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thirty-first birthday, Jacquard confessed to Barret that he had spent almost all his inheritance.
    Jacquard’s more romantic contemporary biographers attribute his descent into poverty to spending too much time trying to build a better loom, but in fact there is no evidence whatsoever that Jacquard was working as an inventor at this stage in his life.
    A sombre chapter in Jacquard’s life followed. He does not appear to have gone bankrupt, but he was certainly forced to sell almost everything that remained of his inheritance: a small house, two drawlooms, as well as his wife’s modest jewellery and even—according to one source—his very own bed. He sank to the level of an unemployed workman, inevitably dragging his family down with him.
    It is not known for certain what Jacquard did next. Some nineteenth-century sources have him working as a labourer in a plaster quarry, others maintain that he toiled for a lime-burner in the Bresse area. One alleges that he became a lime manufacturer, another that he worked in a gypsum mine. It is certainly known that Claudine stayed with their son in Lyons, working in a small straw-hat factory. Her wages for this, one franc a day, were barely sufficient to buy bread to keep herself and her son alive.
    Jacquard was only saved from this life of poverty and obscurity by the French Revolution, which shattered and transformed France between 1787 and 1799 . It is known that Jacquard helped to defend the city against the Revolutionaries during the siege of Lyons in 1793 , when Lyons went through a counter-Revolutionary phase. The source of these sentiments in Lyons is not hard to identify. It stemmed substantially from the city’s long commercial tradition of having royalty and aristocrats as customers.
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    The son of a master-weaver
    During the battle for Lyons, Jacquard’s fifteen-year-old son fought by his side. When the city fell, the two fled together.
    Most of the leading counter-Revolutionaries were guillotined. By the end of the siege Jacquard himself had become known as an ardent defender of Lyons against the Revolutionary forces. Had he been caught and identified he would very likely have been booked in for a morning appointment with the guillotine himself.
    But with a reversal of loyalties that was as dramatic as it was sensible, he and his son adopted false names and joined the Revolutionary army.
    The precise nature of Jacquard’s military career is in some doubt, but it is known that he progressed to an officer rank within a few months of joining. One source claims Jacquard occupied a high rank in the military government of the German city of Worms after the Revolutionaries overran it in 1797 , but there is no evidence to confirm this story. Of course, if Jacquard were using a false name at the time, no evidence is likely ever to come to light. What is known is that during this period of military adventurism for Jacquard and his son, Jean-Marie was killed in a battle or skirmish, probably in Germany and most likely in 1797 .
    The death of his son and only child robbed Jacquard of the desire to remain a soldier. By 1798 he had returned to Lyons and to his wife. His health was far from good; he had been wounded in battle and spent several months in a Lyons hospital, ill and grieving. But he recovered, and finally managed to win his dis-charge from the army.
    Once Jacquard left hospital he again worked at various odd jobs; repairing looms, doing occasional weaving work, bleaching straw hats, and driving light horse-drawn carts between the Lyons suburbs of Perrache and la Guillotière. It appeared that once again, after his brief military career, Jacquard had lost the plot of his life.
    But the career that would catapult him into immortality was just about to start.
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    The Emperor’s new clothes
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