f the
neighbouring castle, who was living in seventeen hundred and eighty; he
was well-educated for the time, a travelled man, and sensible and
moderate in all respects but that of his abhorrence of the Cagots: he
would insult them from the very altar, calling out to them, as they stood
afar off, "Oh! ye Cagots, damned for evermore!" One day, a half-blind
Cagot stumbled and touched the censer borne before this Abbe de Lourbes.
He was immediately turned out of the church, and forbidden ever to re-
enter it. One does not know how to account for the fact, that the very
brother of this bigoted abbe, the seigneur of the village, went and
married a Cagot girl; but so it was, and the abbe brought a legal process
against him, and had his estates taken from him, solely on account of his
marriage, which reduced him to the condition of a Cagot, against whom the
old law was still in force. The descendants of this Seigneur de Lourbes
are simple peasants at this very day, working on the lands which belonged
to their grandfather.

This prejudice against mixed marriages remained prevalent until very
lately. The tradition of the Cagot descent lingered among the people,
long after the laws against the accursed race were abolished. A Breton
girl, within the last few years, having two lovers each of reputed Cagot
descent, employed a notary to examine their pedigrees, and see which of
the two had least Cagot in him; and to that one she gave her hand. In
Brittany the prejudice seems to have been more virulent than anywhere
else. M. Emile Souvestre records proofs of the hatred borne to them in
Brittany so recently as in eighteen hundred and thirty-five. Just lately
a baker at Hennebon, having married a girl of Cagot descent, lost all his
custom. The godfather and godmother of a Cagot child became Cagots
themselves by the Breton laws, unless, indeed, the poor little baby died
before attaining a certain number of days. They had to eat the butchers'
meat condemned as unhealthy; but, for some unknown reason, they were
considered to have a right to every cut leaf turned upside down, with its
cut side towards the door, and might enter any house in which they saw a
loaf in this position, and carry it away with them. About thirty years
ago, there was the skeleton of a hand hanging up as an offering in a
Breton church near Quimperle, and the tradition was, that it was the hand
of a rich Cagot who had dared to take holy water out of the usual