The narrative is as follows:-- "'In 1360, twenty-six years ago, when I was myself thirty-nine years of age, the event happened which I have now to tell you.

I was a Cagot from my birth, by my parents and my ancestors--a proscribed outcast of unkind nature, like these you see around--poor, ignorant, timid, and a mark for insult and contempt.

I had already suffered much; for God, alas! had given me a heart formed to feel and to love; yet long habits of endurance had, in great measure, rendered it callous and insensible, unaided as I was by intellectual culture.
"'I married a woman of my race; but, after a year, she died, leaving me in lonely widowed sorrow, with one child.

Alas! he has just rejoined his mother, and rude is the journey which has conducted him to her! "'At this period, as you know, and as I afterwards learnt from the mouth of your venerable preceptor, the holy hermit, all France was overrun with bands of marauders and robbers of every nation, called the _late-comers_.[48] Bearn was no more free from them than other parts of the kingdom.

One day, I was returning from Oloron, my heart more sad than usual,--cursing men and life, for I had been the object of new injuries,--when a chief of one of these predatory bands suddenly presented himself before me; and, addressing me, said: 'Good man, will you do a kind action?
Take this infant, abandoned to my men-at-arms by an unfaithful servant.