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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
+
+by Elizabeth Gaskell
+
+March, 2001  [Etext #2531]
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of An Accursed Race by Elizabeth Gaskell
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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