Lescar is but a league distant from Pau, but not many of those who winter in that delightful city ever come here. "The Normans razed it in 856, when it was rebuilt on the side of a hill in the midst of a wood." This was the old chronicler's description, and it holds good to-day. Usually travellers find the big cities like Pau or Tarbes so irresistible that they have no eye for the charm of the small town. The country-side they like, and the cities, and yet the dull, little, sleepy old-world towns whose names are never mentioned in the newspapers, and often nowhere but on the road maps of the automobilist, are possessed of many pleasing attributes for which one may look in vain in more populous places. Lescar has some of these, one of them being its Hôtel Uglas. Lescar is a good brisk hour and a half's stroll from Pau, the classic constitutional recommended by the doctors to the semi-invalids who are so frequently met with at Pau, and is a humble, dull bourgade even to-day, sleepy, rustic, and unprogressive, and accordingly a delightful contrast to its ostentatious neighbour. Poor Lescar, its fall has been profound since the days when it was the Beneharnum of the Romans. Its bishopric has been shredded into nonentity, and its ancient cathedral disfigured by interpolated banalities until one can hardly realize to-day that it was once a metropolitan church. St. Denis, as the old cathedral of Lescar is named, was once the royal burial-place of Béarn, as was its namesake just outside of Paris the sepulchre of the kings of France. Here the Béarnais royalties who were kings and queens of Navarre came to their last long slumbers. Side by side lie the Centulles and the D'Albrets. The cathedral sits upon a terrace formed of the ancient ramparts of the old city, and right here is the chief attraction and charm of Lascarris, "_la ville morte_." Lascarris, as it was known before it became simply Lescar, was built up anew after the primitive city had been destroyed by the Saracens in 841. This rampart terrace has one great architectural monument, formerly a part of the ancient fortress, a simple, severe tower in outline, but of most complicated construction, built up of bands of brick and stone in a regular building-block fashion, a caprice of some local builder. Through this tower one gains access to the cathedral, which shows plainly how the affairs of church and state, and war and peace, were closely bound together in times past. This little brick and stone tower is the only remaining fragment of the fourteenth-century fortress-château known as the Fort de l'Esquirette.