required to wear a distinctive badge—a goose's foot in red cloth attached to one shoulder. The expression "Cagot" is still used as a term of opprobrium. But when one asks to be shown a Cagot, after some hesitation, a cretin or a poor creature afflicted with a goître is pointed out.
But the original Cagot was not such.
Jean Darnal, a solicitor in the Parliament of Bordeaux, thus describes the Cagots, whom he calls Gahets, in his Chronique Bourdeloise, 1555.
"The magistrates gave orders that the Gahets should reside outside the town on the side of S. Julien, in a little faubourg apart, that they should not leave it without wearing conspicuously a bit of red cloth. These are a sort of lepers, with the disease in an undeveloped condition, with whom it is ill to associate. They are carpenters by trade, and capital workmen, and gain their livelihood by this trade in the town and in the country."
One notion concerning them was that they descended from the carpenter who had made the cross of Christ; and most of them, though by no means all, actually were carpenters. Florimond de Rémond, councillor of the Parliament of Bordeaux, wrote concerning them in 1613:—
"We see in Guyenne this race, commonly designated Cangots or Capots, one which although Christian and Catholic, holds no communication with others, and may enter into no alliance with other Christians; even to live in their towns is not allowed. They are not suffered to approach the Holy Table along with other Christians, and have a place set apart for them in the churches. The people are convinced that they are diseased, that their breath and sweat is malodorous, and that they are to some extent lepers. This is why that in many places, as at Bordeaux, they are constrained to wear a scrap of red cloth on one shoulder."
