An Accursed Race | Page 6

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