Eastern luxuries--silks, gems, perfumes and spices--was immense, and the trade too lucrative to be renounced; and so Rome satisfied her conscience by allowing the traffic to be carried on by certain persons within certain well-defined limits, and was handsomely paid for the concession. The merchants of Montpellier in France had obtained a license from the pope to send one ship yearly to Eastern ports, and to their fraternity Jacques Coeur joined himself in 1432. He had chosen a propitious moment to begin his operations. France was beginning to recover from the prostrate condition in which the civil war had left her, and Coeur's ventures prospered marvellously. Before long he is the recorded owner of seven vessels, and employer of no less than three hundred agents who represented him in all the chief commercial centres in France and abroad. His ships sailed to the furthest harbors of the Levant, and his relations with the sultan assumed political importance. A contemporary chronicler describes him as "a second Jason, with Cairo for his Colchis strand." [Illustration: PLATE LII HOUSE OF JACQUES COEUR: ENTRANCE] A merchant of such wealth and importance could hardly be overlooked by Charles VII., who had a talent for putting the right man in the right place; and when in 1436 Paris at last consented to admit the king, he re-established an Hôtel des Monnaies in the capital, and gave the direction of it to the man who had managed his own monetary affairs with such striking results. It was in connection with this office that Coeur rendered his country his most important and permanent service. France was flooded with debased coin, English, Burgundian and French: indeed so little could the merchants depend upon the nominal value of the pieces which passed through their hands that they stipulated with each other for payment by weight instead of in the usual legal tender. Jacques Coeur recognized the disastrous effects of this system; and as soon as he became master of the Paris mint undertook to reform it. Money suspected of being under weight was arbitrarily seized, wherever it was found, and a new gold and silver coinage of full value was struck. "The new treasurer," says a chronicler, "believed that the way for the king to grow rich, as for other people, was to pay his debts."