The Hundred Years' War put a stop to the accumulation of art treasures in the metropolitan church. When Charles VII, "the little king of Bourges," as the English had dubbed him ironically, went with the victorious Maid of Orleans to be crowned king at Rheims, his gentle queen, Marie of Anjou, stayed in Bourges with her mother, Yolande of Aragon. Marie's brother, then a youth under Jeanne's command, was to become the good King René of history. To Bourges Jeanne herself came later. She lodged with an estimable widow of the town who, years afterward, during the inquest conducted for the Maid's rehabilitation, bore testimony to the young girl's simple goodness. She told how gallantly Jeanne mounted a horse and how adroitly she managed a lance so that "everyone was in admiration of her, for no knight could have done better."[137]
Then when "_Jehanne la bonne Lorraine_," as Villon called her, had given France a new soul, when the blight of the Great Schism of the West was over, and France accepted the same spiritual chief as the remainder of Europe, there came about the energetic, happy, restless manifestation of art which we call Flamboyant Gothic. Bourges then possessed a Mæcenas in the person of a merchant (son of a tradesman of the city) whose ships covered the sea. Jacques Coeur, from 1443 to 1452, built himself, in his native town, the finest burgher's house in France, to see which René of Anjou--great-nephew of Jean of Berry--came especially to Bourges. Its walls were carved with quaint devices and images,[138] and, like Van Eyck's, were the charming little angels painted on its chapel vaults. No civic monument in the land excels it; it ranks as the best with Rouen's Palais de Justice and the Hôtel Cluny at Paris.
The same merchant-prince built in Bourges Cathedral a private chapel for his family, and beside it a rich Flamboyant Gothic sacristy. The Annunciation window in the chapel (1450) is held to be the best glass of its century, uniting the better drawing of the later day with a plain, firm, general design. The face of the Angel Gabriel has been said to be a portrait of Jacques Coeur. St. James is represented in pilgrim garb because of the fame of his shrine at Santiago Compostela. It is thought that Jacques Coeur donated the row of richly damasked windows in the west façade beneath Jean of Berry's big sheet of glass, made fifty years earlier. Colors have become richer and the figures show a tendency to escape from the rigid attitude of statues, but not yet has absolute congruity between the hues been achieved.
