IV.
There is a famous old church of the Templars at Luz, which we go to see. It stands at the top of a hilly street, shut off behind a stout fortified wall and between two square flanking towers. We pass through the gateway, and the old sacristan lets us into the church. There is a curious gate, a turret rough in traced carving, and inside, in the dim light, we are chiefly impressed with the rude-gilded altar and the grotesque frescoes on the walls. Yet there is a certain solemnity about the darkness and stillness, after coming from the warm daylight outside. It preaches silently of devotion, of the mystery of religion, of the power and the poetry of worship. "It is a superstition of the place that at a certain time the dead warrior-priests rise from their graves and sit in ghostly assembly, remembering the time when they had raised these rafters and piled these stones together and worshiped therein and died and were buried beneath them.
"The old church lies in the shadow of the Pic de Bergonz and within ear-shot of a mountain's torrent; and the moonlight plays all sorts of fantastic tricks, throwing strange shadows, until it is not difficult to fancy that unearthly forms are near.... At the hour of vespers, there are as many as two hundred women in the church, [their heads always covered with their brown or scarlet capulets,] and its ancient, sombre interior appears filled with hooded figures, such as have often troubled our childish dreams, kneeling and crouching in the uncertain twilight to the sound of the Miserere."[[26]]
No one knows the age of this church. Some accounts give the year 1060, but as the Templars' order was not founded until 1117 or 1118, this is improbable. They were warlike in their religion, these Templars, quite as able to fight as to pray, pledged "never to fly before three infidels even when alone," and with a stirring touch of romance about all their history. They were planted here, as is stated, to guard the frontier in those troublous times, keeping vigilant watch against both Saracens and Spaniards; and few will say that the Christian valley of Luz could have been more efficiently defended.
After we have looked over the interior, the sacristan conducts us out into the mouldy little burying-ground at one side, and crossing the grass, proudly points out in the surrounding wall the chief historic ear-mark of the place,—a scar among the stones, where was once a narrow opening through the wall. This was the despised entrance set apart for that singular race, the Cagots. The Cagots were a once-distinct tribe dwelling in corners of all these Pyrenean valleys, similar to the Cacous or Caqueux of Brittany and Auvergne, and for some reason held as outcasts and in universal detestation. The popular abhorrence of them was phenomenal. Their origin is not known: of Goths, Alans, Moors, Jews, Egyptians, each theory has had its propounder. Even the taint of descent from lepers has been ascribed to them. But whoever their ancestors, the people would none of them. They were pariahs, proscribed and held infamous. They lived in separate hamlets, shunned and insulted, their lives desolate and joyous, without hope, without spirit, without ambition. Laws were passed against them, one at Bordeaux as late as 1596,—many earlier; by these they were even denied the rights of citizens; they could not bear arms, nor engage in any trade save wood-working or menial occupations, nor marry out of their race; they were obliged to wear a scarlet badge on the shoulder, in the shape of a goose's foot; they were not to go barefoot in towns lest they contaminate the streets, and the penalty was branding with a red-hot iron; they were not to touch the provisions in the market-place nor the holy water in the font; they must creep into the church corners through contemptuous side-doors, as at Larroque and Lannemezan and here at Luz. The priests would hardly admit them to confession; the tribunals required the testimony of seven to equal that of a citizen; and hatred pursued them even to the grave and compelled their dead to be buried in lonely plots of ground, separate and remote from the Acre of God.
Did a burgher sicken and die, witchcraft was charged to the Cagot; did a reckless mob seek to vent its spite, it fell upon the Cagot. Despite popular report, most of them had the appearance of ordinary humanity, though rarely its spirit; a few even held their own intellectually; but very many, bred in by constant intermarriage of kin, seem to have become as the Swiss cretins,—deformed, idiotic, repulsive.
The Cagots were cursed "on four separate heads and on four separate and opposing propositions: for being lepers, for being Jews, for being Egyptians, and for being Moors or Saracens;" and they were persecuted "as though the objectionable points of all four races were centred in them." As lepers, they were reputed to be descendants of the cursed Gehazi; as Egyptians, they were ascribed the jettatura or evil eye; as Saracens, they were held unclean and descended from infidels; and as Jews, their enforced pursuit of the carpenter's trade was considered as proving that their ancestors were the builders of the Cross!
Few of the race are to be found in these happier days; the old laws were softened during the first quarter of the eighteenth century, and the Revolution did away with them altogether. The Cagots as a separate tribe have gradually disappeared or been absorbed. Yet the antipathy to the name and the tribe even to-day in some of these regions, though now chiefly a tradition, is still alive and implacable. M. Ramond, the Saussure of the Pyrenees, carefully studied these outcasts over seventy-five years ago, and made this touching statement concerning them:
"I have seen," he wrote, "some families of these unfortunate creatures. They are gradually approaching the villages from which prejudice has banished them. The side-doors by which they were formerly obliged to enter the churches are useless, and some degree of pity mingles at length with the contempt and aversion which they formerly inspired; yet I have been in some of their retreats where they still fear the insults of prejudice and await the visits of the compassionate. I have found among them the poorest beings perhaps that exist upon the face of the earth. I have met with brothers who loved each other with that tenderness which is the most pressing want of isolated men. I have seen among them women whose affection had a somewhat in it of that submission and devotion which are inspired by feebleness and misfortune. And never, in this half-annihilation of those beings of my species, could I recognize without shuddering the extent of the power which we may exercise over the existence of our fellow,—the narrow circle of knowledge and of enjoyment within which we may confine him,—the smallness of the sphere to which we may reduce his usefulness.".