Jacques de Vaucanson, who died when Jacquard was thirty years old, was one of the most celebrated mechanicians of France. His automatons were the wonder of the age. He exhibited a duck which, when moved, ate and drank like a live one. The figure would stretch out its neck for food, and swallow it: walk, swim, dabble in the water, and quack most naturally. His musician, playing the flageolet with the left hand, and beating the tambourine with the right, executing many pieces of difficult music with great accuracy, was an astonishment to every body. He had been appointed inspector of silk-factories at Lyons, and, because he made some improvements in machines, he was pelted with stones by the workmen, who feared that they would thereby lose their labor. He revenged himself by making a machine which wove, brocaded, and colored at the same time, and was worked by a donkey!
It remained for Jacquard to make the Vaucanson loom of the utmost practical use to Lyons and to the world. After a time he was not only able to dispense with one workman at each loom, but he made machinery do the work of three men and two women at each frame. The city authorities sent a model of this machine to Paris, that the Emperor Napoleon might examine it. So pleased was he that he at once sent for Jacquard to come to Paris. The latter had previously invented a machine for making fishing-nets, now used in producing Nottingham lace. When brought before Bonaparte, and Carnot the Minister of the Interior, the latter asked, "Is it you then, who pretend to do a thing which is impossible for man,—to make a knot upon a tight thread?"
Jacquard answered the brusque inquiry by setting up a machine, and letting the incredulous minister see for himself.
The Emperor made Jacquard welcome to the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers, where he could study books and machines to his heart's content, and gave him a pension of about twelve hundred dollars for his discovery. When he had, with his own hands, woven a magnificent brocaded silk dress for the Empress Josephine, he returned to Lyons to set up the Jacquard looms. His name began to be lauded everywhere. Claudine's prophecies had at last come true. She had given her life to help him; but she could not live to share his honors.
Soon, however, the tide of praise turned. Whole families found themselves forced into the street for lack of work, as the looms were doing what their hands had done. Bands of unemployed men were shouting, "Behold the traitor! Let him provide for our wives and children now driven as mendicants from door to door; or let him, the destroyer of the peoples' labor, share in the death which he has prepared for us!" The authorities seemed unable to quell the storm, and by their orders the new loom was broken in pieces on the public square. "The iron," says Jacquard, "was sold as old iron; the wood, for fuel." One day he was seized by a crowd of starving workmen, who knocked him down, and dragged him to the banks of the Rhone, where he would have been drowned at once, had not the police rescued him, bleeding and nearly dead. He left the city overwhelmed with astonishment and sorrow. Soon Switzerland, Germany, Italy, and America were using the Jacquard looms, largely increasing the manufacture and sale of silk, and therefore the number of laborers. The poor men of Lyons awoke to the sad fact, that by breaking up Jacquard's machines, they had put the work of silk-weaving into other hands all over the world; and idleness was proving their ruin. They might have doubled and trebled the number of their factories, and benefited labor a thousand-fold.
The inventor refused to take out a patent for himself, nor would he accept any offers made him by foreigners, because he thought all his services belonged to France. He loved the working people, who, for twenty years, were too blind to see it.
He removed to a little home and garden at Oullins, near Lyons, the use of which had been given him for life, where he could hear the sound of his precious looms on which he had worked for sixty years, and which his city had at last adopted. Here he attended his garden, and went every morning to early church, distributing each day some small pieces of money to poor children. As old age came on, Lyons realized the gratitude due her great inventor. A silver medal was awarded him, and then the grand distinction of the cross of the Legion of Honor.
People from the neighboring towns visited Oullins, and pointed out with pride the noble old man at eighty-four, sitting by his garden-wall, dressed like a workman in his long black tunic, but wearing his broad red ribbon with his cross of honor. Illustrious travellers and statesmen visited him whose fame was now spread through Europe and America.
Toinette, a faithful servant who had known and loved Claudine, watched over the pure-hearted Jacquard till death came, Aug. 7, 1834. Six years after, Lyons, which once broke his machine and nearly killed him, raised a beautiful statue of him in the public square. The more than seventy thousand looms in the city, employing two hundred thousand workmen, are grander monuments even than the statue. The silk-weavers are better housed and fed than formerly. The struggling, self-sacrificing man, who might have been immensely rich as well as famous, was an untold blessing to labor and to the world.