An Accursed Race | Page 7

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,