradition of the Cagot descent lingered among the people,
+long after the laws against the accursed race were abolished. A Breton
+girl, within the last few years, having two lovers each of reputed Cagot
+descent, employed a notary to examine their pedigrees, and see which of
+the two had least Cagot in him; and to that one she gave her hand. In
+Brittany the prejudice seems to have been more virulent than anywhere
+else. M. Emile Souvestre records proofs of the hatred borne to them in
+Brittany so recently as in eighteen hundred and thirty-five. Just lately
+a baker at Hennebon, having married a girl of Cagot descent, lost all his
+custom. The godfather and godmother of a Cagot child became Cagots
+themselves by the Breton laws, unless, indeed, the poor little baby died
+before attaining a certain number of days. They had to eat the butchers'
+meat condemned as unhealthy; but, for some unknown reason, they were
+considered to have a right to every cut loaf turned upside down, with its
+cut side towards the door, and might enter any house in which they saw a
+loaf in this position, and carry it away with them. About thirty years
+ago, there was the skeleton of a hand hanging up as an offering in a
+Breton church near Quimperle, and the tradition was, that it was the hand
+of a rich Cagot who had dared to take holy water out of the usual
+benitier, some time at the beginning of the reign of Louis the Sixteenth;
+which an old soldier witnessing, he lay in wait, and the next time the
+offender approached the benitier he cut off his hand, and hung it up,
+dripping with blood, as an offering to the patron saint of the church.
+The poor Cagots in Brittany petitioned against their opprobrious name,
+and begged to be distinguished by the appelation of Malandrins. To
+English ears one is much the same as the other, as neither conveys any
+meaning; but, to this day, the descendants of the Cagots do not like to
+have this name applied to them, preferring that of Malandrin.
+
+The French Cagots tried to destroy all the records of their pariah
+descent, in the commotions of seventeen hundred and eighty-nine; but if
+writings have disappeared, the tradition yet remains, and points out such
+and such a family as Cagot, or Malandrin, or Oiselier, according to the
+old terms of abhorrence.
+
+There are various ways in which learned men have attempted to account for
+the universal repugnance in which this well-made, powerful race are held.
+Some say that the antipathy to them took its rise in the days when
+leprosy was a dreadfully prevalent disease; and that the Cagots are more
+liable than any other men to a kind of skin disease, not precisely
+leprosy, but resembling it in some of its symptoms; such as dead
+whiteness of complexion, and swellings of the face and extremities. There
+was also some resemblance to the ancient Jewish custom in respect to
+lepers, in the habit of the people; who on meeting a Cagot called out,
+"Cagote? Cagote?" to which they were bound to reply, "Perlute! perlute!"
+Leprosy is not properly an infectious complaint, in spite of the horror
+in which the Cagot furniture, and the cloth woven by them, are held in
+some places; the disorder is hereditary, and hence (say this body of wise
+men, who have troubled themselves to account for the origin of Cagoterie)
+the reasonableness and the justice of preventing any mixed marriages, by
+which this terrible tendency to leprous complaints might be spread far
+and wide. Another authority says, that though the Cagots are
+fine-looking men, hard-working, and good mechanics, yet they bear in
+their faces, and show in their actions, reasons for the detestation in
+which they are held: their glance, if you meet it, is the jettatura, or
+evil-eye, and they are spiteful, and cruel, and deceitful above all other
+men. All these qualities they derive from their ancestor Gehazi, the
+servant of Elisha, together with their tendency to leprosy.
+
+Again, it is said that they are descended from the Arian Goths who were
+permitted to live in certain places in Guienne and Languedoc, after their
+defeat by King Clovis, on condition that they abjured their heresy, and
+kept themselves separate from all other men for ever. The principal
+reason alleged in support of this supposition of their Gothic descent, is
+the specious one of derivation,--Chiens Gots, Cans Gets, Cagots,
+equivalent to Dogs of Goths.
+
+Again, they were thought to be Saracens, coming from Syria. In
+confirmation of this idea, was the belief that all Cagots were possessed
+by a horrible smell. The Lombards, also, were an unfragrant race, or so
+reputed among the Italians: witness Pope Stephen's letter to Charlemagne,
+dissuading him from marrying Bertha, daughter of Didier, King of
+Lombardy. The Lombards boasted of Eastern descent, and were noisome. The
+Cagots were noisome, and therefore must be of Eastern descent. What
+could be clearer? In addition, there was the proof to be derived from
+the name Cagot, which those maintaining the opinion of their Saracen
+descent held to be Chiens, or Chasseurs des Gots, because the Saracens
+chased the Goths out of Spain. Moreover, the Saracens were originally
+Mahometans, and as such obliged to bathe seven times a-day: whence the
+badge of the duck's foot. A duck was a water-bird: Mahometans bathed in
+the water. Proof upon proof!
+
+In Brittany the common idea was, they were of Jewish descent. Their
+unpleasant smell was again pressed into service. The Jews, it was well
+known, had this physical infirmity, which might be cured either by
+bathing in a certain fountain in Egypt--which was a long way from
+Brittany--or by anointing themselves with the blood of a Christian child.
+Blood gushed out of the body of every Cagot on Good Friday. No wonder,
+if they were of Jewish descent. It was the only way of accounting for so
+portentous a fact. Again; the Cagots were capital carpenters, which gave
+the Bretons every reason to believe that their ancestors were the very
+Jews who made the cross. When first the tide of emigration set from
+Brittany to America, the oppressed Cagots crowded to the ports, seeking
+to go to some new country, where their race might be unknown. Here was
+another proof of their descent from Abraham and his nomadic people: and,
+the forty years' wandering in the wilderness and the Wandering Jew
+himself, were pressed into the service to prove that the Cagots derived
+their restlessness and love of change from their ancestors, the Jews. The
+Jews, also, practised arts-magic, and the Cagots sold bags of wind to the
+Breton sailors, enchanted maidens to love them--maidens who never would
+have cared for them, unless they had been previously enchanted--made
+hollow rocks and trees give out strange and unearthly noises, and sold
+the magical herb called _bon-succes_. It is true enough that, in all the
+early acts of the fourteenth century, the same laws apply to Jews as to
+Cagots, and the appellations seem used indiscriminately; but their fair
+complexions, their remarkable devotion to all the ceremonies of the
+Catholic Church, and many other circumstances, conspire to forbid our
+believing them to be of Hebrew descent.
+
+Another very plausible idea is, that they are the descendants of
+unfortunate individuals afflicted with goitres, which is, even to this
+day, not an uncommon disorder in the gorges and valleys of the Pyrenees.
+Some have even derived the word goitre from Got, or Goth; but their name,
+Crestia, is not unlike Cretin, and the same symptoms of idiotism were not
+unusual among the Cagots; although sometimes, if old tradition is to be
+credited, their malady of the brain took rather the form of violent
+delirium, which attacked them at new and full moons. Then the workmen
+laid down their tools, and rushed off from their labour to play mad
+pranks up and down the country. Perpetual motion was required to
+alleviate the agony of fury that seized upon the Cagots at such times. In
+this desire for rapid movement, the attack resembled the Neapolitan
+tarantella; while in the mad deeds they performed during such attacks,
+they were not unlike the northern Berserker. In Bearn especially, those
+suffering from this madness were dreaded by the pure race; the Bearnais,
+going to cut their wooden clogs in the great forests that lay around the
+base of the Pyrenees, feared above all things to go too near the periods
+when the Cagoutelle seized on the oppressed and accursed people; from
+whom it was then the oppressors' turn to fly. A man was living within
+the memory of some, who married a Cagot wife; he used to beat her right
+soundly when he saw the first symptoms of the Cagoutelle, and, having
+reduced her to a wholesome state of exhaustion and insensibility, he
+locked her up until the moon had altered her shape in the heavens. If he
+had not taken such decided steps, say the oldest inhabitants, there is no
+knowing what might have happened.
+
+From the thirteenth to the end of the nineteenth century, there are facts
+enough to prove the universal abhorrence in which this unfortunate race
+was held; whether called Cagots, or Gahets in Pyrenean districts,
+Caqueaux in Brittany, or Yaqueros Asturias. The great French revolution
+brought some good out of its fermentation of the people: the more
+intelligent among them tried to overcome the prejudice against the
+Cagots.
+
+In seventeen hundred and eighteen, there was a famous cause tried at
+Biarritz relating to Cagot rights and privileges. There was a wealthy
+miller, Etienne Arnauld by name, of the race of Gotz, Quagotz, Bisigotz,
+Astragotz, or Gahetz, as his people are described in the legal document.
+He married an heiress, a Gotte (or Cagot) of Biarritz; and the
+newly-married well-to-do couple saw no reason why they should stand near
+the door in the church, nor why he should not hold some civil office in
+the commune, of which he was the principal inhabitant. Accordingly, he
+petitioned the law that he and his wife might be allowed to sit in the
+gallery of the church, and that he might be relieved from his civil
+disabilities. This wealthy white miller, Etienne Arnauld, pursued his
+rights with some vigour against the Baillie of Labourd, the dignitary of
+the neighbourhood. Whereupon the inhabitants of Biarritz met in the open
+air, on the eighth of May, to the number of one hundred and fifty;
+approved of the conduct of the Baillie in rejecting Arnauld, made a
+subscription, and gave all power to their lawyers to defend the cause of
+the pure race against Etienne Arnauld--"that stranger," who, having
+married a girl of Cagot blood, ought also to be expelled from the holy
+places. This lawsuit was carried through all the local courts, and ended
+by an appeal to the highest court in Paris; where a decision was given
+against Basque superstitions; and Etienne Arnauld was thenceforward
+entitled to enter the gallery of the church.
+
+Of course, the inhabitants of Biarritz were all the more ferocious for
+having been conquered; and, four years later, a carpenter, named Miguel
+Legaret, suspected of Cagot descent, having placed himself in the church
+among other people, was dragged out by the abbe and two of the jurets of
+the parish. Legaret defended himself with a sharp knife at the time, and
+went to law afterwards; the end of which was, that the abbe and his two
+accomplices were condemned to a public confession of penitence, to be
+uttered while on their knees at the church door, just after high-mass.
+They appealed to the parliament of Bourdeaux against this decision, but
+met with no better success than the opponents of the miller Arnauld.
+Legaret was confirmed in his right of standing where he would in the
+parish church. That a living Cagot had equal rights with other men in
+the town of Biarritz seemed now ceded to them; but a dead Cagot was a
+different thing. The inhabitants of pure blood struggled long and hard
+to be interred apart from the abhorred race. The Cagots were equally
+persistent in claiming to have a common burying-ground. Again the texts
+of the Old Testament were referred to, and the pure blood quoted
+triumphantly the precedent of Uzziah the leper (twenty-sixth chapter of
+the second book of Chronicles), who was buried in the field of the
+Sepulchres of the Kings, not in the sepulchres themselves. The Cagots
+pleaded that they were healthy and able-bodied; with no taint of leprosy
+near them. They were met by the strong argument so difficult to be
+refuted, which I quoted before. Leprosy was of two kinds, perceptible
+and imperceptible. If the Cagots were suffering from the latter kind,
+who could tell whether they were free from it or not? That decision must
+be left to the judgment of others.
+
+One sturdy Cagot family alone, Belone by name, kept up a lawsuit,
+claiming the privilege of common sepulture, for forty-two years; although
+the cure of Biarritz had to pay one hundred livres for every Cagot not
+interred in the right place. The inhabitants indemnified the curate for
+all these fines.
+
+M. de Romagne, Bishop of Tarbes, who died in seventeen hundred and sixty-
+eight, was the first to allow a Cagot to fill any office in the Church.
+To be sure, some were so spiritless as to reject office when it was
+offered to them, because, by so claiming their equality, they had to pay
+the same taxes as other men, instead of the Rancale or pole-tax levied on
+the Cagots; the collector of which had also a right to claim a piece of
+bread of a certain size for his dog at every Cagot dwelling.
+
+Even in the present century, it has been necessary in some churches for
+the archdeacon of the district, followed by all his clergy, to pass out
+of the small door previously appropriated to the Cagots, in order to
+mitigate the superstition which, even so lately, made the people refuse
+to mingle with them in the house of God. A Cagot once played the
+congregation at Larroque a trick suggested by what I have just named. He
+slily locked the great parish-door of the church, while the greater part
+of the inhabitants were assisting at mass inside; put gravel into the
+lock itself, so as to prevent the use of any duplicate key,--and had the
+pleasure of seeing the proud pure-blooded people file out with bended
+head, through the small low door used by the abhorred Cagots.
+
+We are naturally shocked at discovering, from facts such as these, the
+causeless rancour with which innocent and industrious people were so
+recently persecuted. The moral of the history of the accursed race may,
+perhaps, be best conveyed in the words of an epitaph on Mrs. Mary Hand,
+who lies buried in the churchyard of Stratford-on-Avon:--
+
+    What faults you saw in me,
+      Pray strive to shun;
+    And look at home; there's
+      Something to be done.
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AN ACCURSED RACE ***
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+<div style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of An Accursed Race, by Elizabeth Gaskell</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
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+country where you are located before using this eBook.
+</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: An Accursed Race</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Elizabeth Gaskell</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: March, 2001 [eBook #2531]<br />
+[Most recently updated: December 22, 2021]</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Character set encoding: UTF-8</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Produced by: David Price, Jennifer Lee, Alev Akman and Andy Wallace</div>
+<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AN ACCURSED RACE ***</div>
+
+<h1>AN ACCURSED RACE</h1>
+
+<h2 class="no-break">by Elizabeth Gaskell</h2>
+
+<hr />
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p>
+We have our prejudices in England. Or, if that assertion offends any of my
+readers, I will modify it: we have had our prejudices in England. We have
+tortured Jews; we have burnt Catholics and Protestants, to say nothing of a few
+witches and wizards. We have satirized Puritans, and we have dressed-up Guys.
+But, after all, I do not think we have been so bad as our Continental friends.
