The train which we took from Orléans to Bourges was slow enough to enable us to look out, almost as easily as from a voiture, at the richly wooded country. Here and there a small pyramidal church tower peeps out from the trees, but, as a rule, there is little sign of life in this pleasant country, and even the fields and the gorse-covered commons are bare of sheep and cattle. This train-d’omnibus, in discharge of its functions as a mail train, distributed letter-bags at every station. Here were waiting young girls acting as postmistresses, many of whom had come from a considerable distance, having ridden on bicycles, bare-headed, in the scorching sun, along dusty roads, to deliver up their heavy loads and to enjoy a chat with the travelling postman, who was evidently welcomed by them as bringing all the latest bits of gossip along the line.
About a mile away there is a very beautiful view of the town, and the general effect is a grey one. Roofs and houses—the latter perhaps originally built of yellow-white stone—have all weathered to a beautiful grey, and there is an air of mediævalism about the place. Bourges, indeed, like many other towns in France, goes back to early days for its greatness, and belongs far more to the past than to the present. The fifteenth century saw it at the height of its fame as a king’s residence; Charles VII., perhaps finding the more northerly towns too hot for him during the English occupation, took up his abode there and became for the time being “King of Bourges”; and Louis XI. founded a university in the town.
Here was born the famous Bourdaloue, and Boucher, the painter of Versailles before “le Déluge,” Boucher who was
“a Grasshopper, and painted—
Rose-water Raphael—en couleur de rose,
The crowned Caprice, whose sceptre, nowise sainted,
Swayed the light realms of ballets and bon-mots;
Ruled the dim boudoir’s demi-jour, or drove
Pink-ribboned flocks through some pink-flowered grove,”
and who now, his Grasshopper days ended, lies buried beside his mother in the Church of Saint Bonnet.
Perhaps the principal interest of old Bourges centres in the name of Jacques Cœur, the merchant prince, “a Vanderbilt or a Rothschild of the fifteenth century,” who in his days of prosperity built a great house on the hill-side where his native town stands. Cœur, we are told, founded the trade between France and the Levant; later he became Master of the Mint in Paris, and one of the Royal Commissioners to the Languedoc Parliament. He was three times sent on an embassy to foreign powers, notably to Pope Nicholas V. Charles VII., weak, unstable, and always in need of money, relied on him absolutely, but with the usual characteristics of a weak master, was one of the first to desert and despoil him of his wealth when occasion offered. The beginning of the end came through a disgraceful and apparently quite unfounded accusation against Cœur at the time of the death of the famous Agnes Sorel, whom he was accused of poisoning. Jacques was too prosperous not to have enemies, and these were, as usual, prompt to use every opportunity against him. The first steps taken, calumnies of all kind poured in to defame the man whom France had once delighted to honour, and the rest of his career is a strange mixture of exile, mysterious captivity, and equally mysterious escape, honourable reception in Rome, and friendship with the Pope; the last scene of all, perhaps the strangest and most foreign to all idea of a peaceful, prosperous merchant—for here we see him in command, not of a fleet of trading ships laden with merchandise, but of vessels of war sent against the Turks by Pope Calixtus III. Rumour has it that, far from dying in poverty and sorrow, Jacques Cœur, at the end of his life, had acquired greater riches than when at the zenith of his fame in France, but the fact remains that he died in exile, with a cloud over his memory which was not cleared away until many years after, when popular favour again smiled on his name, and he became, what he remains to this day, the citizen-hero of Bourges.
There is a very charming description—too long to quote here—in Mr. Henry James’ “Little Tour in France” of the house of Jacques Cœur; and one point of interest attaching to it is that it is built upon the old defences of the town, and at the back are many considerable remains of solid Roman bastions.
It is one of the most beautiful types of a fifteenth-century town-house that can possibly be imagined—a veritable remnant of the ancient prosperity of Bourges, of a time when such houses were no uncommon feature in the streets—when men who had made their fame and fortune loved to build for themselves a beautiful home in their native town, and enrich it with every conceivable ornament. Modern nouveaux riches indeed do the same, though perhaps not in their native place, where their memory as butcher or baker might, in their eyes, tell against them; but the difference between their “mansions” and the hotel of Jacques Cœur is the difference between an age when the Renaissance was in its early freshness and an age when it has suffered the degradations of many modern horrors in the style that is popularly designated “handsome.” No one looking upon the delicate sculptures, the wonderful wood carving, the courtyard with its cloister, the lovely porticos and galleries, can doubt the taste of the man who built and lived in this “maison pleine de mystères.”
