An essay chronicles the long-standing marginalization of a stigmatized minority known as Cagots in regions along the Pyrenees and western France, describing how custom and law enforced their isolation and unclear origins. It catalogs restrictions that confined them to certain trades, forbade land ownership and bearing arms, limited livestock and access to markets, fountains, and taverns, and required conspicuous badges. It details ecclesiastical segregation in churches and separate burial grounds, illustrates everyday humiliations and fines, and notes that only late legal reforms began to restore equal civic rights while leaving the group's origin and the roots of the prejudice unexplained.