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

Such were literally the arguments by which the Cagots were thrown
back into a worse position than ever, as far as regarded their rights
as citizens. The Pope insisted that they should receive all their
ecclesiastical privileges. The Spanish priests said nothing; but
tacitly refused to allow the Cagots to mingle with the rest of the
faithful, either dead or alive. The accursed race obtained laws in
their favour from the Emperor Charles the Fifth; which, however,
there was no one to carry into effect. As a sort of revenge for
their want of submission, and for their impertinence in daring to
complain, their tools were all taken away from them by the local
authorities: an old man and all his family died of starvation, being
no longer allowed to fish.

They could not emigrate. Even to remove their poor mud habitations,
from one spot to another, excited anger and suspicion. To be sure,
in sixteen hundred and ninety-five, the Spanish government ordered
the alcaldes to search out all the Cagots, and to expel them before
two months had expired, under pain of having fifty ducats to pay for
every Cagot remaining in Spain at the expiration of that time. The
inhabitants of the villages rose up and flogged out any of the
miserable race who might be in their neighbourhood; but the French
were on their guard against this enforced irruption, and refused to
permit them to enter France. Numbers were hunted up into the
inhospitable Pyrenees, and there died of starvation, or became a prey
to wild beasts. They were obliged to wear both gloves and shoes when
they were thus put to flight, otherwise the stones and herbage they
trod upon and the balustrades of the bridges that they handled in
crossing, would, according to popular belief, have become poisonous.

And all this time, there was nothing remarkable or disgusting in the
outward appearance of this unfortunate people. There was nothing
about them to countenance the idea of their being lepers--the most
natural mode of accounting for the abhorrence in which they were
held. They were repeatedly examined by learned doctors, whose
experiments, although singular and rude, appear to have been made in
a spirit of humanity. For instance, the surgeons of the king of
Navarre, in sixteen hundred, bled twenty-two Cagots, in order to
examine and analyze their blood. They were young and healthy people
of both sexes; and the doctors seem to have expected that they should
have been able to extract some new kind of salt from their blood
which might account for the wonderful heat of their bodies. But
their blood was just like that of other people. Some of these
medical men have left us a description of the general appearance of
this unfortunate race, at a time when they were more numerous and
less intermixed than they are now. The families existing in the
south and west of France, who are reputed to be of Cagot descent at
this day, are, like their ancestors, tall, largely made, and powerful
in frame; fair and ruddy in complexion, with gray-blue eyes, in which
some observers see a pensive heaviness of look. Their lips are