Chapter 12

The cathedral is not the only lion of Bourges; the
house of Jacques Coeur is an object of interest scarcely
less positive. This remarkable man had a very strange
history, and he too was "broken," like the wretched
soldier whom I did not stay to see. He has been re-
habilitated, however, by an age which does not fear
the imputation of paradox, and a marble statue of
him ornaments the street in front of his house. To
interpret him according to this image - a womanish
figure in a long robe and a turban, with big bare arms
and a dramatic pose - would be to think of him as a
kind of truculent sultana. He wore the dress of his
period, but his spirit was very modern; he was a Van-
derbilt or a Rothschild of the fifteenth century. He
supplied the ungrateful Charles VII. with money to pay
the troops who, under the heroic Maid, drove the
English from French soil. His house, which to-day is
used as a Palais de Justice, appears to have been re-
garded at the time it was built very much as the resi-
dence of Mr. Vanderbilt is regarded in New York to-day.
It stands on the edge of the hill on which most of the
town is planted, so that, behind, it plunges down to a
lower level, and, if you approach it on that side, as I
did, to come round to the front of it, you have to
ascend a longish flight of steps. The back, of old,
must have formed a portion of the city wall; at any
rate, it offers to view two big towers, which Joanne
says were formerly part of the defence of Bourges.
From the lower level of which I speak - the square in
front of the post-office - the palace of Jacques Coeur
looks very big and strong and feudal; from the upper
street, in front of it, it looks very handsome and deli-
cate. To this street it presents two stories and a con-
siderable length of facade; and it has, both within and
without, a great deal of curious and beautiful detail.
Above the portal, in the stonework, are two false win-
dows, in which two figures, a man and a woman, ap-
parently household servants, are represented, in sculp-
ture, as looking down into the street. The effect is
homely, yet grotesque, and the figures are sufficiently
living to make one commiserate them for having been
condemned, in so dull a town, to spend several cen-
turies at the window. They appear to be watching for
the return of their master, who left his beautiful house
one morning and never came back.

The history of Jacques Coeur, which has been
written by M. Pierre Clement, in a volume crowned
by the French Academy, is very wonderful and in-
teresting, but I have no space to go into it here.
There is no more curious example, and few more
tragical, of a great fortune crumbling from one day to