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 intermarriages 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 sheeps' 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; but there was no one to
carry these laws 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 miserable Cagots
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 crossed,
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