In its first appeal to the stranger’s eye there is something unpleasing; a mingling, as it seems to him, of over severity with over minuteness. But let him give it time, as he should to all other consummate art. I remember well how, when a boy, I used to despise that Campanile, and think it meanly smooth and finished. But I have since lived beside it many a day, and looked out upon it from my windows by sunlight and moonlight, and I shall not soon forget how profound and gloomy appeared to me the savageness of the Northern Gothic, when I afterwards stood, for the first time, beneath the front of Salisbury. The contrast is indeed strange, if it could be quickly felt, between the rising of those grey walls out of their quiet swarded space, like dark and barren rocks out of a green lake, with their rude, mouldering, rough-grained shafts, and triple lights, without tracery or other ornament than the martins’ nests in the height of them, and that bright, smooth, sunny surface of glowing jasper, those spiral shafts and fairy traceries, so white, so faint, so crystalline, that their slight shapes are hardly traced in darkness on the pallor of the Eastern sky, that serene height of mountain alabaster, coloured like a morning cloud, and chased like a sea shell. And if this be, as I believe it, the model and mirror of perfect architecture, is there not something to be learned by looking back to the early life of him who raised it? I said that the Power of human mind had its growth in the Wilderness; much more must the love and the conception of that beauty, whose every line and hue we have seen to be, at the best, a faded image of God’s daily work, and an arrested ray of some star of creation, be given chiefly in the places which He has gladdened by planting there the fir-tree and the pine. Not within the walls of Florence, but among the far away fields of her lilies, was the child trained who was to raise that head-stone of Beauty above the towers of watch and war. Remember all that he became; count the sacred thoughts with which he filled Italy; ask those who followed him what they learned at his feet; and when you have numbered his labours, and received their testimony, if it seem to you that God had verily poured out upon this His servant no common nor restrained portion of His Spirit, and that he was indeed a king among the children of men, remember also that the legend upon his crown was that of David’s:—“I took thee from the sheepcote, and from following the sheep.”

The Seven Lamps of Architecture (London, 1849).

THE HOUSE OF JACQUES CŒUR IN BOURGES.
AD. BERTY.

Certainly Jacques Cœur, that citizen of humble birth, who, by his merit reached the highest dignity of state at an epoch when aristocracy reigned supreme, this man of genius, who, while creating a maritime commerce for France, amassed so great a fortune for himself that he was able to help towards the deliverance of his own country in supporting at his own expense four armies at the same time, was not one of the least important figures of the Fifteenth Century. Posterity has not always been just to this illustrious upstart: he should be ranked immediately after Jeanne d’Arc, for the sword of the Maid of Domrémy would, perhaps, have been powerless to chase the enemy from the soil (which a cowardly king did not think of repulsing), without the wise economy and the generous sacrifices of him, who, at a later period, was abandoned by the king to the rapacity of his courtiers with that same ignoble ingratitude which he had shown to the sainte libertrice of the great nation over which he was so unworthy to rule.

Jacques Cœur was the son of a furrier, or according to some authorities, a goldsmith of Bourges. He was probably following his father’s business when his intelligence and talents brought him into the notice of Charles VII., who had been forced to take refuge in the capital of Berry on account of the English conquests. The king appointed him to the mint, then made him master of this branch of administration, and, finally, argentier, a title equivalent to superintendent of finance. Cœur, in his new and brilliant position, did not abandon commerce to which he owed his fortune; his ships continued to furrow the seas, and three hundred clerks aided him in bartering European products for the silks and spices of the East and in realizing a fortune. Always fortunate in his enterprises, ennobled[9] by the king in 1440, and charged by him with many important political missions, he probably did not know how to resist the vertigo which always seizes those of mean origin who attain great eminence. He exhibited an extraordinary luxury, whose splendours humiliated the pride of the noble courtiers, excited their hatred and envy, and contributed to his ruin. With little regard for the great services which he had rendered to the country, such as, for example, the gift of 200,000 crowns in gold at the time of the expedition of Normandy, the nobles only saw in the magnificent argentier an unworthy gambler, who should be deprived of his immense wealth[10] for their profit. For this purpose they organized a cabal. Cœur was charged with a multitude of crimes: he was accused of having poisoned Agnès Sorel, who had made him her testamentary executor, of having altered money, and of various other peculations; he was also reproached for having extorted money for various purposes in the name of the king....

The sentence of Jacques Cœur was not entirely executed; he was not banished, but, on the contrary, was imprisoned in the Convent des Cordeliers de Beaucaire. Aided by one of his clerks, Jean de Village, who had married his niece, he made his escape and went to Rome, where Pope Calixtus III., at that moment preparing an expedition against the Turks, gave him command of a flotilla. Cœur then departed, but, falling ill on the way, he disembarked at Chio, where he died in 1461. His body was buried in the church of the Cordeliers in that island.

Of the different houses which Jacques Cœur possessed, the one considered among the most beautiful in all France, exists almost intact, and is still known under the name of the Maison de Jacques Cœur, although it now serves for a hall of justice and mayoralty. This house, or rather this hôtel, was built between the years 1443 and 1453, and cost a sum equal to 215,000 francs of our money. For its construction, Cœur, having bought one of the towers of the ramparts of Bourges, commonly called Tour de la chaussée, from the fief of this name, built on a level with it another and more beautiful tower, and these two towers served as a beginning for the manoir, which was called, in consequence, the Hôtel de la chaussée. In building it they used stones taken from the old Roman walls of the town, which were on the site of the new hôtel, and which had already been pulled down by virtue of a charter given by Louis VIII. in 1224, by which, permission had been granted for building upon the ramparts and fortifications. At the time of the revision of the law-suit of Jacques Cœur under Louis XI. the hôtel was given back to his heirs, who in 1552 sold it to Claude de l’Aubespine, secretary of state. By a descendant of the latter it was ceded to Colbert in 1679; Colbert sold it again to the town of Bourges on January 30, 1682, for the sum of 33,000 livres. Jacques Cœur’s house was therefore destined to become a hôtel-de-ville, and, as we have said, still exists to-day.

HOUSE OF JACQUES CŒUR, BOURGES

The plan of the building is an irregular pentagon, composed of different bodies of buildings joined without any symmetry, according to the general disposition of almost all mediæval civil and military buildings. The large towers are Jacques Cœur’s original ones. One was entirely reconstructed by him with the exception of the first story, which is of Roman work, as the layers of brick and masonry indicate; the other, on the contrary, received only its crown and a new interior construction, and, like the first, was flanked by a tower destined to serve as a cage for the stairway. The court of honour is vast, and arranged so that it was easy to communicate with the different parts of the hôtel.