An Accursed Race | Page 8

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