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Updated: May 9, 2025
Accordingly, the decree of the parliament of Toulouse condemned only the leading Cagots concerned in this affray to be put to death, and that henceforward and for ever no Cagot was to be permitted to enter the town of Lourdes by any gate but that called Capdet-pourtet: they were only to be allowed to walk under the rain-gutters, and neither to sit, eat, nor drink in the town.
Any damage done by the sheep was, however, fairly appraised, and the Cagot paid no more for it than any other man would have done. Did a Cagot leave his poor cabin, and venture into the towns, even to render services required of him in the way of his he was bidden, by all the municipal laws, to stand by and remember his rude old state.
Even the water gushing out of the common fountain was prohibited to them. Far away, in their own squalid village, there was the Cagot fountain, and they were not allowed to drink of any other water.
Such animosity as was shown against the priesthood emanated from some of the public clubs where the future Communards perorated. It was only as time went on, and the defence grew more and more hopeless, that Trochu himself was denounced as a cagot and a souteneur de soutanes; and not until the Commune did the Extremists give full rein to their hatred of the Church and its ministers.
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.
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.
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.
The descendants of this Seigneur de Lourbes are simple peasants at this very day, working on the lands which belonged to their grandfather. This prejudice against mixed marriages remained prevalent until very lately. The tradition of the Cagot descent lingered among the people, long after the laws against the accursed race were abolished.
If they failed in observing any of these rules, the parliament decreed, in the spirit of Shylock, that the disobedient Cagots should have two strips of flesh, weighing never more than two ounces a-piece, cut out from each side of their spines. In the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries it was considered no more a crime to kill a Cagot than to destroy obnoxious vermin.
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.
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