+To be sure, our insular position has kept us free, to a certain degree, from
+the inroads of alien races; who, driven from one land of refuge, steal into
+another equally unwilling to receive them; and where, for long centuries, their
+presence is barely endured, and no pains is taken to conceal the repugnance
+which the natives of &ldquo;pure blood&rdquo; experience towards them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There yet remains a remnant of the miserable people called Cagots in the
+valleys of the Pyrenees; in the Landes near Bourdeaux; and, stretching up on
+the west side of France, their numbers become larger in Lower Brittany. Even
+now, the origin of these families is a word of shame to them among their
+neighbours; although they are protected by the law, which confirmed them in the
+equal rights of citizens about the end of the last century. Before then they
+had lived, for hundreds of years, isolated from all those who boasted of pure
+blood, and they had been, all this time, oppressed by cruel local edicts. They
+were truly what they were popularly called, The Accursed Race.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All distinct traces of their origin are lost. Even at the close of that period
+which we call the Middle Ages, this was a problem which no one could solve; and
+as the traces, which even then were faint and uncertain, have vanished away one
+by one, it is a complete mystery at the present day. Why they were accursed in
+the first instance, why isolated from their kind, no one knows. From the
+earliest accounts of their state that are yet remaining to us, it seems that
+the names which they gave each other were ignored by the population they lived
+amongst, who spoke of them as Crestiaa, or Cagots, just as we speak of animals
+by their generic names. Their houses or huts were always placed at some
+distance out of the villages of the country-folk, who unwillingly called in the
+services of the Cagots as carpenters, or tilers, or slaters&mdash;trades which
+seemed appropriated by this unfortunate race&mdash;who were forbidden to occupy
+land, or to bear arms, the usual occupations of those times. They had some
+small right of pasturage on the common lands, and in the forests: but the
+number of their cattle and live-stock was strictly limited by the earliest laws
+relating to the Cagots. They were forbidden by one act to have more than twenty
+sheep, a pig, a ram, and six geese. The pig was to be fattened and killed for
+winter food; the fleece of the sheep was to clothe them; but if the said sheep
+had lambs, they were forbidden to eat them. Their only privilege arising from
+this increase was, that they might choose out the strongest and finest in
+preference to keeping the old sheep. At Martinmas the authorities of the
+commune came round, and counted over the stock of each Cagot. If he had more
+than his appointed number, they were forfeited; half went to the commune, half
+to the baillie, or chief magistrate of the commune. The poor beasts were
+limited as to the amount of common which they might stray over in search of
+grass. While the cattle of the inhabitants of the commune might wander hither
+and thither in search of the sweetest herbage, the deepest shade, or the
+coolest pool in which to stand on the hot days, and lazily switch their dappled
+sides, the Cagot sheep and pig had to learn imaginary bounds, beyond which if
+they strayed, any one might snap them up, and kill them, reserving a part of
+the flesh for his own use, but graciously restoring the inferior parts to their
+original owner. Any damage done by the sheep was, however, fairly appraised,
+and the Cagot paid no more for it than any other man would have done.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Did a Cagot leave his poor cabin, and venture into the towns, even to render
+services required of him in the way of his trade, he was bidden, by all the
+municipal laws, to stand by and remember his rude old state. In all the towns
+and villages the large districts extending on both sides of the
+Pyrenees&mdash;in all that part of Spain&mdash;they were forbidden to buy or
+sell anything eatable, to walk in the middle (esteemed the better) part of the
+streets, to come within the gates before sunrise, or to be found after sunset
+within the walls of the town. But still, as the Cagots were good-looking men,
+and (although they bore certain natural marks of their caste, of which I shall
+speak by-and-by) were not easily distinguished by casual passers-by from other
+men, they were compelled to wear some distinctive peculiarity which should
+arrest the eye; and, in the greater number of towns, it was decreed that the
+outward sign of a Cagot should be a piece of red cloth sewed conspicuously on
+the front of his dress. In other towns, the mark of Cagoterie was the foot of a
+duck or a goose hung over their left shoulder, so as to be seen by any one
+meeting them. After a time, the more convenient badge of a piece of yellow
+cloth cut out in the shape of a duck&rsquo;s foot, was adopted. If any Cagot
+was found in any town or village without his badge, he had to pay a fine of
+five sous, and to lose his dress. He was expected to shrink away from any
+passer-by, for fear that their clothes should touch each other; or else to
+stand still in some corner or by-place. If the Cagots were thirsty during the
+days which they passed in those towns where their presence was barely suffered,
+they had no means of quenching their thirst, for they were forbidden to enter
+into the little cabarets or taverns. Even the water gushing out of the common
+fountain was prohibited to them. Far away, in their own squalid village, there
+was the Cagot fountain, and they were not allowed to drink of any other water.
+A Cagot woman having to make purchases in the town, was liable to be flogged
+out of it if she went to buy anything except on a Monday&mdash;a day on which
+all other people who could, kept their houses for fear of coming in contact
+with the accursed race.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the Pays Basque, the prejudices&mdash;and for some time the laws&mdash;ran
+stronger against them than any which I have hitherto mentioned. The Basque
+Cagot was not allowed to possess sheep. He might keep a pig for provision, but
+his pig had no right of pasturage. He might cut and carry grass for the ass,
+which was the only other animal he was permitted to own; and this ass was
+permitted, because its existence was rather an advantage to the oppressor, who
+constantly availed himself of the Cagot&rsquo;s mechanical skill, and was glad
+to have him and his tools easily conveyed from one place to another.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The race was repulsed by the State. Under the small local governments they
+could hold no post whatsoever. And they were barely tolerated by the Church,
+although they were good Catholics, and zealous frequenters of the mass. They
+might only enter the churches by a small door set apart for them, through which
+no one of the pure race ever passed. This door was low, so as to compel them to
+make an obeisance. It was occasionally surrounded by sculpture, which
+invariably represented an oak-branch with a dove above it. When they were once
+in, they might not go to the holy water used by others. They had a bénitier of
+their own; nor were they allowed to share in the consecrated bread when that
+was handed round to the believers of the pure race. The Cagots stood afar off,
+near the door. There were certain boundaries&mdash;imaginary lines on the nave
+and in the aisles which they might not pass. In one or two of the more tolerant
+of the Pyrenean villages, the blessed bread was offered to the Cagots, the
+priest standing on one side of the boundary, and giving the pieces of bread on
+a long wooden fork to each person successively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the Cagot died, he was interred apart, in a plot burying-ground on the
+north side of the cemetery. Under such laws and prescriptions as I have
+described, it is no wonder that he was generally too poor to have much property
+for his children to inherit; but certain descriptions of it were forfeited to
+the commune. The only possession which all who were not of his own race refused
+to touch, was his furniture. That was tainted, infectious, unclean&mdash;fit
+for none but Cagots.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When such were, for at least three centuries, the prevalent usages and opinions
+with regard to this oppressed race, it is not surprising that we read of
+occasional outbursts of ferocious violence on their part. In the
+Basses-Pyrenées, for instance it is only about a hundred years since, that the
+Cagots of Rehouilhes rose up against the inhabitants of the neighbouring town
+of Lourdes, and got the better of them, by their magical powers as it is said.
+The people of Lourdes were conquered and slain, and their ghastly, bloody heads
+served the triumphant Cagots for balls to play at ninepins with! The local
+parliaments had begun, by this time, to perceive how oppressive was the ban of
+public opinion under which the Cagots lay, and were not inclined to enforce too
+severe a punishment. Accordingly, the decree of the parliament of Toulouse
+condemned only the leading Cagots concerned in this affray to be put to death,
+and that henceforward and for ever no Cagot was to be permitted to enter the
+town of Lourdes by any gate but that called Capdet-pourtet: they were only to
+be allowed to walk under the rain-gutters, and neither to sit, eat, nor drink
+in the town. If they failed in observing any of these rules, the parliament
+decreed, in the spirit of Shylock, that the disobedient Cagots should have two
+strips of flesh, weighing never more than two ounces a-piece, cut out from each
+side of their spines.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries it was considered no more
+a crime to kill a Cagot than to destroy obnoxious vermin. A &ldquo;nest of
+Cagots,&rdquo; as the old accounts phrase it, had assembled in a deserted
+castle of Mauvezin, about the year sixteen hundred; and, certainly, they made
+themselves not very agreeable neighbours, as they seemed to enjoy their
+reputation of magicians; and, by some acoustic secrets which were known to
+them, all sorts of moanings and groanings were heard in the neighbouring
+forests, very much to the alarm of the good people of the pure race; who could
+not cut off a withered branch for firewood, but some unearthly sound seemed to
+fill the air, nor drink water which was not poisoned, because the Cagots would
+persist in filling their pitchers at the same running stream. Added to these
+grievances, the various pilferings perpetually going on in the neighbourhood
+made the inhabitants of the adjacent towns and hamlets believe that they had a
+very sufficient cause for wishing to murder all the Cagots in the Ch&acirc;teau
+de Mauvezin. But it was surrounded by a moat, and only accessible by a
+drawbridge; besides which, the Cagots were fierce and vigilant. Some one,
+however, proposed to get into their confidence; and for this purpose he
+pretended to fall ill close to their path, so that on returning to their
+stronghold they perceived him, and took him in, restored him to health, and
+made a friend of him. One day, when they were all playing at ninepins in the
+woods, their treacherous friend left the party on pretence of being thirsty,
+and went back into the castle, drawing up the bridge after he had passed over
+it, and so cutting off their means of escape into safety. Them, going up to the
+highest part of the castle, he blew a horn, and the pure race, who were lying
+in wait on the watch for some such signal, fell upon the Cagots at their games,
+and slew them all. For this murder I find no punishment decreed in the
+parliament of Toulouse, or elsewhere.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As any intermarriage with the pure race was strictly forbidden, and as there
+were books kept in every commune in which the names and habitations of the
+reputed Cagots were written, these unfortunate people had no hope of ever
+becoming blended with the rest of the population. Did a Cagot marriage take
+place, the couple were serenaded with satirical songs. They also had minstrels,
+and many of their romances are still current in Brittany; but they did not
+attempt to make any reprisals of satire or abuse. Their disposition was
+amiable, and their intelligence great. Indeed, it required both these
+qualities, and their great love of mechanical labour, to make their lives
+tolerable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At last, they began to petition that they might receive some protection from
+the laws; and, towards the end of the seventeenth century, the judicial power
+took their side. But they gained little by this. Law could not prevail against
+custom: and, in the ten or twenty years just preceding the first French
+revolution, the prejudice in France against the Cagots amounted to fierce and
+positive abhorrence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Cagots of Navarre complained to
+the Pope, that they were excluded from the fellowship of men, and accursed by
+the Church, because their ancestors had given help to a certain Count Raymond
+of Toulouse in his revolt against the Holy See. They entreated his holiness not
+to visit upon them the sins of their fathers. The Pope issued a bull on the
+thirteenth of May, fifteen hundred and fifteen&mdash;ordering them to be
+well-treated and to be admitted to the same privileges as other men. He charged
+Don Juan de Santa Maria of Pampeluna to see to the execution of this bull. But
+Don Juan was slow to help, and the poor Spanish Cagots grew impatient, and
+resolved to try the secular power. They accordingly applied to the Cortes of
+Navarre, and were opposed on a variety of grounds. First, it was stated that
+their ancestors had had &ldquo;nothing to do with Raymond Count of Toulouse, or
+with any such knightly personage; that they were in fact descendants of Gehazi,
+servant of Elisha (second book of Kings, fifth chapter, twenty-seventh verse),
+who had been accursed by his master for his fraud upon Naaman, and doomed, he
+and his descendants, to be lepers for evermore. Name, Cagots or Gahets; Gahets,
+Gehazites. What can be more clear? And if that is not enough, and you tell us
+that the Cagots are not lepers now; we reply that there are two kinds of
+leprosy, one perceptible and the other imperceptible, even to the person
+suffering from it. Besides, it is the country talk, that where the Cagot
+treads, the grass withers, proving the unnatural heat of his body. Many
+credible and trustworthy witnesses will also tell you that, if a Cagot holds a
+freshly-gathered apple in his hand, it will shrivel and wither up in an
+hour&rsquo;s time as much as if it had been kept for a whole winter in a dry
+room. They are born with tails; although the parents are cunning enough to
+pinch them off immediately. Do you doubt this? If it is not true, why do the
+children of the pure race delight in sewing on sheep&rsquo;s tails to the dress
+of any Cagot who is so absorbed in his work as not to perceive them? And their
+bodily smell is so horrible and detestable that it shows that they must be
+heretics of some vile and pernicious description, for do we not read of the
+incense of good workers, and the fragrance of holiness?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such were literally the arguments by which the Cagots were thrown back into a
+worse position than ever, as far as regarded their rights as citizens. The Pope
+insisted that they should receive all their ecclesiastical privileges. The
+Spanish priests said nothing; but tacitly refused to allow the Cagots to mingle
+with the rest of the faithful, either dead or alive. The accursed race obtained
+laws in their favour from the Emperor Charles the Fifth; which, however, there
+was no one to carry into effect. As a sort of revenge for their want of
+submission, and for their impertinence in daring to complain, their tools were
+all taken away from them by the local authorities: an old man and all his
+family died of starvation, being no longer allowed to fish.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They could not emigrate. Even to remove their poor mud habitations, from one
+spot to another, excited anger and suspicion. To be sure, in sixteen hundred
+and ninety-five, the Spanish government ordered the alcaldes to search out all
+the Cagots, and to expel them before two months had expired, under pain of
+having fifty ducats to pay for every Cagot remaining in Spain at the expiration
+of that time. The inhabitants of the villages rose up and flogged out any of
+the miserable race who might be in their neighbourhood; but the French were on
+their guard against this enforced irruption, and refused to permit them to
+enter France. Numbers were hunted up into the inhospitable Pyrenees, and there
+died of starvation, or became a prey to wild beasts. They were obliged to wear
+both gloves and shoes when they were thus put to flight, otherwise the stones
+and herbage they trod upon and the balustrades of the bridges that they handled
+in crossing, would, according to popular belief, have become poisonous.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And all this time, there was nothing remarkable or disgusting in the outward
+appearance of this unfortunate people. There was nothing about them to
+countenance the idea of their being lepers&mdash;the most natural mode of
+accounting for the abhorrence in which they were held. They were repeatedly
+examined by learned doctors, whose experiments, although singular and rude,
+appear to have been made in a spirit of humanity. For instance, the surgeons of
+the king of Navarre, in sixteen hundred, bled twenty-two Cagots, in order to
+examine and analyze their blood. They were young and healthy people of both
+sexes; and the doctors seem to have expected that they should have been able to
+extract some new kind of salt from their blood which might account for the
+wonderful heat of their bodies. But their blood was just like that of other
+people. Some of these medical men have left us a description of the general
+appearance of this unfortunate race, at a time when they were more numerous and
+less intermixed than they are now. The families existing in the south and west
+of France, who are reputed to be of Cagot descent at this day, are, like their
+ancestors, tall, largely made, and powerful in frame; fair and ruddy in
+complexion, with gray-blue eyes, in which some observers see a pensive
+heaviness of look. Their lips are thick, but well-formed. Some of the reports
+name their sad expression of countenance with surprise and
+suspicion&mdash;&ldquo;They are not gay, like other folk.&rdquo; The wonder
+would be if they were. Dr. Guyon, the medical man of the last century who has
+left the clearest report on the health of the Cagots, speaks of the vigorous
+old age they attain to. In one family alone, he found a man of seventy-four
+years of age; a woman as old, gathering cherries; and another woman, aged
+eighty-three, was lying on the grass, having her hair combed by her
+great-grandchildren. Dr. Guyon and other surgeons examined into the subject of
+the horribly infectious smell which the Cagots were said to leave behind them,
+and upon everything they touched; but they could perceive nothing unusual on
+this head. They also examined their ears, which according to common belief (a
+belief existing to this day), were differently shaped from those of other
+people; being round and gristly, without the lobe of flesh into which the
+ear-ring is inserted. They decided that most of the Cagots whom they examined
+had the ears of this round shape; but they gravely added, that they saw no
+reason why this should exclude them from the good-will of men, and from the
+power of holding office in Church and State. They recorded the fact, that the
+children of the towns ran baaing after any Cagot who had been compelled to come
+into the streets to make purchases, in allusion to this peculiarity of the
+shape of the ear, which bore some resemblance to the ears of the sheep as they
+are cut by the shepherds in this district. Dr. Guyon names the case of a
+beautiful Cagot girl, who sang most sweetly, and prayed to be allowed to sing
+canticles in the organ-loft. The organist, more musician than bigot, allowed
+her to come, but the indignant congregation, finding out whence proceeded that
+clear, fresh voice, rushed up to the organ-loft, and chased the girl out,
+bidding her &ldquo;remember her ears,&rdquo; and not commit the sacrilege of
+singing praises to God along with the pure race.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But this medical report of Dr. Guyon&rsquo;s&mdash;bringing facts and arguments
+to confirm his opinion, that there was no physical reason why the Cagots should
+not be received on terms of social equality by the rest of the world&mdash;did
+no more for his clients than the legal decrees promulgated two centuries before
+had done. The French proved the truth of the saying in Hudibras&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+He that&rsquo;s convinced against his will<br />
+Is of the same opinion still.
