Jacquards' Web Read Online Free PDF

and activity are no more. Today, the pavements no longer rever-berate with the endless noisy rattle of hand-looms being operated by the more than 30 000 weavers who worked in Croix Rousse in its heyday. No brawny workmen load heavy wrapped silk fabrics into the carefully cleaned backs of horse-drawn carts. No fat, prosperous merchants linger over their glasses of absinthe at roadside cafés, boasting to their friends of the latest deal they made with some wealthy customer. Instead, today, there is mostly silence, the occasional bark of a dog, sometimes a Renault or Citroën dawdling along, and here and there vaguely dis-contented couples walking arm-in-arm, out for an evening in picturesque Croix Rousse before heading back to their modern apartments on the other side of the river. They look rather demoralized, as if they find the district a little too quiet for their liking.
    After its glorious nineteenth century, Croix Rousse has long sunk into obscurity. Yet despite this, silk-weaving has not entirely vanished from the district, for a faithful band of about two dozen expert weavers still weave silk there by hand. I visited one of them, Georges Mattelon, in his studio. Cluttered with three Jacquard hand-looms and a myriad bobbins of coloured silk thread, the studio smelt of old wood and oil and was as 20
    The son of a master-weaver
    comfortable as a hobbit-hole. Georges, a weaver in Croix Rousse for six decades, showed me the very loom on which he wove much of Queen Elizabeth’s dress for her wedding in 1947 . Later, he took me for lunch at a nearby bouchon —the local name for a bistro—where six or seven other hand-loom weavers were gathered. Over steak, frites , and red wine, this band of silk-weaving old-timers spoke with enormous enthusiasm of the glory days of the Lyons weaving industry in the nineteenth century. It was as if they might have been working as weavers then, too.
    Strolling around Croix Rousse today, you cannot escape the feeling of walking through a ghost town. There are restaurants and bars, but none of them is very busy. The general impression is of a rundown, fairly shabby district which does at least have considerable picturesque charm. Its narrow alleys wind among pretty, robust-looking buildings whose plaster walls are painted in light pastel hues. All the main streets lead to La Place de la Croix Rousse —the district’s main square. The square’s bars and bistros, well off the usual tourist route, are patronized almost entirely by locals and serve excellent wines and delicious, modestly priced meals: Lyons delicacies such as eel stew, salted capon, quenelles of pike, and the rich onion soup for which the city is especially famous.
    On the far side of La Place de la Croix Rousse, near the steep steps that lead down to the river a couple of hundred feet below, there is a large and prominent grey stone statue. The statue depicts a man in a greatcoat, with shoulder-length hair. As a work of art, it is a disappointment. Its bland, expressionless face is, indeed, the face of a statue, not a man. Its pose—the left arm vertical, clutching a rolled parchment, the right hand held rigidly across the chest—seems artificial, and the left arm is too long and out of proportion with the body.
    Inscriptions on the four sides of the cubic plinth reveal some information about the man whom the statue depicts. ‘ To J.M.
    Jacquard, the benefactor of silk-workers, from a grateful city of Lyons’ , reads one. Jacquard himself, remembering an enforced swim he 21
    Jacquard’s Web
    is believed to have had in one of Lyons’s waterways courtesy of irate draw-boys who had been rendered unemployed by his remarkable invention, would probably have considered this inscription more than a little ironic. ‘ Inventor of the loom for the manufacture of luxury fabrics ’, says the inscription on the next side of the plinth. The other inscriptions give the dates and places of Jacquard’s birth and death.
    While mediocre