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 the other, or of the antique superstition that the gods grow jealous of human success. Merchant, million- naire, banker, ship-owner, royal favorite, and minister of finance, explorer of the East and monopolist of the glittering trade between that quarter of the globe and his own, great capitalist who had anticipated the brilliant operations of the present time, he expiated his prosperity by poverty, imprisonment, and torture. The obscure points in his career have been elucidated by M. Clement, who has drawn, moreover, a very vivid picture of the corrupt and exhausted state of France during the middle of the fifteenth century.

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