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+And, indeed, the being convinced by Dr. Guyon that they ought to receive Cagots
+as fellow-creatures, only made them more rabid in declaring that they would
+not. One or two little occurrences which are recorded, show that the bitterness
+of the repugnance to the Cagots was in full force at the time just preceding
+the first French revolution. There was a M. d&rsquo;Abedos, the curate of
+Lourdes, and brother to the seigneur of the neighbouring castle, who was living
+in seventeen hundred and eighty; he was well-educated for the time, a travelled
+man, and sensible and moderate in all respects but that of his abhorrence of
+the Cagots: he would insult them from the very altar, calling out to them, as
+they stood afar off, &ldquo;Oh! ye Cagots, damned for evermore!&rdquo; One day,
+a half-blind Cagot stumbled and touched the censer borne before this Abbé de
+Lourdes. He was immediately turned out of the church, and forbidden ever to
+re-enter it. One does not know how to account for the fact, that the very
+brother of this bigoted abbé, the seigneur of the village, went and married a
+Cagot girl; but so it was, and the abbé brought a legal process against him,
+and had his estates taken from him, solely on account of his marriage, which
+reduced him to the condition of a Cagot, against whom the old law was still in
+force. The descendants of this Seigneur de Lourdes are simple peasants at this
+very day, working on the lands which belonged to their grandfather.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This prejudice against mixed marriages remained prevalent until very lately.
+The tradition of the Cagot descent lingered among the people, long after the
+laws against the accursed race were abolished. A Breton girl, within the last
+few years, having two lovers each of reputed Cagot descent, employed a notary
+to examine their pedigrees, and see which of the two had least Cagot in him;
+and to that one she gave her hand. In Brittany the prejudice seems to have been
+more virulent than anywhere else. M. Emile Souvestre records proofs of the
+hatred borne to them in Brittany so recently as in eighteen hundred and
+thirty-five. Just lately a baker at Hennebon, having married a girl of Cagot
+descent, lost all his custom. The godfather and godmother of a Cagot child
+became Cagots themselves by the Breton laws, unless, indeed, the poor little
+baby died before attaining a certain number of days. They had to eat the
+butchers&rsquo; meat condemned as unhealthy; but, for some unknown reason, they
+were considered to have a right to every cut loaf turned upside down, with its
+cut side towards the door, and might enter any house in which they saw a loaf
+in this position, and carry it away with them. About thirty years ago, there
+was the skeleton of a hand hanging up as an offering in a Breton church near
+Quimperle, and the tradition was, that it was the hand of a rich Cagot who had
+dared to take holy water out of the usual bénitier, some time at the beginning
+of the reign of Louis the Sixteenth; which an old soldier witnessing, he lay in
+wait, and the next time the offender approached the bénitier he cut off his
+hand, and hung it up, dripping with blood, as an offering to the patron saint
+of the church. The poor Cagots in Brittany petitioned against their opprobrious
+name, and begged to be distinguished by the appelation of Malandrins. To
+English ears one is much the same as the other, as neither conveys any meaning;
+but, to this day, the descendants of the Cagots do not like to have this name
+applied to them, preferring that of Malandrin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The French Cagots tried to destroy all the records of their pariah descent, in
+the commotions of seventeen hundred and eighty-nine; but if writings have
+disappeared, the tradition yet remains, and points out such and such a family
+as Cagot, or Malandrin, or Oiselier, according to the old terms of abhorrence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There are various ways in which learned men have attempted to account for the
+universal repugnance in which this well-made, powerful race are held. Some say
+that the antipathy to them took its rise in the days when leprosy was a
+dreadfully prevalent disease; and that the Cagots are more liable than any
+other men to a kind of skin disease, not precisely leprosy, but resembling it
+in some of its symptoms; such as dead whiteness of complexion, and swellings of
+the face and extremities. There was also some resemblance to the ancient Jewish
+custom in respect to lepers, in the habit of the people; who on meeting a Cagot
+called out, &ldquo;Cagote? Cagote?&rdquo; to which they were bound to reply,
+&ldquo;Perlute! perlute!&rdquo; Leprosy is not properly an infectious
+complaint, in spite of the horror in which the Cagot furniture, and the cloth
+woven by them, are held in some places; the disorder is hereditary, and hence
+(say this body of wise men, who have troubled themselves to account for the
+origin of Cagoterie) the reasonableness and the justice of preventing any mixed
+marriages, by which this terrible tendency to leprous complaints might be
+spread far and wide. Another authority says, that though the Cagots are
+fine-looking men, hard-working, and good mechanics, yet they bear in their
+faces, and show in their actions, reasons for the detestation in which they are
+held: their glance, if you meet it, is the jettatura, or evil-eye, and they are
+spiteful, and cruel, and deceitful above all other men. All these qualities
+they derive from their ancestor Gehazi, the servant of Elisha, together with
+their tendency to leprosy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again, it is said that they are descended from the Arian Goths who were
+permitted to live in certain places in Guienne and Languedoc, after their
+defeat by King Clovis, on condition that they abjured their heresy, and kept
+themselves separate from all other men for ever. The principal reason alleged
+in support of this supposition of their Gothic descent, is the specious one of
+derivation,&mdash;Chiens Gots, Cans Gets, Cagots, equivalent to Dogs of Goths.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again, they were thought to be Saracens, coming from Syria. In confirmation of
+this idea, was the belief that all Cagots were possessed by a horrible smell.
+The Lombards, also, were an unfragrant race, or so reputed among the Italians:
+witness Pope Stephen&rsquo;s letter to Charlemagne, dissuading him from
+marrying Bertha, daughter of Didier, King of Lombardy. The Lombards boasted of
+Eastern descent, and were noisome. The Cagots were noisome, and therefore must
+be of Eastern descent. What could be clearer? In addition, there was the proof
+to be derived from the name Cagot, which those maintaining the opinion of their
+Saracen descent held to be Chiens, or Chasseurs des Gots, because the Saracens
+chased the Goths out of Spain. Moreover, the Saracens were originally
+Mahometans, and as such obliged to bathe seven times a-day: whence the badge of
+the duck&rsquo;s foot. A duck was a water-bird: Mahometans bathed in the water.
+Proof upon proof!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In Brittany the common idea was, they were of Jewish descent. Their unpleasant
+smell was again pressed into service. The Jews, it was well known, had this
+physical infirmity, which might be cured either by bathing in a certain
+fountain in Egypt&mdash;which was a long way from Brittany&mdash;or by
+anointing themselves with the blood of a Christian child. Blood gushed out of
+the body of every Cagot on Good Friday. No wonder, if they were of Jewish
+descent. It was the only way of accounting for so portentous a fact. Again; the
+Cagots were capital carpenters, which gave the Bretons every reason to believe
+that their ancestors were the very Jews who made the cross. When first the tide
+of emigration set from Brittany to America, the oppressed Cagots crowded to the
+ports, seeking to go to some new country, where their race might be unknown.
+Here was another proof of their descent from Abraham and his nomadic people:
+and, the forty years&rsquo; wandering in the wilderness and the Wandering Jew
+himself, were pressed into the service to prove that the Cagots derived their
+restlessness and love of change from their ancestors, the Jews. The Jews, also,
+practised arts-magic, and the Cagots sold bags of wind to the Breton sailors,
+enchanted maidens to love them&mdash;maidens who never would have cared for
+them, unless they had been previously enchanted&mdash;made hollow rocks and
+trees give out strange and unearthly noises, and sold the magical herb called
+<i>bon-succès</i>. It is true enough that, in all the early acts of the
+fourteenth century, the same laws apply to Jews as to Cagots, and the
+appellations seem used indiscriminately; but their fair complexions, their
+remarkable devotion to all the ceremonies of the Catholic Church, and many
+other circumstances, conspire to forbid our believing them to be of Hebrew
+descent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another very plausible idea is, that they are the descendants of unfortunate
+individuals afflicted with goitres, which is, even to this day, not an uncommon
+disorder in the gorges and valleys of the Pyrenees. Some have even derived the
+word goitre from Got, or Goth; but their name, Crestia, is not unlike Cretin,
+and the same symptoms of idiotism were not unusual among the Cagots; although
+sometimes, if old tradition is to be credited, their malady of the brain took
+rather the form of violent delirium, which attacked them at new and full moons.
+Then the workmen laid down their tools, and rushed off from their labour to
+play mad pranks up and down the country. Perpetual motion was required to
+alleviate the agony of fury that seized upon the Cagots at such times. In this
+desire for rapid movement, the attack resembled the Neapolitan tarantella;
+while in the mad deeds they performed during such attacks, they were not unlike
+the northern Berserker. In Béarn especially, those suffering from this madness
+were dreaded by the pure race; the Béarnais, going to cut their wooden clogs in
+the great forests that lay around the base of the Pyrenées, feared above all
+things to go too near the periods when the Cagoutelle seized on the oppressed
+and accursed people; from whom it was then the oppressors&rsquo; turn to fly. A
+man was living within the memory of some, who married a Cagot wife; he used to
+beat her right soundly when he saw the first symptoms of the Cagoutelle, and,
+having reduced her to a wholesome state of exhaustion and insensibility, he
+locked her up until the moon had altered her shape in the heavens. If he had
+not taken such decided steps, say the oldest inhabitants, there is no knowing
+what might have happened.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From the thirteenth to the end of the nineteenth century, there are facts
+enough to prove the universal abhorrence in which this unfortunate race was
+held; whether called Cagots, or Gahets in Pyrenean districts, Caqueaux in
+Brittany, or Yaqueros Asturias. The great French revolution brought some good
+out of its fermentation of the people: the more intelligent among them tried to
+overcome the prejudice against the Cagots.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In seventeen hundred and eighteen, there was a famous cause tried at Biarritz
+relating to Cagot rights and privileges. There was a wealthy miller, Etienne
+Arnauld by name, of the race of Gotz, Quagotz, Bisigotz, Astragotz, or Gahetz,
+as his people are described in the legal document. He married an heiress, a
+Gotte (or Cagot) of Biarritz; and the newly-married well-to-do couple saw no
+reason why they should stand near the door in the church, nor why he should not
+hold some civil office in the commune, of which he was the principal
+inhabitant. Accordingly, he petitioned the law that he and his wife might be
+allowed to sit in the gallery of the church, and that he might be relieved from
+his civil disabilities. This wealthy white miller, Etienne Arnauld, pursued his
+rights with some vigour against the Baillie of Labourd, the dignitary of the
+neighbourhood. Whereupon the inhabitants of Biarritz met in the open air, on
+the eighth of May, to the number of one hundred and fifty; approved of the
+conduct of the Baillie in rejecting Arnauld, made a subscription, and gave all
+power to their lawyers to defend the cause of the pure race against Etienne
+Arnauld&mdash;&ldquo;that stranger,&rdquo; who, having married a girl of Cagot
+blood, ought also to be expelled from the holy places. This lawsuit was carried
+through all the local courts, and ended by an appeal to the highest court in
+Paris; where a decision was given against Basque superstitions; and Etienne
+Arnauld was thenceforward entitled to enter the gallery of the church.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of course, the inhabitants of Biarritz were all the more ferocious for having
+been conquered; and, four years later, a carpenter, named Miguel Legaret,
+suspected of Cagot descent, having placed himself in the church among other
+people, was dragged out by the abbé and two of the jurets of the parish.
