[Illustration:  Jacques Coeur’s Hostel at Bourges——­169]

M. Clement, in his table of Jacques Coeur’s wealth does not count either the mines which he worked at various spots in France, nor the vast capital, unknown, which he turned to profit in his commercial enterprises; but, on the other hand, he names, with certain et ceteras, forty-two court-personages, or king’s officers, indebted to Jacques Coeur for large or small sums he had lent them.  We will quote but two instances of Jacques Coeur’s financial connection, not with courtiers, however, but with the royal family and the king himself.  Margaret of Scotland, wife of the dauphin, who became Louis XI., wrote with her own hand, on the 20th of July, 1445, “We, Margaret, dauphiness of Viennois, do acknowledge to have received from Master Stephen Petit, secretary of my lord the king, and receiver-general of his finances for Languedoc and Guienne, two thousand livres of Tours, to us given by my said lord, and to us advanced by the hands of Jacques Coeur, his moneyman, we being but lately in Lorraine, for to get silken stuff and sables to make robes for our person.”  In 1449, when Charles VII. determined to drive the English from Normandy, his treasury was exhausted, and he had recourse to Jacques Coeur.  “Sir,” said the trader to the king, “what I have is yours,” and lent him two hundred thousand crowns; “the effect of which was,” says Jacques Duclercq, “that during, this conquest, all the men-at-arms of the King of France, and all those who were in his service, were paid their wages month by month.”

An original document, dated 1450, which exists in the “cabinet des titres” of the National Library, bears upon it a receipt for sixty thousand livres from Jacques Coeur to the king’s receiver-general in Normandy, “in restitution of the like sum lent by me in ready money to the said lord in the month of August last past, on occasion of the surrendering to his authority of the towns and castle of Cherbourg, at that time held by the English, the ancient enemies of this realm.”  It was probably a partial repayment of the two hundred thousand crowns lent by Jacques Coeur to the king at this juncture, according to all the contemporary chroniclers.

Enormous and unexpected wealth excites envy and suspicion at the same time that it confers influence; and the envious before long become enemies.  Sullen murmurs against Jacques Coeur were raised in the king’s own circle; and the way in which he had begun to make his fortune—­the coinage of questionable money—­furnished some specious ground for them.  There is too general an inclination amongst potentates of the earth to give an easy ear to reasons, good or bad, for dispensing with the gratitude and respect otherwise due to those who serve them.  Charles VII., after having long been the patron and debtor of Jacques Coeur, all at once, in 1451, shared the suspicions aroused against him.  To accusations of grave abuses and malversations in money matters