The Cagot Rebellion began here, he said. It was mobilized on the grounds of our local ruin, the Château de Gaume.
The Count of Vantôme, the feudal lord who controlled this region, had a barren wife. The village doctor could do nothing for her. The count’s footman told him of a Cagot named Jacques who had magical powers to heal ailments.
Jacques the Cagot lived in a rock shelter above the creek (one could assume this was near the D79, Bruno said, before, of course, there was a D79). Jacques had jet-black hair and ice-blue eyes. He was two meters tall. For his striking looks, and his reputation for useful magic, Jacques had been afforded certain rights not normally given to Cagots. He was allowed to own a horse, and he had freedom of movement other Cagots did not enjoy. The name of Jacques’s horse was Loli, a swaybacked mare that was much beloved and doted on by Jacques, who believed that his horse was the secret to his own power, that she was a magic horse.
The count sent for Jacques, who came to his manor riding Loli, his beloved mare. Jacques was brought to the bedside of the count’s wife. She told her husband to wait outside, that she wanted absolute quiet while Jacques performed the magical rites that would heal her sterility.
In the days and weeks after Jacques’s visit, the count’s wife underwent a transformation. She was fatigued and nauseous and her belly began to grow. Her hair turned lustrous and thick. Her skin glowed. Her chambermaid gossiped, said she had begun hearing the count and his wife conducting loud and strenuous entanglements in the lady’s chambers. My own interpretation of this, Bruno said, is that the count knew he could take no credit for his wife’s condition, and thus he was trying to overtake her already-pregnancy, against all logic, by inserting a second seed, which would, in his own magical thinking, somehow replace the first seed, clearly Jacques the Cagot’s. Jacques who was handsome, young, two meters tall, and given absolute privacy to cure another man’s wife of a fertility impasse.
When the child was born, a baby girl, it had black hair and pale blue eyes. The count, in a rage—not his child, and even worse, a girl—threw the baby into a well. He cast out his wife, who had to be taken in by her own wet nurse. The count brought charges of sorcery against Jacques, who was burned at the stake with his beloved horse, Loli.
The brutality of the count’s acts, the murder of a baby, the public burning of Jacques, the shunning of his wife, none of these, on their own, sparked what happened next, a revolt that convulsed the whole of the greater Guyenne.
There is always some tipping point, an incitement so outrageous among the smaller but no less hideous acts, that sweeps people into a full-scale insurrection, Bruno said. But we must not romanticize, he said. What made the peasants blind with rage was not the treatment of Jacques and of the baby. Remember, Bruno said, that Cagots were categorically subhuman. The count’s wife, for her gender, was sub-man and a baby girl sub-baby.
It was Loli that was the final straw. A fiefdom that could burn an innocent horse at the stake was a fiefdom worth destroying.
A little background here, Bruno said, is important to understand: For thirty years the peasants had been conscripted by the nobility to fight the religious wars. For a peasant who had never strayed more than a half day’s walk from where he was born, these wars were abstract, wars he was told he must die for and also must pay for, whether through taxation or extortion or land seizure. This situation and its discontents partly explains how it was that peasants and Cagots, historical enemies, suddenly conspired and came together to attack the nobles.
Peasants had targeted the Cagots for generations, and so this collusion between Cagot and peasant was shocking. It was as if, Bruno said, the poor white overseer and the Black man forced into chattel slavery had colluded against plantation owners in the American South, as if the poor white overseer all at once discarded his racial superiority, recognizing it as a dirty prize and little more, for his own servitude.
A peasant had been brought up to believe a Cagot would steal and slaughter your pig or good laying hen. A Cagot would poison your well. He might kidnap your children, curse the weather, blight your crops, or blind a person who met him face-to-face on the road.
Suddenly, these strange people, with their white skin, their red hair, tall and strong and good fighters, were coming out of the woods to help the peasants plan their attacks against the local and regional nobility. And the peasant had to ask himself, Even if he looks a bit different from me, what is it that I hold against this man, the Cagot? Why have I believed he is my enemy, when my real enemies are the magistrate and the tax collector?
The local castle, the Château de Gaume, which had been looted and wrecked in the sieges of the religious wars, became the staging area of this unholy alliance of peasants and Cagots.
The roads to Vantôme brimmed with young and able-bodied men on foot, on donkey, on horseback, traveling to the Château de Gaume to join the rebellion. Some ledgers had it there was a ragtag army of twenty thousand, peasant and Cagot planning and plotting together on the castle grounds.
From the château, the peasants and the Cagots launched a series of attacks on the local nobility, whose armies were outnumbered. The skills of peasants and Cagots, Bruno said, were harmonious, because different. The peasants, for whom military service had been compulsory, used their training to plan their attacks. The Cagots were talented tree climbers with guerrilla tactics and night vision (legend had it that their eyes, like the eyes of a nightjar, glowed orange in the dark).
