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.