"ElizabethGaskell-AnAccursedRace" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gaskell Elizabeth C)

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 descendants of Gehazi,
servant of Elisha (second book of Kings, fifth chapter, twenty-
seventh verse), who had been accursed by his master for his fraud
upon Naaman, and doomed, he and his descendants, to be lepers for
evermore. Name, Cagots or Gahets; Gahets, Gehazites. What can be
more clear? And if that is not enough, and you tell us that the
Cagots are not lepers now; we reply that there are two kinds of
leprosy, one perceptible and the other imperceptible, even to the
person suffering from it. Besides, it is the country talk, that
where the Cagot treads, the grass withers, proving the unnatural heat
of his body. Many credible and trustworthy witnesses will also tell
you that, if a Cagot holds a freshly-gathered apple in his hand, it
will shrivel and wither up in an hour's time as much as if it had
been kept for a whole winter in a dry room. They are born with
tails; although the parents are cunning enough to pinch them off
immediately. Do you doubt this? If it is not true, why do the
children of the pure race delight in sewing on sheep's tails to the
dress of any Cagot who is so absorbed in his work as not to perceive
them? And their bodily smell is so horrible and detestable that it
shows that they must be heretics of some vile and pernicious
description, for do we not read of the incense of good workers, and
the fragrance of holiness?"