+Legaret defended himself with a sharp knife at the time, and went to law
+afterwards; the end of which was, that the abbé and his two accomplices were
+condemned to a public confession of penitence, to be uttered while on their
+knees at the church door, just after high-mass. They appealed to the parliament
+of Bourdeaux against this decision, but met with no better success than the
+opponents of the miller Arnauld. Legaret was confirmed in his right of standing
+where he would in the parish church. That a living Cagot had equal rights with
+other men in the town of Biarritz seemed now ceded to them; but a dead Cagot
+was a different thing. The inhabitants of pure blood struggled long and hard to
+be interred apart from the abhorred race. The Cagots were equally persistent in
+claiming to have a common burying-ground. Again the texts of the Old Testament
+were referred to, and the pure blood quoted triumphantly the precedent of
+Uzziah the leper (twenty-sixth chapter of the second book of Chronicles), who
+was buried in the field of the Sepulchres of the Kings, not in the sepulchres
+themselves. The Cagots pleaded that they were healthy and able-bodied; with no
+taint of leprosy near them. They were met by the strong argument so difficult
+to be refuted, which I quoted before. Leprosy was of two kinds, perceptible and
+imperceptible. If the Cagots were suffering from the latter kind, who could
+tell whether they were free from it or not? That decision must be left to the
+judgment of others.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One sturdy Cagot family alone, Belone by name, kept up a lawsuit, claiming the
+privilege of common sepulture, for forty-two years; although the curé of
+Biarritz had to pay one hundred livres for every Cagot not interred in the
+right place. The inhabitants indemnified the curate for all these fines.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+M. de Romagne, Bishop of Tarbes, who died in seventeen hundred and sixty-eight,
+was the first to allow a Cagot to fill any office in the Church. To be sure,
+some were so spiritless as to reject office when it was offered to them,
+because, by so claiming their equality, they had to pay the same taxes as other
+men, instead of the Rancale or pole-tax levied on the Cagots; the collector of
+which had also a right to claim a piece of bread of a certain size for his dog
+at every Cagot dwelling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Even in the present century, it has been necessary in some churches for the
+archdeacon of the district, followed by all his clergy, to pass out of the
+small door previously appropriated to the Cagots, in order to mitigate the
+superstition which, even so lately, made the people refuse to mingle with them
+in the house of God. A Cagot once played the congregation at Larroque a trick
+suggested by what I have just named. He slily locked the great parish-door of
+the church, while the greater part of the inhabitants were assisting at mass
+inside; put gravel into the lock itself, so as to prevent the use of any
+duplicate key,&mdash;and had the pleasure of seeing the proud pure-blooded
+people file out with bended head, through the small low door used by the
+abhorred Cagots.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We are naturally shocked at discovering, from facts such as these, the
+causeless rancour with which innocent and industrious people were so recently
+persecuted. The moral of the history of the accursed race may, perhaps, be best
+conveyed in the words of an epitaph on Mrs. Mary Hand, who lies buried in the
+churchyard of Stratford-on-Avon:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+What faults you saw in me,<br />
+    Pray strive to shun;<br />
+And look at home; there&rsquo;s<br />
+    Something to be done.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:4em'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AN ACCURSED RACE ***</div>
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, An Accursed Race, by Elizabeth Gaskell
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: An Accursed Race
+
+
+Author: Elizabeth Gaskell
+
+Release Date: May 17, 2005  [eBook #2531]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AN ACCURSED RACE***
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1896 Smith, Elder and Co. "From Lizzie Leigh and
+Other Tales" edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk.  Proofed
+by Jennifer Lee, Alev Akman and Andy Wallace.
+
+
+
+
+
+AN ACCURSED RACE
+Elizabeth Gaskell
+
+
+We have our prejudices in England.  Or, if that assertion offends any of
+my readers, I will modify it: we have had our prejudices in England.  We
+have tortured Jews; we have burnt Catholics and Protestants, to say
+nothing of a few witches and wizards.  We have satirized Puritans, and we
+have dressed-up Guys.  But, after all, I do not think we have been so bad
+as our Continental friends.  To be sure, our insular position has kept us
+free, to a certain degree, from the inroads of alien races; who, driven
+from one land of refuge, steal into another equally unwilling to receive
+them; and where, for long centuries, their presence is barely endured,
+and no pains is taken to conceal the repugnance which the natives of
+"pure blood" experience towards them.
+
+There yet remains a remnant of the miserable people called Cagots in the
+valleys of the Pyrenees; in the Landes near Bourdeaux; and, stretching up
+on the west side of France, their numbers become larger in Lower
+Brittany.  Even now, the origin of these families is a word of shame to
+them among their neighbours; although they are protected by the law,
+which confirmed them in the equal rights of citizens about the end of the
+last century.  Before then they had lived, for hundreds of years,
+isolated from all those who boasted of pure blood, and they had been, all
+this time, oppressed by cruel local edicts.  They were truly what they
+were popularly called, The Accursed Race.
+
+All distinct traces of their origin are lost.  Even at the close of that
+period which we call the Middle Ages, this was a problem which no one
+could solve; and as the traces, which even then were faint and uncertain,
+have vanished away one by one, it is a complete mystery at the present
+day.  Why they were accursed in the first instance, why isolated from
+their kind, no one knows.  From the earliest accounts of their state that
+are yet remaining to us, it seems that the names which they gave each
+other were ignored by the population they lived amongst, who spoke of
+them as Crestiaa, or Cagots, just as we speak of animals by their generic
+names.  Their houses or huts were always placed at some distance out of
+the villages of the country-folk, who unwillingly called in the services
+of the Cagots as carpenters, or tilers, or slaters--trades which seemed
+appropriated by this unfortunate race--who were forbidden to occupy land,
+or to bear arms, the usual occupations of those times.  They had some
+small right of pasturage on the common lands, and in the forests: but the
+number of their cattle and live-stock was strictly limited by the
+earliest laws relating to the Cagots.  They were forbidden by one act to
+have more than twenty sheep, a pig, a ram, and six geese.  The pig was to
+be fattened and killed for winter food; the fleece of the sheep was to
+clothe them; but if the said sheep had lambs, they were forbidden to eat
+them.  Their only privilege arising from this increase was, that they
+might choose out the strongest and finest in preference to keeping the
+old sheep.  At Martinmas the authorities of the commune came round, and
+counted over the stock of each Cagot.  If he had more than his appointed
+number, they were forfeited; half went to the commune, half to the
+baillie, or chief magistrate of the commune.  The poor beasts were
+limited as to the amount of common which they might stray over in search
+of grass.  While the cattle of the inhabitants of the commune might
+wander hither and thither in search of the sweetest herbage, the deepest
+shade, or the coolest pool in which to stand on the hot days, and lazily
+switch their dappled sides, the Cagot sheep and pig had to learn
+imaginary bounds, beyond which if they strayed, any one might snap them
+up, and kill them, reserving a part of the flesh for his own use, but
+graciously restoring the inferior parts to their original owner.  Any
+damage done by the sheep was, however, fairly appraised, and the Cagot
+paid no more for it than any other man would have done.
+
+Did a Cagot leave his poor cabin, and venture into the towns, even to
+render services required of him in the way of his trade, he was bidden, by all
+the municipal laws, to stand by and remember his rude old state.  In all
+the towns and villages the large districts extending on both sides of the
+Pyrenees--in all that part of Spain--they were forbidden to buy or sell
+anything eatable, to walk in the middle (esteemed the better) part of the
+streets, to come within the gates before sunrise, or to be found after
+sunset within the walls of the town.  But still, as the Cagots were good-
+looking men, and (although they bore certain natural marks of their
+caste, of which I shall speak by-and-by) were not easily distinguished by
+casual passers-by from other men, they were compelled to wear some
+distinctive peculiarity which should arrest the eye; and, in the greater
+number of towns, it was decreed that the outward sign of a Cagot should
+be a piece of red cloth sewed conspicuously on the front of his dress.  In
+other towns, the mark of Cagoterie was the foot of a duck or a goose hung
+over their left shoulder, so as to be seen by any one meeting them.  After
+a time, the more convenient badge of a piece of yellow cloth cut out in
+the shape of a duck's foot, was adopted.  If any Cagot was found in any
+town or village without his badge, he had to pay a fine of five sous, and
+to lose his dress.  He was expected to shrink away from any passer-by,
+for fear that their clothes should touch each other; or else to stand
+still in some corner or by-place.  If the Cagots were thirsty during the
+days which they passed in those towns where their presence was barely
+suffered, they had no means of quenching their thirst, for they were
+forbidden to enter into the little cabarets or taverns.  Even the water
+gushing out of the common fountain was prohibited to them.  Far away, in
+their own squalid village, there was the Cagot fountain, and they were
+not allowed to drink of any other water.  A Cagot woman having to make
+purchases in the town, was liable to be flogged out of it if she went to
+buy anything except on a Monday--a day on which all other people who
+could, kept their houses for fear of coming in contact with the accursed
+race.
+
+In the Pays Basque, the prejudices--and for some time the laws--ran
+stronger against them than any which I have hitherto mentioned.  The
+Basque Cagot was not allowed to possess sheep.  He might keep a pig for
+provision, but his pig had no right of pasturage.  He might cut and carry
+grass for the ass, which was the only other animal he was permitted to
+own; and this ass was permitted, because its existence was rather an
+advantage to the oppressor, who constantly availed himself of the Cagot's
+mechanical skill, and was glad to have him and his tools easily conveyed
+from one place to another.
+
+The race was repulsed by the State.  Under the small local governments
+they could hold no post whatsoever.  And they were barely tolerated by
+the Church, although they were good Catholics, and zealous frequenters of
+the mass.  They might only enter the churches by a small door set apart
+for them, through which no one of the pure race ever passed.  This door
+was low, so as to compel them to make an obeisance.  It was occasionally
+surrounded by sculpture, which invariably represented an oak-branch with
+a dove above it.  When they were once in, they might not go to the holy
+water used by others.  They had a benitier of their own; nor were they
+allowed to share in the consecrated bread when that was handed round to
+the believers of the pure race.  The Cagots stood afar off, near the
+door.  There were certain boundaries--imaginary lines on the nave and in
+the aisles which they might not pass.  In one or two of the more tolerant
+of the Pyrenean villages, the blessed bread was offered to the Cagots,
+the priest standing on one side of the boundary, and giving the pieces of
+bread on a long wooden fork to each person successively.
+
+When the Cagot died, he was interred apart, in a plot burying-ground on
+the north side of the cemetery.  Under such laws and prescriptions as I
+have described, it is no wonder that he was generally too poor to have
+much property for his children to inherit; but certain descriptions of it
+were forfeited to the commune.  The only possession which all who were
+not of his own race refused to touch, was his furniture.  That was
+tainted, infectious, unclean--fit for none but Cagots.
+
+When such were, for at least three centuries, the prevalent usages and
+opinions with regard to this oppressed race, it is not surprising that we
+read of occasional outbursts of ferocious violence on their part.  In the
+Basses-Pyrenees, for instance it is only about a hundred years since,
+that the Cagots of Rehouilhes rose up against the inhabitants of the
+neighbouring town of Lourdes, and got the better of them, by their
+magical powers as it is said.  The people of Lourdes were conquered and
+slain, and their ghastly, bloody heads served the triumphant Cagots for
+balls to play at ninepins with!  The local parliaments had begun, by this
+time, to perceive how oppressive was the ban of public opinion under
+which the Cagots lay, and were not inclined to enforce too severe a
+punishment.  Accordingly, the decree of the parliament of Toulouse
+condemned only the leading Cagots concerned in this affray to be put to
+death, and that henceforward and for ever no Cagot was to be permitted to
+enter the town of Lourdes by any gate but that called Capdet-pourtet:
+they were only to be allowed to walk under the rain-gutters, and neither
+to sit, eat, nor drink in the town.  If they failed in observing any of
+these rules, the parliament decreed, in the spirit of Shylock, that the
+disobedient Cagots should have two strips of flesh, weighing never more
+than two ounces a-piece, cut out from each side of their spines.
+
+In the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries it was considered
+no more a crime to kill a Cagot than to destroy obnoxious vermin.  A
+"nest of Cagots," as the old accounts phrase it, had assembled in a
+deserted castle of Mauvezin, about the year sixteen hundred; and,
+certainly, they made themselves not very agreeable neighbours, as they
+seemed to enjoy their reputation of magicians; and, by some acoustic
+secrets which were known to them, all sorts of moanings and groanings
+were heard in the neighbouring forests, very much to the alarm of the
+good people of the pure race; who could not cut off a withered branch for
+firewood, but some unearthly sound seemed to fill the air, nor drink
+water which was not poisoned, because the Cagots would persist in filling
+their pitchers at the same running stream.  Added to these grievances,
+the various pilferings perpetually going on in the neighbourhood made the
+inhabitants of the adjacent towns and hamlets believe that they had a
+very sufficient cause for wishing to murder all the Cagots in the Chateau
+de Mauvezin.  But it was surrounded by a moat, and only accessible by a
+drawbridge; besides which, the Cagots were fierce and vigilant.  Some
+one, however, proposed to get into their confidence; and for this purpose
+he pretended to fall ill close to their path, so that on returning to
+their stronghold they perceived him, and took him in, restored him to
+health, and made a friend of him.  One day, when they were all playing at
+ninepins in the woods, their treacherous friend left the party on
+pretence of being thirsty, and went back into the castle, drawing up the
+bridge after he had passed over it, and so cutting off their means of
+escape into safety.  Them, going up to the highest part of the castle, he
+blew a horn, and the pure race, who were lying in wait on the watch for
+some such signal, fell upon the Cagots at their games, and slew them all.