Working together they launched an offensive and captured nine nobles, who were brought to the Château de Gaume, where they were beheaded on the castle’s open promontory. Centuries prior to the “humane” invention of the guillotine, these beheadings were accomplished with an axe, an imperfect instrument requiring two or three or four swings, making local woodcutters ideal for this assignment. The Cagots and peasants used the nobles’ severed heads for games of pétanque, which the peasants taught to the Cagots. Given that Cagots had not been allowed the standard few rituals of leisure—dancing, lawn bowling—that a peasant was allowed, they were unfamiliar with the rules of pétanque, much less pétanque with severed nobles’ heads.
So far so good, Bruno said. But do you even need to hear what comes next? You can imagine it. The rebellion was crushed, and brutally.
King Henry IV called in reinforcements, so many troops that their horses stirred up an enormous churn, a column of dust that could be seen from the tactical lookouts along the highest bluffs in the valley. A huge army was bearing down on their fortification in the Château de Gaume. As news spread of the imminent arrival of the king’s armed troops, some of the peasants betrayed the Cagots, to try to save themselves in desperate acts of turncoatism, such as running toward the approaching army with their arms up, shouting surrender (many were trampled to death in the process). The army captured everyone, regardless, and herded them all onto the promontory of the château. Cagots and peasants side by side were slaughtered without differentiation, as one enemy. Hundreds were buried in a mass grave on the château’s grounds.
As order in the region was reestablished, an amnesia set in, Bruno said. The peasants took up, once again, the social contract of their rulers, which required of them that they loathe those deemed Cagot, their own superiority over this wretched creature a paltry payment for serfdom, but a payment nonetheless.
Later, in the chaos of the monarchy’s collapse, Cagots stormed local magistrates, burning birth certificates and other records of their low social status. Legally, they became French, and thus the Cagots—as a category, a trauma, a foreclosed victory—all but vanished.
The strange history of the Château de Gaume, Bruno said, has only reinforced this vanishing. In 1940, when nomadism was outlawed by the Vichy, the château became a prison overseen by German officers. Communists, teachers, trade unionists, and all manner of “undesirables,” gypsies and Poles, “persons with no fixed address,” were rounded up and held there. Many died of malnutrition or dysentery, or were shot while attempting to flee, and put in a mass grave. This is why no French leader has ever agreed to examine the castle’s grounds, which have been abandoned for decades.
Relatives of those interred there in 1940 have asked for a monument. The descendants of Cagots have asked for no such thing. People of that lineage, Bruno said, do not announce it. Instead, Cagot heritage is a secret flame that is cupped and held and protected from the wind.
AS I TURNED UP the shaded gravel road to the house from the D43, eager to get home, take a shower, and drink some water (I didn’t trust the water in the lavoir), I heard a car coming down this private road, from the direction of the house. And then I saw the car: a little white Citroën panel truck, an older man driving it. His windows were down.
“Sadie? It’s Robert!”
I smiled as if I knew who this was.
“Your uncle!” he said in an aggressively friendly voice. “You don’t know me. We’ve never met you. And Agathe said to me, why don’t you make the trip, see if she’s gotten into the house okay. Show her some hospitality. That’s Agathe. She worries. And I knew, there’s no settling this without driving over, to make sure you’re okay. Never mind that Agathe and I have never even caught a glimpse of you. No one has. It’s a bit odd!” He chuckled.
“But Lucien, he was always off the beaten path. I thought he was, you know. There’s one in every family, right? We weren’t offended not to get much warning he was having you stay in the house. But we were curious. It’s natural to wonder. The Dubois name is quite… you know. These people are protective and even a bit snob if you want to know what I think. No one in that family does care what I think. But between us, Sadie, they have a point. I have to admit they have a point. The thing is no one seems to know anything about you. Our daughter did a bit of research on the internet. She said there wasn’t much. A page she thought might be yours on some kind of professional network, but you needed to join the network to see the details.”
Sadie Smith is what this man and his daughter would know to type in. But Smith isn’t even a name. It’s a placeholder. Smith is Anglo-American for Last Name, which makes me barely googleable, lost in a sea of Smiths. There’s a LinkedIn page, nothing suspicious about it.
I stepped toward his window.
Robert was overweight and bald, with purplish-red blotches on his neck and face. His laugh was phlegmy and emphysemic; he rumbled. Behind his big smile and his loud voice, he looked ill. Not long for this world.
“I told Agathe, let the boy be,” he went on. “It’s a relief he’s not, you know—”
“Lucien isn’t gay,” I said.
“Oh, I do not think he is!” He laughed, which sent him into a coughing fit.
You’re headed for portable oxygen, I didn’t say.
“And, you know, Lucien”—he was looking me up and down—“maybe he’s done okay for himself.”
There was something wrong with Robert’s eyeballs. They were pointy. They bulged, as if trying to lurch toward what he was looking at, get a head start. Or like someone had stepped on his eyeballs by accident, squishing them out of round.
Is that a health condition? I wondered.
“I told my wife, go easy. Don’t pry into Lucien’s business. Technically it’s his house. This American woman, sure, we don’t know her, and she seems to have come… out of nowhere. Still, she’s his girlfriend. We’ll make the trip over to the house when they invite us.”
“But here you are,” I said.
