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-succès.
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 goîtres, which is, even to this
day, not an uncommon disorder in the gorges
and valleys of the Pyrenees.  Some have
even derived the word goître from Got, or
Goth; but their name, Crestiaa, 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 man, who had 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 Vaqueros in
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, 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, Miguel Legaret, suspected of
Cagot descent, having placed himself in
church among other people, was dragged
out by the abbé and two of the jurats 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
abbé 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