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Origin and history

The Hotel de Bastard-Castaing is a former mansion built in the second half of the eighteenth century for Louis de Castaing, lieutenant general at the Presidial of Lectoure, and his wife Marie-Marguerite de Bastard-Saint-Denis. Located on Rue Lagrange, it dominates the city with its successive terraces and its back porch, between Rue Subervie and Rue Saint-Gervais. Its sober, stone-cut architecture is distinguished by elegant woodwork and interior stucco decorations, organized around a central corridor.

Upon the death of Louis de Castaing, the hotel passed to their son François-Dominique (1747-1821), ultra-royalist mayor of Lectoure from 1815 to 1819. Without a direct heir, the property was owned by his cousin Jean-Baptiste de Bastard, Baron d'Empire, whose widow hosted a rival royalist salon at the Descamps Hotel (Republican Hall). The Baroness received notables, poets like Jean-François Bladé, and made it a major cultural place until her death in 1867.

Sold in 1869 to the local bourgeois Dufour family, the hotel retains its worldly prestige until 1920, despite financial difficulties. The Dufours, including Alexander (poet and lawyer) and his mother Anaïs, were already with the Baroness. Turned into a tobacco warehouse and then into a professional high school in the 20th century, it was bought by the municipality in 1948. Restored in 1983, it became the hotel-restaurant Le Bastard in 1984, while preserving its historical decorations (gypseries, staircases, facades), classified as Historical Monuments since 1984.

The architecture incorporates remarkable elements: a carved stone sink, mosaics in the stairwell, and vaulted brick cellars. The garden, once terraced, now houses a swimming pool. The hotel symbolizes the social evolution of Lectoure, from a place of aristocratic power (family of Castaing) to a bourgeois space (Dufour), then to a public heritage.

His literary history is marked by Jean-François Bladé, a gascon folklorist whose son Étienne won a prize from the Floral Games for an Elegie inspired by the hotel. In 1930, his grand-niece Jean Balde described a melancholy visit to the desert building, evoking the ghosts of his golden age. These accounts testify to its persistent cultural aura, well beyond its original function.

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