An Accursed Race | Page 4

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