An Accursed Race

E >> Elizabeth Gaskell >> An Accursed Race


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.