+For this murder I find no punishment decreed in the parliament of
+Toulouse, or elsewhere.
+
+As any intermarriage with the pure race was strictly forbidden, and as
+there were books kept in every commune in which the names and habitations
+of the reputed Cagots were written, these unfortunate people had no hope
+of ever becoming blended with the rest of the population.  Did a Cagot
+marriage take place, the couple were serenaded with satirical songs.  They
+also had minstrels, and many of their romances are still current in
+Brittany; but they did not attempt to make any reprisals of satire or
+abuse.  Their disposition was amiable, and their intelligence great.
+Indeed, it required both these qualities, and their great love of
+mechanical labour, to make their lives tolerable.
+
+At last, they began to petition that they might receive some protection
+from the laws; and, towards the end of the seventeenth century, the
+judicial power took their side.  But they gained little by this.  Law
+could not prevail against custom: and, in the ten or twenty years just
+preceding the first French revolution, the prejudice in France against
+the Cagots amounted to fierce and positive abhorrence.
+
+At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Cagots of Navarre
+complained to the Pope, that they were excluded from the fellowship of
+men, and accursed by the Church, because their ancestors had given help
+to a certain Count Raymond of Toulouse in his revolt against the Holy
+See.  They entreated his holiness not to visit upon them the sins of
+their fathers.  The Pope issued a bull on the thirteenth of May, fifteen
+hundred and fifteen--ordering them to be well-treated and to be admitted
+to the same privileges as other men.  He charged Don Juan de Santa Maria
+of Pampeluna to see to the execution of this bull.  But Don Juan was slow
+to help, and the poor Spanish Cagots grew impatient, and resolved to try
+the secular power.  They accordingly applied to the Cortes of Navarre,
+and were opposed on a variety of grounds.  First, it was stated that
+their ancestors had had "nothing to do with Raymond Count of Toulouse, or
+with any such knightly personage; that they were in fact descendants of
+Gehazi, servant of Elisha (second book of Kings, fifth chapter, twenty-
+seventh verse), who had been accursed by his master for his fraud upon
+Naaman, and doomed, he and his descendants, to be lepers for evermore.
+Name, Cagots or Gahets; Gahets, Gehazites.  What can be more clear?  And
+if that is not enough, and you tell us that the Cagots are not lepers
+now; we reply that there are two kinds of leprosy, one perceptible and
+the other imperceptible, even to the person suffering from it.  Besides,
+it is the country talk, that where the Cagot treads, the grass withers,
+proving the unnatural heat of his body.  Many credible and trustworthy
+witnesses will also tell you that, if a Cagot holds a freshly-gathered
+apple in his hand, it will shrivel and wither up in an hour's time as
+much as if it had been kept for a whole winter in a dry room.  They are
+born with tails; although the parents are cunning enough to pinch them
+off immediately.  Do you doubt this?  If it is not true, why do the
+children of the pure race delight in sewing on sheep's tails to the dress
+of any Cagot who is so absorbed in his work as not to perceive them?  And
+their bodily smell is so horrible and detestable that it shows that they
+must be heretics of some vile and pernicious description, for do we not
+read of the incense of good workers, and the fragrance of holiness?"
+
+Such were literally the arguments by which the Cagots were thrown back
+into a worse position than ever, as far as regarded their rights as
+citizens.  The Pope insisted that they should receive all their
+ecclesiastical privileges.  The Spanish priests said nothing; but tacitly
+refused to allow the Cagots to mingle with the rest of the faithful,
+either dead or alive.  The accursed race obtained laws in their favour
+from the Emperor Charles the Fifth; which, however, there was no one to
+carry into effect.  As a sort of revenge for their want of submission,
+and for their impertinence in daring to complain, their tools were all
+taken away from them by the local authorities: an old man and all his
+family died of starvation, being no longer allowed to fish.
+
+They could not emigrate.  Even to remove their poor mud habitations, from
+one spot to another, excited anger and suspicion.  To be sure, in sixteen
+hundred and ninety-five, the Spanish government ordered the alcaldes to
+search out all the Cagots, and to expel them before two months had
+expired, under pain of having fifty ducats to pay for every Cagot
+remaining in Spain at the expiration of that time.  The inhabitants of
+the villages rose up and flogged out any of the miserable race who might
+be in their neighbourhood; but the French were on their guard against
+this enforced irruption, and refused to permit them to enter France.
+Numbers were hunted up into the inhospitable Pyrenees, and there died of
+starvation, or became a prey to wild beasts.  They were obliged to wear
+both gloves and shoes when they were thus put to flight, otherwise the
+stones and herbage they trod upon and the balustrades of the bridges that
+they handled in crossing, would, according to popular belief, have become
+poisonous.
+
+And all this time, there was nothing remarkable or disgusting in the
+outward appearance of this unfortunate people.  There was nothing about
+them to countenance the idea of their being lepers--the most natural mode
+of accounting for the abhorrence in which they were held.  They were
+repeatedly examined by learned doctors, whose experiments, although
+singular and rude, appear to have been made in a spirit of humanity.  For
+instance, the surgeons of the king of Navarre, in sixteen hundred, bled
+twenty-two Cagots, in order to examine and analyze their blood.  They
+were young and healthy people of both sexes; and the doctors seem to have
+expected that they should have been able to extract some new kind of salt
+from their blood which might account for the wonderful heat of their
+bodies.  But their blood was just like that of other people.  Some of
+these medical men have left us a description of the general appearance of
+this unfortunate race, at a time when they were more numerous and less
+intermixed than they are now.  The families existing in the south and
+west of France, who are reputed to be of Cagot descent at this day, are,
+like their ancestors, tall, largely made, and powerful in frame; fair and
+ruddy in complexion, with gray-blue eyes, in which some observers see a
+pensive heaviness of look.  Their lips are thick, but well-formed.  Some
+of the reports name their sad expression of countenance with surprise and
+suspicion--"They are not gay, like other folk."  The wonder would be if
+they were.  Dr. Guyon, the medical man of the last century who has left
+the clearest report on the health of the Cagots, speaks of the vigorous
+old age they attain to.  In one family alone, he found a man of seventy-
+four years of age; a woman as old, gathering cherries; and another woman,
+aged eighty-three, was lying on the grass, having her hair combed by her
+great-grandchildren.  Dr. Guyon and other surgeons examined into the
+subject of the horribly infectious smell which the Cagots were said to
+leave behind them, and upon everything they touched; but they could
+perceive nothing unusual on this head.  They also examined their ears,
+which according to common belief (a belief existing to this day), were
+differently shaped from those of other people; being round and gristly,
+without the lobe of flesh into which the ear-ring is inserted.  They
+decided that most of the Cagots whom they examined had the ears of this
+round shape; but they gravely added, that they saw no reason why this
+should exclude them from the good-will of men, and from the power of
+holding office in Church and State.  They recorded the fact, that the
+children of the towns ran baaing after any Cagot who had been compelled
+to come into the streets to make purchases, in allusion to this
+peculiarity of the shape of the ear, which bore some resemblance to the
+ears of the sheep as they are cut by the shepherds in this district.  Dr.
+Guyon names the case of a beautiful Cagot girl, who sang most sweetly,
+and prayed to be allowed to sing canticles in the organ-loft.  The
+organist, more musician than bigot, allowed her to come, but the
+indignant congregation, finding out whence proceeded that clear, fresh
+voice, rushed up to the organ-loft, and chased the girl out, bidding her
+"remember her ears," and not commit the sacrilege of singing praises to
+God along with the pure race.
+
+But this medical report of Dr. Guyon's--bringing facts and arguments to
+confirm his opinion, that there was no physical reason why the Cagots
+should not be received on terms of social equality by the rest of the
+world--did no more for his clients than the legal decrees promulgated two
+centuries before had done.  The French proved the truth of the saying in
+Hudibras--
+
+   He that's convinced against his will
+   Is of the same opinion still.
+
+And, indeed, the being convinced by Dr. Guyon that they ought to receive
+Cagots as fellow-creatures, only made them more rabid in declaring that
+they would not.  One or two little occurrences which are recorded, show
+that the bitterness of the repugnance to the Cagots was in full force at
+the time just preceding the first French revolution.  There was a M.
+d'Abedos, the curate of Lourdes, and brother to the seigneur of the
+neighbouring castle, who was living in seventeen hundred and eighty; he
+was well-educated for the time, a travelled man, and sensible and
+moderate in all respects but that of his abhorrence of the Cagots: he
+would insult them from the very altar, calling out to them, as they stood
+afar off, "Oh! ye Cagots, damned for evermore!"  One day, a half-blind
+Cagot stumbled and touched the censer borne before this Abbe de Lourdes.
+He was immediately turned out of the church, and forbidden ever to re-
+enter it.  One does not know how to account for the fact, that the very
+brother of this bigoted abbe, the seigneur of the village, went and
+married a Cagot girl; but so it was, and the abbe brought a legal process
+against him, and had his estates taken from him, solely on account of his
+marriage, which reduced him to the condition of a Cagot, against whom the
+old law was still in force.  The descendants of this Seigneur de Lourdes
+are simple peasants at this very day, working on the lands which belonged
+to their grandfather.
+
+This prejudice against mixed marriages remained prevalent until very
+lately.  The tradition of the Cagot descent lingered among the people,
+long after the laws against the accursed race were abolished.  A Breton
+girl, within the last few years, having two lovers each of reputed Cagot
+descent, employed a notary to examine their pedigrees, and see which of
+the two had least Cagot in him; and to that one she gave her hand.  In
+Brittany the prejudice seems to have been more virulent than anywhere
+else.  M. Emile Souvestre records proofs of the hatred borne to them in
+Brittany so recently as in eighteen hundred and thirty-five.  Just lately
+a baker at Hennebon, having married a girl of Cagot descent, lost all his
+custom.  The godfather and godmother of a Cagot child became Cagots
+themselves by the Breton laws, unless, indeed, the poor little baby died
+before attaining a certain number of days.  They had to eat the butchers'
+meat condemned as unhealthy; but, for some unknown reason, they were
+considered to have a right to every cut loaf turned upside down, with its
+cut side towards the door, and might enter any house in which they saw a
+loaf in this position, and carry it away with them.  About thirty years
+ago, there was the skeleton of a hand hanging up as an offering in a
+Breton church near Quimperle, and the tradition was, that it was the hand
+of a rich Cagot who had dared to take holy water out of the usual
+benitier, some time at the beginning of the reign of Louis the Sixteenth;
+which an old soldier witnessing, he lay in wait, and the next time the
+offender approached the benitier he cut off his hand, and hung it up,
+dripping with blood, as an offering to the patron saint of the church.
+The poor Cagots in Brittany petitioned against their opprobrious name,
+and begged to be distinguished by the appelation of Malandrins.  To
+English ears one is much the same as the other, as neither conveys any
+meaning; but, to this day, the descendants of the Cagots do not like to
+have this name applied to them, preferring that of Malandrin.
+
+The French Cagots tried to destroy all the records of their pariah
+descent, in the commotions of seventeen hundred and eighty-nine; but if
+writings have disappeared, the tradition yet remains, and points out such
+and such a family as Cagot, or Malandrin, or Oiselier, according to the
+old terms of abhorrence.
+
+There are various ways in which learned men have attempted to account for
+the universal repugnance in which this well-made, powerful race are held.
+Some say that the antipathy to them took its rise in the days when
+leprosy was a dreadfully prevalent disease; and that the Cagots are more
+liable than any other men to a kind of skin disease, not precisely
+leprosy, but resembling it in some of its symptoms; such as dead
+whiteness of complexion, and swellings of the face and extremities.  There
+was also some resemblance to the ancient Jewish custom in respect to
+lepers, in the habit of the people; who on meeting a Cagot called out,
+"Cagote? Cagote?" to which they were bound to reply, "Perlute! perlute!"
+Leprosy is not properly an infectious complaint, in spite of the horror
+in which the Cagot furniture, and the cloth woven by them, are held in
+some places; the disorder is hereditary, and hence (say this body of wise
+men, who have troubled themselves to account for the origin of Cagoterie)
+the reasonableness and the justice of preventing any mixed marriages, by
+which this terrible tendency to leprous complaints might be spread far
+and wide.  Another authority says, that though the Cagots are
+fine-looking men, hard-working, and good mechanics, yet they bear in
+their faces, and show in their actions, reasons for the detestation in
+which they are held: their glance, if you meet it, is the jettatura, or
+evil-eye, and they are spiteful, and cruel, and deceitful above all other
+men.  All these qualities they derive from their ancestor Gehazi, the
+servant of Elisha, together with their tendency to leprosy.
+
+Again, it is said that they are descended from the Arian Goths who were
+permitted to live in certain places in Guienne and Languedoc, after their
+defeat by King Clovis, on condition that they abjured their heresy, and
+kept themselves separate from all other men for ever.  The principal
+reason alleged in support of this supposition of their Gothic descent, is
+the specious one of derivation,--Chiens Gots, Cans Gets, Cagots,
+equivalent to Dogs of Goths.
