disease. It was a form of funeral. Earth was cast upon him, and he was declared to be legally and socially dead.
Precisely the same regulations were applied to the Cagots that were made for lepers. They were forbidden to spit in the roads, and to walk in them barefooted. If constrained to handle anything that had to be used by those who were sound, they must wear gloves. They might not marry out of their caste or company. They were relegated to live and be buried apart from all others.
When we consider this identity of regulation, as also that the Cagots are spoken of by all old writers as quasi-lepers, as that in popular belief they were held to have on them marks of undeveloped leprosy; when, further, we see that their old designation comes from caput mortuum, I think it is hard not to arrive at the conclusion that the Cagots were the descendants of sequestrated communities of lepers. But such is the recuperative power of Nature, in the healthy surroundings of the mountains, in its pure air and in wholesome diet, that the descendants of the lepers in course of time shook off the disease and became sound and robust men and women.
The Church in the eighteenth century made an effort to break down the wall of separation, the occasion for the existence of which had ceased.
We hear of an archdeacon when visiting one church had his indignation roused by seeing the Cagots huddled together in a side chapel apart from the rest of the congregation. Taking the Blessed Sacrament in his hands, he marched out of the church through the Cagots' chapel and door, and signed to the congregation to follow him. After a moment's hesitation they obeyed, and from that day the prejudice against these outcasts failed in that parish. In the Middle Ages no Cagot could become consul, mayor, juror, or be admitted
