Again, they were thought to be Saracens, coming from Syria.  In confirmation of this idea, was the belief that all Cagots were possessed by a horrible smell.  The Lombards, also, were an unfragrant race, or so reputed among the Italians:  witness Pope Stephen’s letter to Charlemagne, dissuading him from marrying Bertha, daughter of Didier, King of Lombardy.  The Lombards boasted of Eastern descent, and were noisome.  The Cagots were noisome, and therefore must be of Eastern descent.  What could be clearer?  In addition, there was the proof to be derived from the name Cagot, which those maintaining the opinion of their Saracen descent held to be Chiens, or Chasseurs des Gots, because the Saracens chased the Goths out of Spain.  Moreover, the Saracens were originally Mahometans, and as such obliged to bathe seven times a-day:  whence the badge of the duck’s foot.  A duck was a water-bird:  Mahometans bathed in the water.  Proof upon proof!

In Brittany the common idea was, they were of Jewish descent.  Their unpleasant smell was again pressed into service.  The Jews, it was well known, had this physical infirmity, which might be cured either by bathing in a certain fountain in Egypt—­which was a long way from Brittany—­or by anointing themselves with the blood of a Christian child.  Blood gushed out of the body of every Cagot on Good Friday.  No wonder, if they were of Jewish descent.  It was the only way of accounting for so portentous a fact.  Again; the Cagots were capital carpenters, which gave the Bretons every reason to believe that their ancestors were the very Jews who made the cross.  When first the tide of emigration set from Brittany to America, the oppressed Cagots crowded to the ports, seeking to go to some new country, where their race might be unknown.  Here was another proof of their descent from Abraham and his nomadic people:  and, the forty years’ wandering in the wilderness and the Wandering Jew himself, were pressed into the service to prove that the Cagots derived their restlessness and love of change from their ancestors, the Jews.  The Jews, also, practised arts-magic, and the Cagots sold bags of wind to the Breton sailors, enchanted maidens to love them—­maidens who never would have cared for them, unless they had been previously enchanted—­made hollow rocks and trees give out strange and unearthly noises, and sold the magical herb called bon-succes.  It is true enough that, in all the early acts of the fourteenth century, the same laws apply to Jews as to Cagots, and the appellations seem used indiscriminately; but their fair 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.