+
+Again, they were thought to be Saracens, coming from Syria.  In
+confirmation of this idea, was the belief that all Cagots were possessed
+by a horrible smell.  The Lombards, also, were an unfragrant race, or so
+reputed among the Italians: witness Pope Stephen's letter to Charlemagne,
+dissuading him from marrying Bertha, daughter of Didier, King of
+Lombardy.  The Lombards boasted of Eastern descent, and were noisome.  The
+Cagots were noisome, and therefore must be of Eastern descent.  What
+could be clearer?  In addition, there was the proof to be derived from
+the name Cagot, which those maintaining the opinion of their Saracen
+descent held to be Chiens, or Chasseurs des Gots, because the Saracens
+chased the Goths out of Spain.  Moreover, the Saracens were originally
+Mahometans, and as such obliged to bathe seven times a-day: whence the
+badge of the duck's foot.  A duck was a water-bird: Mahometans bathed in
+the water.  Proof upon proof!
+
+In Brittany the common idea was, they were of Jewish descent.  Their
+unpleasant smell was again pressed into service.  The Jews, it was well
+known, had this physical infirmity, which might be cured either by
+bathing in a certain fountain in Egypt--which was a long way from
+Brittany--or by anointing themselves with the blood of a Christian child.
+Blood gushed out of the body of every Cagot on Good Friday.  No wonder,
+if they were of Jewish descent.  It was the only way of accounting for so
+portentous a fact.  Again; the Cagots were capital carpenters, which gave
+the Bretons every reason to believe that their ancestors were the very
+Jews who made the cross.  When first the tide of emigration set from
+Brittany to America, the oppressed Cagots crowded to the ports, seeking
+to go to some new country, where their race might be unknown.  Here was
+another proof of their descent from Abraham and his nomadic people: and,
+the forty years' wandering in the wilderness and the Wandering Jew
+himself, were pressed into the service to prove that the Cagots derived
+their restlessness and love of change from their ancestors, the Jews.  The
+Jews, also, practised arts-magic, and the Cagots sold bags of wind to the
+Breton sailors, enchanted maidens to love them--maidens who never would
+have cared for them, unless they had been previously enchanted--made
+hollow rocks and trees give out strange and unearthly noises, and sold
+the magical herb called _bon-succes_.  It is true enough that, in all the
+early acts of the fourteenth century, the same laws apply to Jews as to
+Cagots, and the appellations seem used indiscriminately; but their fair
+complexions, their remarkable devotion to all the ceremonies of the
+Catholic Church, and many other circumstances, conspire to forbid our
+believing them to be of Hebrew descent.
+
+Another very plausible idea is, that they are the descendants of
+unfortunate individuals afflicted with goitres, which is, even to this
+day, not an uncommon disorder in the gorges and valleys of the Pyrenees.
+Some have even derived the word goitre from Got, or Goth; but their name,
+Crestia, is not unlike Cretin, and the same symptoms of idiotism were not
+unusual among the Cagots; although sometimes, if old tradition is to be
+credited, their malady of the brain took rather the form of violent
+delirium, which attacked them at new and full moons.  Then the workmen
+laid down their tools, and rushed off from their labour to play mad
+pranks up and down the country.  Perpetual motion was required to
+alleviate the agony of fury that seized upon the Cagots at such times.  In
+this desire for rapid movement, the attack resembled the Neapolitan
+tarantella; while in the mad deeds they performed during such attacks,
+they were not unlike the northern Berserker.  In Bearn especially, those
+suffering from this madness were dreaded by the pure race; the Bearnais,
+going to cut their wooden clogs in the great forests that lay around the
+base of the Pyrenees, feared above all things to go too near the periods
+when the Cagoutelle seized on the oppressed and accursed people; from
+whom it was then the oppressors' turn to fly.  A man was living within
+the memory of some, who married a Cagot wife; he used to beat her right
+soundly when he saw the first symptoms of the Cagoutelle, and, having
+reduced her to a wholesome state of exhaustion and insensibility, he
+locked her up until the moon had altered her shape in the heavens.  If he
+had not taken such decided steps, say the oldest inhabitants, there is no
+knowing what might have happened.
+
+From the thirteenth to the end of the nineteenth century, there are facts
+enough to prove the universal abhorrence in which this unfortunate race
+was held; whether called Cagots, or Gahets in Pyrenean districts,
+Caqueaux in Brittany, or Yaqueros Asturias.  The great French revolution
+brought some good out of its fermentation of the people: the more
+intelligent among them tried to overcome the prejudice against the
+Cagots.
+
+In seventeen hundred and eighteen, there was a famous cause tried at
+Biarritz relating to Cagot rights and privileges.  There was a wealthy
+miller, Etienne Arnauld by name, of the race of Gotz, Quagotz, Bisigotz,
+Astragotz, or Gahetz, as his people are described in the legal document.
+He married an heiress, a Gotte (or Cagot) of Biarritz; and the
+newly-married well-to-do couple saw no reason why they should stand near
+the door in the church, nor why he should not hold some civil office in
+the commune, of which he was the principal inhabitant.  Accordingly, he
+petitioned the law that he and his wife might be allowed to sit in the
+gallery of the church, and that he might be relieved from his civil
+disabilities.  This wealthy white miller, Etienne Arnauld, pursued his
+rights with some vigour against the Baillie of Labourd, the dignitary of
+the neighbourhood.  Whereupon the inhabitants of Biarritz met in the open
+air, on the eighth of May, to the number of one hundred and fifty;
+approved of the conduct of the Baillie in rejecting Arnauld, made a
+subscription, and gave all power to their lawyers to defend the cause of
+the pure race against Etienne Arnauld--"that stranger," who, having
+married a girl of Cagot blood, ought also to be expelled from the holy
+places.  This lawsuit was carried through all the local courts, and ended
+by an appeal to the highest court in Paris; where a decision was given
+against Basque superstitions; and Etienne Arnauld was thenceforward
+entitled to enter the gallery of the church.
+
+Of course, the inhabitants of Biarritz were all the more ferocious for
+having been conquered; and, four years later, a carpenter, named Miguel
+Legaret, suspected of Cagot descent, having placed himself in the church
+among other people, was dragged out by the abbe and two of the jurets of
+the parish.  Legaret defended himself with a sharp knife at the time, and
+went to law afterwards; the end of which was, that the abbe and his two
+accomplices were condemned to a public confession of penitence, to be
+uttered while on their knees at the church door, just after high-mass.
+They appealed to the parliament of Bourdeaux against this decision, but
+met with no better success than the opponents of the miller Arnauld.
+Legaret was confirmed in his right of standing where he would in the
+parish church.  That a living Cagot had equal rights with other men in
+the town of Biarritz seemed now ceded to them; but a dead Cagot was a
+different thing.  The inhabitants of pure blood struggled long and hard
+to be interred apart from the abhorred race.  The Cagots were equally
+persistent in claiming to have a common burying-ground.  Again the texts
+of the Old Testament were referred to, and the pure blood quoted
+triumphantly the precedent of Uzziah the leper (twenty-sixth chapter of
+the second book of Chronicles), who was buried in the field of the
+Sepulchres of the Kings, not in the sepulchres themselves.  The Cagots
+pleaded that they were healthy and able-bodied; with no taint of leprosy
+near them.  They were met by the strong argument so difficult to be
+refuted, which I quoted before.  Leprosy was of two kinds, perceptible
+and imperceptible.  If the Cagots were suffering from the latter kind,
+who could tell whether they were free from it or not?  That decision must
+be left to the judgment of others.
+
+One sturdy Cagot family alone, Belone by name, kept up a lawsuit,
+claiming the privilege of common sepulture, for forty-two years; although
+the cure of Biarritz had to pay one hundred livres for every Cagot not
+interred in the right place.  The inhabitants indemnified the curate for
+all these fines.
+
+M. de Romagne, Bishop of Tarbes, who died in seventeen hundred and sixty-
+eight, was the first to allow a Cagot to fill any office in the Church.
+To be sure, some were so spiritless as to reject office when it was
+offered to them, because, by so claiming their equality, they had to pay
+the same taxes as other men, instead of the Rancale or pole-tax levied on
+the Cagots; the collector of which had also a right to claim a piece of
+bread of a certain size for his dog at every Cagot dwelling.
+
+Even in the present century, it has been necessary in some churches for
+the archdeacon of the district, followed by all his clergy, to pass out
+of the small door previously appropriated to the Cagots, in order to
+mitigate the superstition which, even so lately, made the people refuse
+to mingle with them in the house of God.  A Cagot once played the
+congregation at Larroque a trick suggested by what I have just named.  He
+slily locked the great parish-door of the church, while the greater part
+of the inhabitants were assisting at mass inside; put gravel into the
+lock itself, so as to prevent the use of any duplicate key,--and had the
+pleasure of seeing the proud pure-blooded people file out with bended
+head, through the small low door used by the abhorred Cagots.
+
+We are naturally shocked at discovering, from facts such as these, the
+causeless rancour with which innocent and industrious people were so
+recently persecuted.  The moral of the history of the accursed race may,
+perhaps, be best conveyed in the words of an epitaph on Mrs. Mary Hand,
+who lies buried in the churchyard of Stratford-on-Avon:--
+
+   What faults you saw in me,
+      Pray strive to shun;
+   And look at home; there's
+      Something to be done.
+
+
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of An Accursed Race by Elizabeth Gaskell
+#6 in our series by Elizabeth Gaskell
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+An Accursed Race
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+by Elizabeth Gaskell
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+March, 2001  [Etext #2531]
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+
+
+
+AN ACCURSED RACE
+
+
+
+
+We have our prejudices in England.  Or, if that assertion offends any
+of my readers, I will modify it:  we have had our prejudices in
+England.  We have tortured Jews; we have burnt Catholics and
+Protestants, to say nothing of a few witches and wizards.  We have
+satirized Puritans, and we have dressed-up Guys.  But, after all, I
+do not think we have been so bad as our Continental friends.  To be
+sure, our insular position has kept us free, to a certain degree,
+from the inroads of alien races; who, driven from one land of refuge,
+steal into another equally unwilling to receive them; and where, for
+long centuries, their presence is barely endured, and no pains is
+taken to conceal the repugnance which the natives of "pure blood"
+experience towards them.
+
+There yet remains a remnant of the miserable people called Cagots in
+the valleys of the Pyrenees; in the Landes near Bourdeaux; and,
+stretching up on the west side of France, their numbers become larger
+in Lower Brittany.  Even now, the origin of these families is a word
+of shame to them among their neighbours; although they are protected
+by the law, which confirmed them in the equal rights of citizens
+about the end of the last century.  Before then they had lived, for
+hundreds of years, isolated from all those who boasted of pure blood,
+and they had been, all this time, oppressed by cruel local edicts.
+They were truly what they were popularly called, The Accursed Race.
+
+All distinct traces of their origin are lost.  Even at the close of
+that period which we call the Middle Ages, this was a problem which
+no one could solve; and as the traces, which even then were faint and
+uncertain, have vanished away one by one, it is a complete mystery at
+the present day.  Why they were accursed in the first instance, why
+isolated from their kind, no one knows.  From the earliest accounts
+of their state that are yet remaining to us, it seems that the names
+which they gave each other were ignored by the population they lived
+amongst, who spoke of them as Crestiaa, or Cagots, just as we speak
+of animals by their generic names.  Their houses or huts were always
+placed at some distance out of the villages of the country-folk, who
+unwillingly called in the services of the Cagots as carpenters, or
+tilers, or slaters--trades which seemed appropriated by this
+unfortunate race--who were forbidden to occupy land, or to bear arms,
+the usual occupations of those times.  They had some small right of
+pasturage on the common lands, and in the forests:  but the number of
+their cattle and live-stock was strictly limited by the earliest laws
+relating to the Cagots.  They were forbidden by one act to have more
+than twenty sheep, a pig, a ram, and six geese.  The pig was to be
+fattened and killed for winter food; the fleece of the sheep was to
+clothe them; but if the said sheep had lambs, they were forbidden to
+eat them.  Their only privilege arising from this increase was, that
+they might choose out the strongest and finest in preference to
+keeping the old sheep.  At Martinmas the authorities of the commune
+came round, and counted over the stock of each Cagot.  If he had more
+than his appointed number, they were forfeited; half went to the
+commune, half to the baillie, or chief magistrate of the commune.
+The poor beasts were limited as to the amount of common which they
+might stray over in search of grass.  While the cattle of the
+inhabitants of the commune might wander hither and thither in search
+of the sweetest herbage, the deepest shade, or the coolest pool in
+which to stand on the hot days, and lazily switch their dappled
+sides, the Cagot sheep and pig had to learn imaginary bounds, beyond
+which if they strayed, any one might snap them up, and kill them,
+reserving a part of the flesh for his own use, but graciously
+restoring the inferior parts to their original owner.  Any damage
+done by the sheep was, however, fairly appraised, and the Cagot paid
+no more for it than any other man would have done.
+
+Did a Cagot leave his poor cabin, and venture into the towns, even to
+render services required of him in the way of his he was bidden, by
+all the municipal laws, to stand by and remember his rude old state.
+In all the towns and villages the large districts extending on both
+sides of the Pyrenees--in all that part of Spain--they were forbidden
+to buy or sell anything eatable, to walk in the middle (esteemed the
+better) part of the streets, to come within the gates before sunrise,
+or to be found after sunset within the walls of the town.  But still,
+as the Cagots were good-looking men, and (although they bore certain
+natural marks of their caste, of which I shall speak by-and-by) were
+not easily distinguished by casual passers-by from other men, they
+were compelled to wear some distinctive peculiarity which should
+arrest the eye; and, in the greater number of towns, it was decreed
+that the outward sign of a Cagot should be a piece of red cloth sewed
+conspicuously on the front of his dress.  In other towns, the mark of
+Cagoterie was the foot of a duck or a goose hung over their left
+shoulder, so as to be seen by any one meeting them.  After a time,
+the more convenient badge of a piece of yellow cloth cut out in the
+shape of a duck's foot, was adopted.  If any Cagot was found in any
+town or village without his badge, he had to pay a fine of five sous,
+and to lose his dress.  He was expected to shrink away from any
+passer-by, for fear that their clothes should touch each other; or
+else to stand still in some corner or by-place.  If the Cagots were
+thirsty during the days which they passed in those towns where their
+presence was barely suffered, they had no means of quenching their
+thirst, for they were forbidden to enter into the little cabarets or
+taverns.  Even the water gushing out of the common fountain was
+prohibited to them.  Far away, in their own squalid village, there
+was the Cagot fountain, and they were not allowed to drink of any
+other water.  A Cagot woman having to make purchases in the town, was
+liable to be flogged out of it if she went to buy anything except on
+a Monday--a day on which all other people who could, kept their
+houses for fear of coming in contact with the accursed race.
