Heredity and National Character. 1 1 7 



but slowly, he remains only as a curious and useless thing, 

 picturesque to an artistic eye ; but he is ill adapted to his circum- 

 stances, and certain sooner or later to vanish. 



THE CAGOTS. 



The various names of Cagots, Agots, Capots, Gahets, and 

 Caqueux, are given to races which subsisted down to the present 

 century in Guyenne, Gascony, and Be'am, on the northern side of 

 the Pyrenees, in Navarre and Guipuzcoa, and even in Maine and 

 Brittany. 1 They formed a population apart, separated from the 

 other inhabitants by the aversion with which it was regarded. 

 Popular tradition confounded these people with lepers. It was 

 said that they might be distinguished by their dull-gray eyes, and 

 by the shortness of the lobe of the ear. ' They are,' says an 

 author of the i6th century, ' comely men, industrious, skilful 

 mechanics ; but in their countenances and in their acts you always 

 detect something that makes them worthy of all the abhorrence 

 wherewith they are universally regarded. Furthermore, be they as 

 comely as they may, they have all, men and women alike, a stink- 

 ing breath, and when you come near one of them you experience 

 a certain unpleasant odour emanating from their flesh, as though 

 some curse descending from father to son had fallen upon this 

 miserable race of men.' 



Though, like the population amid which they lived, they were 

 Catholics, still they were not allowed to mix with their co- 

 religionists. Their hovels stood at some little distance outside 

 the villages ; they could enter the parish church only through a 

 narrow doorway exclusively reserved for them ; they took the holy 

 water from a special stoup, or received it from the point of a stick; 

 and in the church they had a corner where they were obliged to 



1 During the Reign of Terror there were yet to be found many of the 

 Caqueux in Finistere. M. Francisque Michel states that in a commune of the 

 canton of Accous, arrondissement of Oleron, a Cagot was, about the year 

 1817, nominated for maire of the commune, to the great scandal of the people 

 of the place. Protests were sent in from all sides to the prefet, but he did not 

 heed them. Still the complaints did not cease, they continued to be made till 

 1830, when the electors forced the maire to retire into his former privacy. 

 Histoire des Races Maudites, i. 127. 



