d 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 suspi