+
+In the Pays Basque, the prejudices--and for some time the laws--ran
+stronger against them than any which I have hitherto mentioned.  The
+Basque Cagot was not allowed to possess sheep.  He might keep a pig
+for provision, but his pig had no right of pasturage.  He might cut
+and carry grass for the ass, which was the only other animal he was
+permitted to own; and this ass was permitted, because its existence
+was rather an advantage to the oppressor, who constantly availed
+himself of the Cagot's mechanical skill, and was glad to have him and
+his tools easily conveyed from one place to another.
+
+The race was repulsed by the State.  Under the small local
+governments they could hold no post whatsoever.  And they were barely
+tolerated by the Church, although they were good Catholics, and
+zealous frequenters of the mass.  They might only enter the churches
+by a small door set apart for them, through which no one of the pure
+race ever passed.  This door was low, so as to compel them to make an
+obeisance.  It was occasionally surrounded by sculpture, which
+invariably represented an oak-branch with a dove above it.  When they
+were once in, they might not go to the holy water used by others.
+They had a benitier of their own; nor were they allowed to share in
+the consecrated bread when that was handed round to the believers of
+the pure race.  The Cagots stood afar off, near the door.  There were
+certain boundaries--imaginary lines on the nave and in the isles
+which they might not pass.  In one or two of the more tolerant of the
+Pyrenean villages, the blessed bread was offered to the Cagots, the
+priest standing on one side of the boundary, and giving the pieces of
+bread on a long wooden fork to each person successively.
+
+When the Cagot died, he was interred apart, in a plot burying-ground
+on the north side of the cemetery.  Under such laws and prescriptions
+as I have described, it is no wonder that he was generally too poor
+to have much property for his children to inherit; but certain
+descriptions of it were forfeited to the commune.  The only
+possession which all who were not of his own race refused to touch,
+was his furniture.  That was tainted, infectious, unclean--fit for
+none but Cagots.
+
+When such were, for at least three centuries, the prevalent usages
+and opinions with regard to this oppressed race, it is not surprising
+that we read of occasional outbursts of ferocious violence on their
+part.  In the Basses-Pyrenees, for instance it is only about a
+hundred years since, that the Cagots of Rehouilhes rose up against
+the inhabitants of the neighbouring town of Lourdes, and got the
+better of them, by their magical powers as it is said.  The people of
+Lourdes were conquered and slain, and their ghastly, bloody heads
+served the triumphant Cagots for balls to play at ninepins with!  The
+local parliaments had begun, by this time, to perceive how oppressive
+was the ban of public opinion under which the Cagots lay, and were
+not inclined to enforce too severe a punishment.  Accordingly, the
+decree of the parliament of Toulouse condemned only the leading
+Cagots concerned in this affray to be put to death, and that
+henceforward and for ever no Cagot was to be permitted to enter the
+town of Lourdes by any gate but that called Capdet-pourtet:  they
+were only to be allowed to walk under the rain-gutters, and neither
+to sit, eat, nor drink in the town.  If they failed in observing any
+of these rules, the parliament decreed, in the spirit of Shylock,
+that the disobedient Cagots should have two strips of flesh, weighing
+never more than two ounces a-piece, cut out from each side of their
+spines.
+
+In the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries it was
+considered no more a crime to kill a Cagot than to destroy obnoxious
+vermin.  A "nest of Cagots," as the old accounts phrase it, had
+assembled in a deserted castle of Mauvezin, about the year sixteen
+hundred; and, certainly, they made themselves not very agreeable
+neighbours, as they seemed to enjoy their reputation of magicians;
+and, by some acoustic secrets which were known to them, all sorts of
+moanings and groanings were heard in the neighbouring forests, very
+much to the alarm of the good people of the pure race; who could not
+cut off a withered branch for firewood, but some unearthly sound
+seemed to fill the air, nor drink water which was not poisoned,
+because the Cagots would persist in filling their pitchers at the
+same running stream.  Added to these grievances, the various
+pilferings perpetually going on in the neighbourhood made the
+inhabitants of the adjacent towns and hamlets believe that they had a
+very sufficient cause for wishing to murder all the Cagots in the
+Chateau de Mauvezin.  But it was surrounded by a moat, and only
+accessible by a drawbridge; besides which, the Cagots were fierce and
+vigilant.  Some one, however, proposed to get into their confidence;
+and for this purpose he pretended to fall ill close to their path, so
+that on returning to their stronghold they perceived him, and took
+him in, restored him to health, and made a friend of him.  One day,
+when they were all playing at ninepins in the woods, their
+treacherous friend left the party on pretence of being thirsty, and
+went back into the castle, drawing up the bridge after he had passed
+over it, and so cutting off their means of escape into safety.  Them,
+going up to the highest part of the castle, he blew a horn, and the
+pure race, who were lying in wait on the watch for some such signal,
+fell upon the Cagots at their games, and slew them all.  For this
+murder I find no punishment decreed in the parliament of Toulouse, or
+elsewhere.
+
+As any intermarriage with the pure race was strictly forbidden, and
+as there were books kept in every commune in which the names and
+habitations of the reputed Cagots were written, these unfortunate
+people had no hope of ever becoming blended with the rest of the
+population.  Did a Cagot marriage take place, the couple were
+serenaded with satirical songs.  They also had minstrels, and many of
+their romances are still current in Brittany; but they did not
+attempt to make any reprisals of satire or abuse.  Their disposition
+was amiable, and their intelligence great.  Indeed, it required both
+these qualities, and their great love of mechanical labour, to make
+their lives tolerable.
+
+At last, they began to petition that they might receive some
+protection from the laws; and, towards the end of the seventeenth
+century, the judicial power took their side.  But they gained little
+by this.  Law could not prevail against custom:  and, in the ten or
+twenty years just preceding the first French revolution, the
+prejudice in France against the Cagots amounted to fierce and
+positive abhorrence.
+
+At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Cagots of Navarre
+complained to the Pope, that they were excluded from the fellowship
+of men, and accursed by the Church, because their ancestors had given
+help to a certain Count Raymond of Toulouse in his revolt against the
+Holy See.  They entreated his holiness not to visit upon them the
+sins of their fathers.  The Pope issued a bull on the thirteenth of
+May, fifteen hundred and fifteen--ordering them to be well-treated
+and to be admitted to the same privileges as other men.  He charged
+Don Juan de Santa Maria of Pampeluna to see to the execution of this
+bull.  But Don Juan was slow to help, and the poor Spanish Cagots
+grew impatient, and resolved to try the secular power.  They
+accordingly applied to the Cortes of Navarre, and were opposed on a
+variety of grounds.  First, it was stated that their ancestors had
+had nothing to do with Raymond Count of Toulouse, or with any such
+knightly personage; that they were in fact descendants of Gehazi,
+servant of Elisha (second book of Kings, fifth chapter, twenty-
+seventh verse), who had been accursed by his master for his fraud
+upon Naaman, and doomed, he and his descendants, to be lepers for
+evermore.  Name, Cagots or Gahets; Gahets, Gehazites.  What can be
+more clear?  And if that is not enough, and you tell us that the
+Cagots are not lepers now; we reply that there are two kinds of
+leprosy, one perceptible and the other imperceptible, even to the
+person suffering from it.  Besides, it is the country talk, that
+where the Cagot treads, the grass withers, proving the unnatural heat
+of his body.  Many credible and trustworthy witnesses will also tell
+you that, if a Cagot holds a freshly-gathered apple in his hand, it
+will shrivel and wither up in an hour's time as much as if it had
+been kept for a whole winter in a dry room.  They are born with
+tails; although the parents are cunning enough to pinch them off
+immediately.  Do you doubt this?  If it is not true, why do the
+children of the pure race delight in sewing on sheep's tails to the
+dress of any Cagot who is so absorbed in his work as not to perceive
+them?  And their bodily smell is so horrible and detestable that it
+shows that they must be heretics of some vile and pernicious
+description, for do we not read of the incense of good workers, and
+the fragrance of holiness?"
+
+Such were literally the arguments by which the Cagots were thrown
+back into a worse position than ever, as far as regarded their rights
+as citizens.  The Pope insisted that they should receive all their
+ecclesiastical privileges.  The Spanish priests said nothing; but
+tacitly refused to allow the Cagots to mingle with the rest of the
+faithful, either dead or alive.  The accursed race obtained laws in
+their favour from the Emperor Charles the Fifth; which, however,
+there was no one to carry into effect.  As a sort of revenge for
+their want of submission, and for their impertinence in daring to
+complain, their tools were all taken away from them by the local
+authorities:  an old man and all his family died of starvation, being
+no longer allowed to fish.
+
+They could not emigrate.  Even to remove their poor mud habitations,
+from one spot to another, excited anger and suspicion.  To be sure,
+in sixteen hundred and ninety-five, the Spanish government ordered
+the alcaldes to search out all the Cagots, and to expel them before
+two months had expired, under pain of having fifty ducats to pay for
+every Cagot remaining in Spain at the expiration of that time.  The
+inhabitants of the villages rose up and flogged out any of the
+miserable race who might be in their neighbourhood; but the French
+were on their guard against this enforced irruption, and refused to
+permit them to enter France.  Numbers were hunted up into the
+inhospitable Pyrenees, and there died of starvation, or became a prey
+to wild beasts.  They were obliged to wear both gloves and shoes when
+they were thus put to flight, otherwise the stones and herbage they
+trod upon and the balustrades of the bridges that they handled in
+crossing, would, according to popular belief, have become poisonous.
+
+And all this time, there was nothing remarkable or disgusting in the
+outward appearance of this unfortunate people.  There was nothing
+about them to countenance the idea of their being lepers--the most
+natural mode of accounting for the abhorrence in which they were
+held.  They were repeatedly examined by learned doctors, whose
+experiments, although singular and rude, appear to have been made in
+a spirit of humanity.  For instance, the surgeons of the king of
+Navarre, in sixteen hundred, bled twenty-two Cagots, in order to
+examine and analyze their blood.  They were young and healthy people
+of both sexes; and the doctors seem to have expected that they should
+have been able to extract some new kind of salt from their blood
+which might account for the wonderful heat of their bodies.  But
+their blood was just like that of other people.  Some of these
+medical men have left us a description of the general appearance of
+this unfortunate race, at a time when they were more numerous and
+less intermixed than they are now.  The families existing in the
+south and west of France, who are reputed to be of Cagot descent at
+this day, are, like their ancestors, tall, largely made, and powerful
+in frame; fair and ruddy in complexion, with gray-blue eyes, in which
+some observers see a pensive heaviness of look.  Their lips are
+thick, but well-formed.  Some of the reports name their sad
+expression of countenance with surprise and suspicion--"They are not
+gay, like other folk."  The wonder would be if they were.  Dr. Guyon,
+the medical man of the last century who has left the clearest report
+on the health of the Cagots, speaks of the vigorous old age they
+attain to.  In one family alone, he found a man of seventy-four years
+of age; a woman as old, gathering cherries; and another woman, aged
+eighty-three, was lying on the grass, having her hair combed by her
+great-grandchildren.  Dr. Guyon and other surgeons examined into the
+subject of the horribly infectious smell which the Cagots were said
+to leave behind them, and upon everything they touched; but they
+could perceive nothing unusual on this head.  They also examined
+their ears, which according to common belief (a belief existing to
+this day), were differently shaped from those of other people; being
+round and gristly, without the lobe of flesh into which the ear-ring
+is inserted.  They decided that most of the Cagots whom they examined
+had the ears of this round shape; but they gravely added, that they
+saw no reason why this should exclude them from the good-will of men,
+and from the power of holding office in Church and State.  They
+recorded the fact, that the children of the towns ran baaing after
+any Cagot who had been compelled to come into the streets to make
+purchases, in allusion to this peculiarity of the shape of the ear,
+which bore some resemblance to the ears of the sheep as they are cut
+by the shepherds in this district.  Dr. Guyon names the case of a
+beautiful Cagot girl, who sang most sweetly, and prayed to be allowed
+to sing canticles in the organ-loft.  The organist, more musician
+than bigot, allowed her to come, but the indignant congregation,
+finding out whence proceeded that clear, fresh voice, rushed up to
+the organ-loft, and chased the girl out, bidding her "remember her
+ears," and not commit the sacrilege of singing praises to God along
+with the pure race.
+
+But this medical report of Dr. Guyon's--bringing facts and arguments
+to confirm his opinion, that there was no physical reason why the
+Cagots should not be received on terms of social equality by the rest
+of the world--did no more for his clients than the legal decrees
+promulgated two centuries before had done.  The French proved the
+truth of the saying in Hudibras -
+
+
+He that's convinced against his will
+Is of the same opinion still.
+
+
+And, indeed, the being convinced by Dr. Guyon that they ought to
+receive Cagots as fellow-creatures, only made them more rabid in
+declaring that they would not.  One or two little occurrences which
+are recorded, show that the bitterness of the repugnance to the
+Cagots was in full force at the time just preceding the first French
+revolution.  There was a M. d'Abedos, the curate of Lourbes, and
+brother to the seigneur of the neighbouring castle, who was living in
+seventeen hundred and eighty; he was well-educated for the time, a
+travelled man, and sensible and moderate in all respects but that of
+his abhorrence of the Cagots:  he would insult them from the very
+altar, calling out to them, as they stood afar off, "Oh! ye Cagots,
+damned for evermore!"  One day, a half-blind Cagot stumbled and
+touched the censer borne before this Abbe de Lourbes.  He was
+immediately turned out of the church, and forbidden ever to re-enter
+it.  One does not know how to account for the fact, that the very
+brother of this bigoted abbe, the seigneur of the village, went and
+married a Cagot girl; but so it was, and the abbe brought a legal
+process against him, and had his estates taken from him, solely on
+account of his marriage, which reduced him to the condition of a
+Cagot, against whom the old law was still in force.  The descendants
+of this Seigneur de Lourbes are simple peasants at this very day,
+working on the lands which belonged to their grandfather.
