548 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



pie and their origin has not been discovered, although the subject has 

 been an object of investigation and much discussion during the last 

 four hundred years. The conjecture already referred to, which has 

 long prevailed in France, that the Cagots and other despised castes in 

 the Basque lands' were descendants of the Visigoths, who were con- 

 quered by Clovis, and fled to the mountains, has been shown to be base- 

 less and untenable. Many of the most esteemed and distinguished fami- 

 lies of Gascony, Aquitaine, and Beam were descended from the Visi- 

 goths; and those bi*ave heroes were not afflicted Avith any of the person- 

 al defects, or anything like them, which were attributed to the Cagots. 



Another conjecture, which was partly held to by the Cagots them- 

 selves, made them descendants of the Albigenses, whom Pope Innocent 

 Til outlawed and banished in the beginning of the thirteenth cent- 

 ury. It is an historical fact that these poor persecuted heretics or 

 opponents of the papacy were then regarded as the scum of mankind ; 

 but then they received in these districts of the present France more sym- 

 pathy and adhesion than the popes themselves. Moreover, the Cagots 

 were in existence as a despised race more than two hundred years 

 before the crusade against the Albigenses. Pierre de Marca thought 

 that the Cagots were descendants of those Moors from Spain who 

 remained in Gascony and Aquitaine after their leader had been van- 

 quished by Charles Martel on the slopes of the Pyrenees. But this 

 view is contradicted by the decided northern type which is still recog- 

 nizable in the bodily appearance of the Cagots, and by the historical 

 fact that those Moors were eventually converted to Christianity, and 

 became blended with the other French nationalities. 



Caxar Amant ascribed a Jewish origin to the Cagots, and endeav- 

 ored to sustain his opinion by a garbled quotation of a Biblical verse. 

 Another writer made them descendants of the Jews who came to 

 Southern Europe after the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus. Abb6 

 Vcnuti supposed that they were descendants of Crusaders who returned 

 from the Holy Land after the first Crusade, afflicted with disease. 

 Count Gebalin saw in them the descendants of the aborigines of the 

 Pyrencan lands, who were reduced to a condition of outlawry like that 

 of the lowest castes and tribes in modern India, Another view, by 

 which they were regarded as the descendants of those Spaniards who 

 were in the conspiracy against Charlemagne and participated in the 

 battle of Roncesvalles, has been disproved by a comparison of dates 

 and places. 



The later explanations of the origin of the Cagots are more plausi- 

 ble, though not quite historically convincing. A French investigator, 

 M. Francisque Michel, has written a valuable book on the " History of 

 the Accursed Races of France and Spain," in which he has sought 

 with great consistency, as M. Louis Lande has also done in the *' Re- 

 vue des Deux Mondes," to prove that leprosy was the cause of the 

 terrible and ignoble treatment Avhich the Cagots have had to endure. 



