e, and
went to law afterwards; the end of which was, that the abbe and his two
accomplices were condemned to a public confession of penitence, to be
uttered while on their knees at the church door, just after high-mass.
They appealed to the parliament of Bourdeaux against this decision, but
met with no better success than the opponents of the miller Arnauld.
Legaret was confirmed in his right of standing where he would in the
parish church. That a living Cagot had equal rights with other men in
the town of Biarritz seemed now ceded to them; but a dead Cagot was a
different thing. The inhabitants of pure blood struggled long and hard
to be interred apart from the abhorred race. The Cagots were equally
persistent in claiming to have a common burying-ground. Again the texts
of the Old Testament were referred to, and the pure blood quoted
triumphantly the precedent of Uzziah the leper (twenty-sixth chapter of
the second book of Chronicles), who was buried in the field of the
Sepulchres of the Kings, not in the sepulchres themselves. The Cagots
pleaded that they were healthy and able-bodied; with no taint of leprosy
near them. They were met by the strong argument so difficult to be
refuted, which I quoted before. Leprosy was of two kinds, perceptible
and imperceptible. If the Cagots were suffering from the latter kind,
who could tell whether they were free from it or not? That decision must
be left to the judgment of others.

One sturdy Cagot family alone, Belone by name, kept up a lawsuit,
claiming the privilege of common sepulture, for forty-two years; although
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