Cagots

“ 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 ”

“ 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 ”

“ Lepers were a race of mediaeval pariahs, rejected of men, that now have gone to rest. But travel into the forests of the Pyrenees, and there you will find their modern representatives in the Cagots. Are these Pyrenean Cagots pagans? Not at all, They are good Christians. Wherefore, then, that low door in the Pyrenean churches, through which the Cagots are forced to enter, and which, obliging them to stoop almost to the ground, is a perpetual memento of their degradation? Wherefore is it that men of pure Spanish blood will hold no intercourse with the Cagot? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Precisely the same regulations were applied to the Cagots that were made for lepers. They were forbidden to spit in the roads, and to walk in them barefooted. If constrained to handle anything that had to be used by those who were sound, they must wear gloves. They might not marry out of their caste or company. They were relegated to live and be buried apart from all others.
When we consider this identity of regulation, as also that the Cagots are spoken of by all old writers as quasi-lepers, as that in popular belief they were held to have on them marks of undeveloped leprosy ”

“ 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. ”

“ Some have even derived the word goître from Got, or Goth; but their name, Crestiaa, 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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 ”

“ CHAPTER XV.
the cagot—vallée d'aspe—superstitions—forests—despourrins—the two gaves—bedous—high-road to saragossa—cascade of lescun—urdos—a picture of murillo—la vache.
The subject of the Cagots has occupied the attention of learned and unlearned persons both formerly, and at the present time; and the interest it excites is rather on the increase than otherwise; like the mysterious question of the race and language of the Basques, it can never fail to excite speculation and conjecture. ”

“ I hoped, from her information, and the manner in which she treated the subject, that the Cagots were indeed extinct, and known only as a by-word, which had now no meaning; but I found, by conversing with intelligent persons who had been a great deal in the mountains, and given their attention to such discoveries, that the unfortunate people, once the objects of scorn and oppression to all their fellow-men, are still to be found, and still lead an isolated life, though no longer proscribed or hunted like wild beasts as formerly. ”

“ The greatest number of Cagots are to be found in those parts of the Pyrenees which lead directly to Spain, which may strengthen the supposition that the Moors are really their ancestors. A sad falling off to the glory and grandeur of this magnificent people is the notion that all that remains of them should be a race of outcasts, loathsome and abhorred! ”

“ 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. ”

“ A gentleman, who is [709] a professor at the college of Pau, has devoted much of his time to the investigation of this curious secret, and has thrown his observations together in the form of a romance, in a manner so pleasing, and so well calculated to place the persons he wishes to describe immediately before the mind's eye of his reader, that I think a few extracts from his story of the cagot, yet unpublished, will give the best idea of the state of degradation and oppression in which the Cagots were forced to exist ”

“ The Cagots as a separate tribe have gradually disappeared or been absorbed. Yet the antipathy to the name and the tribe even to-day in some of these regions, though now chiefly a tradition, is still alive and implacable. M. Ramond, the Saussure of the Pyrenees, carefully studied these outcasts over seventy-five years ago, and made this touching statement concerning them:
"I have seen," he wrote, "some families of these unfortunate creatures. They are gradually approaching the villages from which prejudice has banished them. ”

“ Their language is merely a corrupt form of that spoken around them; but a Teutonic origin seems to be indicated by their fair complexions and blue eyes. Their crania have a normal development; their cheek-bones are high; their noses prominent, with large nostrils; their lips straight; and they are marked by the absence of the auricular lobules.
The origin of the Cagots is undecided. Littré defines them as “a people of the Pyrenees affected with a kind of cretinism.” It has been suggested that they were descendants of the Visigoths, and Michael derives the name from caas (dog) and Goth. ”

“ In Gascony, Béarn, and the Pays Basque, it is well known that for centuries this proscribed race has existed, entirely separated from the rest of their species, marrying with each other, and thus perpetuating their misfortune, avoided, persecuted, and contemned: their origin unknown, and their existence looked upon as a blot on the face of nature. At one period the Cagots were objects of hatred, from the belief that they were afflicted with the leprosy, which notion does not appear to be founded on fact; in later times, they have been supposed to suffer more especially from goître ”

“ 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. ”

“ The beautiful valleys of the Pyrenees are frightfully infested with the disease of goitre, and few of them are free; but the Cagots merely share the affliction, as has been said before (following the learned and benevolent Palassou) with the rest of the inhabitants.
The notion which, at first sight, would seem better founded, is, that the Cagots are descendants of those numerous lepers who formed a fearful community at one period, and were excluded from society to prevent infection ”

“ 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 analyse their blood. They were young and healthy people of both sexes ”

“ THEOPHYLACT will find an account of the Cagots in the Magasin Pittoresque for 1838, where they are stated to be descended from the Goths, their name of Cagots being derived from caas Goth (chien de Goth) , which corresponds with the derivation given by Scaliger. ”

“ The French government and laws before the Revolution did very little for the protection of the Cagots, Better conditions have grown up since then. As soon as science began to busy itself with the investigation of the phenomena of Cagotism and to expose the baselessness of the prejudices against those people, the prejudices began to weaken ”

“ 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 ”

“ The whole history of the Cagots, and a good deal of that of witchcraft, shows how virulent this kind of irrational dislikes is, and how difficult to deal with and to overcome when once they have been introduced into a rural population. ”

“ It was believed that the objects of their unreasoning aversion were variously sprung from the Goths, the Jews, the Saracens, the Albigenses. Modern research, however, has definitely established the fact that the former pariahs of Southwestern Europe, known in Languedoc and Gascony as Capots and Gahets, in Brittany as Cacous, in the Pyrenees as Cagots, in Spain as Agotes, were the descendants of mediæval lepers. A century has hardly elapsed since these victims of popular antipathy have been divested of that suspicion of uncleanness which was their ancient and unhappy heritage. ”

“ For a slate-cutter has to learn the art before he is aged fourteen, whilst the muscles are most flexible. At the age of twenty he has to undergo military service, and when he returns to his shed and tools, at the age of twenty-four, finds it very difficult to recover the skill he possessed before he donned uniform.
One of the most interesting and perplexing themes connected with the Pyrenees is the origin of the Cagots, a "race maudit," that was found throughout the chain, but not there solely. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”