complexions, their remarkable devotion to all the ceremonies of the
Catholic Church, and many other circumstances, conspire to forbid our
believing them to be of Hebrew descent.

Another very plausible idea is, that they are the descendants of
unfortunate individuals afflicted with goitres, which is, even to this
day, not an uncommon disorder in the gorges and valleys of the Pyrenees.
Some have even derived the word goitre from Got, or Goth; but their name,
Crestia, is not unlike Cretin, and the same symptoms of idiotism were not
unusual among the Cagots; although sometimes, if old tradition is to be
credited, their malady of the brain took rather the form of violent
delirium, which attacked them at new and full moons. Then the workmen
laid down their tools, and rushed off from their labour to play mad
pranks up and down the country. Perpetual motion was required to
alleviate the agony of fury that seized upon the Cagots at such times. In
this desire for rapid movement, the attack resembled the Neapolitan
tarantella; while in the mad deeds they performed during such attacks,
they were not unlike the northern Berserker. In Bearn especially, those
suffering from this madness were dreaded by the pure race; the Bearnais,
going to cut their wooden clogs in the great forests that lay around the
base of the Pyrenees, feared above all things to go too near the periods
when the Cagoutelle seized on the oppressed and accursed people; from
whom it was then the oppressors' turn to fly. A man was living within
the memory of some, who married a Cagot wife; he used to beat her right
soundly when he saw the first symptoms of the Cagoutelle, and, having
reduced her to a wholesome state of exhaustion and insensibility, he
locked her up until the moon had altered her shape in the heavens. If he
had not taken such decided steps, say the oldest inhabitants, there is no
knowing what might have happened.