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.
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