The old Route Royale between Bayonne and the capital of Béarn and Navarre passed through Orthez, and the same narrow streets, irregular, badly paved, and badly kept up, are those which one traverses to-day on entering and leaving the city. One great improvement has been made in the ancient quarter of the town--though of course one does not know what historical souvenirs it may have supplanted--and that is the laying out of a _mail_ or mall, planted on either side with great elms, and running from the banks of the Gave to the fine fifteenth-century--but still Gothic--church, well at the centre of the town. The "_jambons de Bayonne_" are mostly cured at Orthez, and it is indeed the leading industry of the city. The porkers of Orthez may not be corn fed, but they are well and cleanly nourished, which is more than can be said of many "domesticated pigs" in New and Old England, which are eaten with a great relish by those who have brought them up. In the religious wars Orthez played a grand rôle, and in 1814 it was the scene of one of the great struggles of France against alien invasion of her territory. Just north of the city, on the height of a flanking hill, Wellington--at the head of a force very much superior, let no one forget--inflicted a bloody defeat on Maréchal Soult. The Duc de Dalmatie lost, it is recorded, nearly four thousand men, but he wounded or killed six thousand in the same engagement. General Foy here received his fourth wound on the field of battle. Orthez is one of the really great feudal cities of the south of France. In the ninth century it was known as Orthesium, and belonged to the Vicomtes de Dax, who, only when they were conquered by Gaston III, Prince of Béarn, ceded the city to the crown of Béarn and Navarre. It was in the château of Orthez that the unfortunate Blanche of Castille, daughter of the king of Aragon, was poisoned by her sister, the wife of Gaston IV, Comte de Foix. This was one of the celebrated crimes of history, though for that matter the builder of the château, the magnificent (_sic_) Gaston Phoebus, committed one worthy to rank with it when he killed his brother and "propre fils" on the mere suspicion that they might some day be led to take sides against him. Orthez flourished greatly under its Protestant princes, but it waned and all but dwindled away in the unpeaceful times immediately following upon the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The cessation of the practice of the arts of industry, and very nearly those of commerce, left the city poor and impoverished, and it is only within recent generations that it has arisen again to importance.