+
+This prejudice against mixed marriages remained prevalent until very
+lately.  The tradition of the Cagot descent lingered among the
+people, long after the laws against the accursed race were abolished.
+A Breton girl, within the last few years, having two lovers each of
+reputed Cagot descent, employed a notary to examine their pedigrees,
+and see which of the two had least Cagot in him; and to that one she
+gave her hand.  In Brittany the prejudice seems to have been more
+virulent than anywhere else.  M. Emile Souvestre records proofs of
+the hatred borne to them in Brittany so recently as in eighteen
+hundred and thirty-five.  Just lately a baker at Hennebon, having
+married a girl of Cagot descent, lost all his custom.  The godfather
+and godmother of a Cagot child became Cagots themselves by the Breton
+laws, unless, indeed, the poor little baby died before attaining a
+certain number of days.  They had to eat the butchers' meat condemned
+as unhealthy; but, for some unknown reason, they were considered to
+have a right to every cut leaf turned upside down, with its cut side
+towards the door, and might enter any house in which they saw a loaf
+in this position, and carry it away with them.  About thirty years
+ago, there was the skeleton of a hand hanging up as an offering in a
+Breton church near Quimperle, and the tradition was, that it was the
+hand of a rich Cagot who had dared to take holy water out of the
+usual benitier, some time at the beginning of the reign of Louis the
+Sixteenth; which an old soldier witnessing, he lay in wait, and the
+next time the offender approached the benitier he cut off his hand,
+and hung it up, dripping with blood, as an offering to the patron
+saint of the church.  The poor Cagots in Brittany petitioned against
+their opprobrious name, and begged to be distinguished by the
+appelation of Malandrins.  To English ears one is much the same as
+the other, as neither conveys any meaning; but, to this day, the
+descendants of the Cagots do not like to have this name applied to
+them, preferring that of Malandrin.
+
+The French Cagots tried to destroy all the records of their pariah
+descent, in the commotions of seventeen hundred and eighty-nine; but
+if writings have disappeared, the tradition yet remains, and points
+out such and such a family as Cagot, or Malandrin, or Oiselier,
+according to the old terms of abhorrence.
+
+There are various ways in which learned men have attempted to account
+for the universal repugnance in which this well-made, powerful race
+are held.  Some say that the antipathy to them took its rise in the
+days when leprosy was a dreadfully prevalent disease; and that the
+Cagots are more liable than any other men to a kind of skin disease,
+not precisely leprosy, but resembling it in some of its symptoms;
+such as dead whiteness of complexion, and swellings of the face and
+extremities.  There was also some resemblance to the ancient Jewish
+custom in respect to lepers, in the habit of the people; who on
+meeting a Cagot called out, "Cagote? Cagote?" to which they were
+bound to reply, "Perlute! perlute!"  Leprosy is not properly an
+infectious complaint, in spite of the horror in which the Cagot
+furniture, and the cloth woven by them, are held in some places; the
+disorder is hereditary, and hence (say this body of wise men, who
+have troubled themselves to account for the origin of Cagoterie) the
+reasonableness and the justice of preventing any mixed marriages, by
+which this terrible tendency to leprous complaints might be spread
+far and wide.  Another authority says, that though the Cagots are
+fine-looking men, hard-working, and good mechanics, yet they bear in
+their faces, and show in their actions, reasons for the detestation
+in which they are held:  their glance, if you meet it, is the
+jettatura, or evil-eye, and they are spiteful, and cruel, and
+deceitful above all other men.  All these qualities they derive from
+their ancestor Gehazi, the servant of Elisha, together with their
+tendency to leprosy.
+
+Again, it is said that they are descended from the Arian Goths who
+were permitted to live in certain places in Guienne and Languedoc,
+after their defeat by King Clovis, on condition that they abjured
+their heresy, and kept themselves separate from all other men for
+ever.  The principal reason alleged in support of this supposition of
+their Gothic descent, is the specious one of derivation,--Chiens
+Gots, Cans Gets, Cagots, equivalent to Dogs of Goths.
+
+Again, they were thought to be Saracens, coming from Syria.  In
+confirmation of this idea, was the belief that all Cagots were
+possessed by a horrible smell.  The Lombards, also, were an
+unfragrant race, or so reputed among the Italians:  witness Pope
+Stephen's letter to Charlemagne, dissuading him from marrying Bertha,
+daughter of Didier, King of Lombardy.  The Lombards boasted of
+Eastern descent, and were noisome.  The Cagots were noisome, and
+therefore must be of Eastern descent.  What could be clearer?  In
+addition, there was the proof to be derived from the name Cagot,
+which those maintaining the opinion of their Saracen descent held to
+be Chiens, or Chasseurs des Gots, because the Saracens chased the
+Goths out of Spain.  Moreover, the Saracens were originally
+Mahometans, and as such obliged to bathe seven times a-day:  whence
+the badge of the duck's foot.  A duck was a water-bird:  Mahometans
+bathed in the water.  Proof upon proof!
+
+In Brittany the common idea was, they were of Jewish descent.  Their
+unpleasant smell was again pressed into service.  The Jews, it was
+well known, had this physical infirmity, which might be cured either
+by bathing in a certain fountain in Egypt--which was a long way from
+Brittany--or by anointing themselves with the blood of a Christian
+child.  Blood gushed out of the body of every Cagot on Good Friday.
+No wonder, if they were of Jewish descent.  It was the only way of
+accounting for so portentous a fact.  Again; the Cagots were capital
+carpenters, which gave the Bretons every reason to believe that their
+ancestors were the very Jews who made the cross.  When first the tide
+of emigration set from Brittany to America, the oppressed Cagots
+crowded to the ports, seeking to go to some new country, where their
+race might be unknown.  Here was another proof of their descent from
+Abraham and his nomadic people:  and, the forty years' wandering in
+the wilderness and the Wandering Jew himself, were pressed into the
+service to prove that the Cagots derived their restlessness and love
+of change from their ancestors, the Jews.  The Jews, also, practised
+arts-magic, and the Cagots sold bags of wind to the Breton sailors,
+enchanted maidens to love them--maidens who never would have cared
+for them, unless they had been previously enchanted--made hollow
+rocks and trees give out strange and unearthly noises, and sold the
+magical herb called bon-succes.  It is true enough that, in all the
+early acts of the fourteenth century, the same laws apply to Jews as
+to Cagots, and the appellations seem used indiscriminately; but their
+fair complexions, their remarkable devotion to all the ceremonies of
+the Catholic Church, and many other circumstances, conspire to forbid
+our believing them to be of Hebrew descent.
+
+Another very plausible idea is, that they are the descendants of
+unfortunate individuals afflicted with goitres, which is, even to
+this day, not an uncommon disorder in the gorges and valleys of the
+Pyrenees.  Some have even derived the word goitre from Got, or Goth;
+but their name, Crestia, is not unlike Cretin, and the same symptoms
+of idiotism were not unusual among the Cagots; although sometimes, if
+old tradition is to be credited, their malady of the brain took
+rather the form of violent delirium, which attacked them at new and
+full moons.  Then the workmen laid down their tools, and rushed off
+from their labour to play mad pranks up and down the country.
+Perpetual motion was required to alleviate the agony of fury that
+seized upon the Cagots at such times.  In this desire for rapid
+movement, the attack resembled the Neapolitan tarantella; while in
+the mad deeds they performed during such attacks, they were not
+unlike the northern Berserker.  In Bearn especially, those suffering
+from this madness were dreaded by the pure race; the Bearnais, going
+to cut their wooden clogs in the great forests that lay around the
+base of the Pyrenees, feared above all things to go too near the
+periods when the Cagoutelle seized on the oppressed and accursed
+people; from whom it was then the oppressors' turn to fly.  A man was
+living within the memory of some, who married a Cagot wife; he used
+to beat her right soundly when he saw the first symptoms of the
+Cagoutelle, and, having reduced her to a wholesome state of
+exhaustion and insensibility, he locked her up until the moon had
+altered her shape in the heavens.  If he had not taken such decided
+steps, say the oldest inhabitants, there is no knowing what might
+have happened.
+
+From the thirteenth to the end of the nineteenth century, there are
+facts enough to prove the universal abhorrence in which this
+unfortunate race was held; whether called Cagots, or Gahets in
+Pyrenean districts, Caqueaux in Brittany, or Yaqueros Asturias.  The
+great French revolution brought some good out of its fermentation of
+the people:  the more intelligent among them tried to overcome the
+prejudice against the Cagots.
+
+In seventeen hundred and eighteen, there was a famous cause tried at
+Biarritz relating to Cagot rights and privileges.  There was a
+wealthy miller, Etienne Arnauld by name, of the race of Gotz,
+Quagotz, Bisigotz, Astragotz, or Gahetz, as his people are described
+in the legal document.  He married an heiress, a Gotte (or Cagot) of
+Biarritz; and the newly-married well-to-do couple saw no reason why
+they should stand near the door in the church, nor why he should not
+hold some civil office in the commune, of which he was the principal
+inhabitant.  Accordingly, he petitioned the law that he and his wife
+might be allowed to sit in the gallery of the church, and that he
+might be relieved from his civil disabilities.  This wealthy white
+miller, Etienne Arnauld, pursued his rights with some vigour against
+the Baillie of Labourd, the dignitary of the neighbourhood.
+Whereupon the inhabitants of Biarritz met in the open air, on the
+eighth of May, to the number of one hundred and fifty; approved of
+the conduct of the Baillie in rejecting Arnauld, made a subscription,
+and gave all power to their lawyers to defend the cause of the pure
+race against Etienne Arnauld--"that stranger," who, having married a
+girl of Cagot blood, ought also to be expelled from the holy places.
+This lawsuit was carried through all the local courts, and ended by
+an appeal to the highest court in Paris; where a decision was given
+against Basque superstitions; and Etienne Arnauld was thenceforward
+entitled to enter the gallery of the church.
+
+Of course, the inhabitants of Biarritz were all the more ferocious
+for having been conquered; and, four years later, a carpenter, named
+Miguel Legaret, suspected of Cagot descent, having placed himself in
+the church among other people, was dragged out by the abbe and two of
+the jurets of the parish.  Legaret defended himself with a sharp
+knife at the time, and went to law afterwards; the end of which was,
+that the abbe and his two accomplices were condemned to a public
+confession of penitence, to be uttered while on their knees at the
+church door, just after high-mass.  They appealed to the parliament
+of Bourdeaux against this decision, but met with no better success
+than the opponents of the miller Arnauld.  Legaret was confirmed in
+his right of standing where he would in the parish church.  That a
+living Cagot had equal rights with other men in the town of Biarritz
+seemed now ceded to them; but a dead Cagot was a different thing.
+The inhabitants of pure blood struggled long and hard to be interred
+apart from the abhorred race.  The Cagots were equally persistent in
+claiming to have a common burying-ground.  Again the texts of the Old
+Testament were referred to, and the pure blood quoted triumphantly
+the precedent of Uzziah the leper (twenty-sixth chapter of the second
+book of Chronicles), who was buried in the field of the Sepulchres of
+the Kings, not in the sepulchres themselves.  The Cagots pleaded that
+they were healthy and able-bodied; with no taint of leprosy near
+them.  They were met by the strong argument so difficult to be
+refuted, which I quoted before.  Leprosy was of two kinds,
+perceptible and imperceptible.  If the Cagots were suffering from the
+latter kind, who could tell whether they were free from it or not?
+That decision must be left to the judgment of others.
+
+One sturdy Cagot family alone, Belone by name, kept up a lawsuit,
+claiming the privilege of common sepulture, for forty-two years;
+although the cure of Biarritz had to pay one hundred livres for every
+Cagot not interred in the right place.  The inhabitants indemnified
+the curate for all these fines.
+
+M. de Romagne, Bishop of Tarbes, who died in seventeen hundred and
+sixty-eight, was the first to allow a Cagot to fill any office in the
+Church.  To be sure, some were so spiritless as to reject office when
+it was offered to them, because, by so claiming their equality, they
+had to pay the same taxes as other men, instead of the Rancale or
+pole-tax levied on the Cagots; the collector of which had also a
+right to claim a piece of bread of a certain size for his dog at
+every Cagot dwelling.
+
+Even in the present century, it has been necessary in some churches
+for the archdeacon of the district, followed by all his clergy, to
+pass out of the small door previously appropriated to the Cagots, in
+order to mitigate the superstition which, even so lately, made the
+people refuse to mingle with them in the house of God.  A Cagot once
+played the congregation at Larroque a trick suggested by what I have
+just named.  He slily locked the great parish-door of the church,
+while the greater part of the inhabitants were assisting at mass
+inside; put gravel into the lock itself, so as to prevent the use of
+any duplicate key,--and had the pleasure of seeing the proud pure-
+blooded people file out with bended head, through the small low door
+used by the abhorred Cagots.
+
+We are naturally shocked at discovering, from facts such as these,
+the causeless rancour with which innocent and industrious people were
+so recently persecuted.  The moral of the history of the accursed
+race may, perhaps, be best conveyed in the words of an epitaph on
+Mrs. Mary Hand, who lies buried in the churchyard of Stratford-on-
+Avon:-
+
+
+What faults you saw in me,
+Pray strive to shun;
+And look at home; there's
+Something to be done.
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg eText An Accursed Race
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