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