One day an English general, crossing from Spain and descending the Val d’Aspe, encountered a little shepherd boy with quick eye and intelligent face, whom he questioned about objects of interest in the neighbourhood. Pleased with the lad, he invited him to enter his service as valet, and the youth, who had a rough time at home, without more ado clambered on to the box to travel to distant and unknown regions. This little shepherd was called Loustaunau, and he followed the officer to India. When his master died he sought to make his fortune by starting a house of commerce in the territory of the Mogul. Then war broke out between the Emperor of Delhi and the Nabob of Lahore.
Chancing to witness a battle between them from an eminence, Loustaunau remarked to a Banian that the disposition of the Mogul army was faulty. “If,” said he, “I had the command of 1200 horsemen, and had a couple of cannon, I would soon determine the battle.” What he had said was reported to the Great Mogul, who at once gave him what he desired. The Béarnais jumped on the back of a horse, took the command of a troop, and ranged it behind a bit of rising ground, placed his guns where he could rake the enemy, and charged the centre of the enemy, and broke it, whilst his cannon pounded the troops of the Nabob. The victory was complete.
Loustaunau was richly rewarded, and given a princess to wife, by whom he had several children. In a battle fought against the Maharattas he lost his left hand, and had it replaced by one of silver.
A quarter of a century had elapsed since he left the Pyrenees; he had amassed a fortune, and a longing came over him to revisit his native valley. Accordingly he returned to France and invested his money in factories, and in châteaux that he purchased within Béarn and in Bigorre.
But disaster came. His factories were burnt by the Spaniards, and his fortune melted away. He meditated a return to India, and started for the East. But unhappily he made the acquaintance of Lady Hester Stanhope, who gained complete possession of his mind. Forgetting the needs of his family, and the object of his journey, he stayed with her at the foot of Lebanon, where he led the life of a prophet and illuminé. Lamartine met him there, and there he died. He had left his children at Tarbes. Three of his daughters were alive in 1860, living in poverty, maintaining themselves by needlework, and looking back sadly on their early days as a dream out of the Arabian Nights.
The village of Osse, planted between strangely shaped hills of ophite, facing the south, is the last refuge of Protestantism in the valley. The population is 560, the majority of whom are Calvinists, and they maintain a pastor and have a “Temple.”
Urdos, the Forum Ligneum of the Ancients, is the last town in France. The fortress commanding the pass is hewn in the natural rock, in a buttress of the mountains rising in stages from the road to the height of 500 feet. Externally the mountain gives little token of what it is, honeycombed with galleries, batteries, stairs. A façade of masonry battlemented and flanked by turrets at the foot of the rock, and a few loopholes and embrasures for cannon, pierced in the face of the cliff, are all that show that this is a French Gibraltar, capable of containing a garrison of 3000 men.
Mauleon, the ancient capital of the little viscounty of Soule, that passed to Béarn, is prettily situated on the banks of the Saison, at the foot of a hill that is crowned by a castle reached by a bridge over the moat or chasm artificially cut in the rock.
The huge roofs of the Hôtel d’Andurrain form the hat to a Renaissance building.
Mauleon, after remaining stagnant for centuries, has begun to stir, and has become the centre of manufacture of the espadrillos, or shoe with canvas top and twisted rope sole, so much in use in the Pyrenees and in Spain.