sanctuary of Notre Dame de
Puy, which rivals that of Roc-Amadour in antiquity, formed the design
of instituting a confraternity to wage war against the _routiers_ and
destroy them. A 'pious fraud' was adopted. A young man, having been
dressed so as to impersonate Notre Dame du Puy, appeared to a
carpenter who was in the habit of praying every night in the
cathedral, and gave him the mission of revealing that it was the will
of the Holy Virgin that a confraternity should be formed to put down
the brigands and establish peace in the country. Hundreds of men
enrolled themselves at once. The confreres, from the fact that they
wore hoods of white linen, obtained the name of Chaperons Blancs. Upon
their breasts hung a piece of lead with this inscription: 'Agnus Dei
qui tollis peccata mundi dona nobis pacem.' The confraternity spread
into Aquitaine, and the _routiers_ were defeated in pitched battles
with great slaughter; but the _chaperons_ in course of time became
lawless fanatics, and were almost as great a nuisance to society as
those whom they had undertaken to exterminate. They were nevertheless
the ancestors in a sense of the confraternities of penitents who, at a
later period, became so general in Europe.

The monthly fair at Figeac offers some curious pictures of rural life.
The peasants crowd in from the valleys and the surrounding _causses_.
Racial differences, or those produced by the influences of soil and
food--especially water--for a long series of generations, are very
strongly marked. There is the florid, robust, blue-eyed, sanguine
type, and there is the leaden-coloured, black-haired, lantern-jawed,
sloping-shouldered, and hollow-chested type. Then there are the
intermediates. Considered generally, these peasants of the Haut-Quercy
are not fine specimens of the human animal. They are dwarfed, and very
often deformed. Their almost exclusively vegetable diet, their
excessive toil, and the habit of drinking half-putrid rain-water from
cisterns which they very rarely clean, may possibly explain this
physical degeneration of the Cadurci. Their character is honest in the
main, but distrustful and superficially insincere by nature or the
force of circumstance. Their worst qualities are shown at a fair,
where they cheat as much as they can, and place no limit to lying.
Their canon of morality there is that everyone must look after
himself. I have been assured by a priest that they never think of
confessing the lies