the cure of Biarritz had to pay one hundred livres for every Cagot not
interred in the right place. The inhabitants indemnified the curate for
all these fines.

M. de Romagne, Bishop of Tarbes, who died in seventeen hundred and sixty-
eight, was the first to allow a Cagot to fill any office in the Church.
To be sure, some were so spiritless as to reject office when it was
offered to them, because, by so claiming their equality, they had to pay
the same taxes as other men, instead of the Rancale or pole-tax levied on
the Cagots; the collector of which had also a right to claim a piece of
bread of a certain size for his dog at every Cagot dwelling.

Even in the present century, it has been necessary in some churches for
the archdeacon of the district, followed by all his clergy, to pass out
of the small door previously appropriated to the Cagots, in order to
mitigate the superstition which, even so lately, made the people refuse
to mingle with them in the house of God. A Cagot once played the
congregation at Larroque a trick suggested by what I have just named. He
slily locked the great parish-door of the church, while the greater part
of the inhabitants were assisting at mass inside; put gravel into the
lock itself, so as to prevent the use of any duplicate key,--and had the
pleasure of seeing the proud pure-blooded people file out with bended
head, through the small low door used by the abhorred Cagots.

We are naturally shocked at discovering, from facts such as these, the
causeless rancour with which innocent and industrious people were so
recently persecuted. The moral of the history of the accursed race may,
perhaps, be best conveyed in the words of an epitaph on Mrs. Mary Hand,
who lies buried in the churchyard of Stratford-on-Avon:--