idge after he had passed over it, and so cutting off their means of
escape into safety. Them, going up to the highest part of the castle, he
blew a horn, and the pure race, who were lying in wait on the watch for
some such signal, fell upon the Cagots at their games, and slew them all.
For this murder I find no punishment decreed in the parliament of
Toulouse, or elsewhere.

As any intermarriage with the pure race was strictly forbidden, and as
there were books kept in every commune in which the names and habitations
of the reputed Cagots were written, these unfortunate people had no hope
of ever becoming blended with the rest of the population. Did a Cagot
marriage take place, the couple were serenaded with satirical songs. They
also had minstrels, and many of their romances are still current in
Brittany; but they did not attempt to make any reprisals of satire or
abuse. Their disposition was amiable, and their intelligence great.
Indeed, it required both these qualities, and their great love of
mechanical labour, to make their lives tolerable.

At last, they began to petition that they might receive some protection
from the laws; and, towards the end of the seventeenth century, the
judicial power took their side. But they gained little by this. Law
could not prevail against custom: and, in the ten or twenty years just
preceding the first French revolution, the prejudice in France against
the Cagots amounted to fierce and positive abhorrence.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Cagots of Navarre
complained to the Pope, that they were excluded from the fellowship of
men, and accursed by the Church, because their ancestors had given help
to a certain Count Raymond of Toulouse in his revolt against the Holy
See. They entreated his holiness not to visit upon them the sins of
their fathers. The Pope issued a bull on the thirteenth of May, fifteen
hundred and fifteen--ordering them to be well-treated and to be admitted
to the same privileges as other men. He charged Don Juan de Santa Maria
of Pampeluna to see to the execution of this bull. But Don Juan was slow
to help, and the poor Spanish Cagots grew impatient, and resolved to try
the secular power. They accordingly applied to the Cortes of Navarre,
and were opposed on a variety of grounds. First, it was stated that
their ancestors had had "nothing to do with Raymond Count of Toulouse, or
with any such knightly personage; that they were in fact des