BOBBINS OF BELGIUM

Transcriber’s Notes

A few words in relation to era/dialect have been retained e.g. tho, possest, stopt, dropt, slipt, distrest.

The frontispiece spelling of the Queen of Belgium is Elisabeth, as shown in the photo with her signature. Throughout the main text however, it has been spelt Queen Elizabeth. These spellings have been left as printed.

In the Appendix, where there are two or more illustrations per page, the words (Top), (Middle), (Bottom) have been used, to indicate the link with the text and illustration.

p.292: changed 4 to _d_

Printer errors have silently been corrected.

H.M. QUEEN ELISABETH OF BELGIUM

BOBBINS OF BELGIUM

A BOOK OF BELGIAN LACE, LACE-WORKERS,
LACE-SCHOOLS AND
LACE-VILLAGES

By

CHARLOTTE KELLOGG
Of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, and Author of
“Women of Belgium”

FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY
NEW YORK AND LONDON
1920

Copyright, 1920, by
FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY
[Printed in the United States of America]
Published in February, 1920

Copyright Under the Articles of the Copyright Convention
of the Pan-American Republics and the
United States, August 11, 1910.

DEDICATION

To the women of the Brussels war-time lace committee—Madame Allard, the Vicomtesse de Beughem, Madame Kefer-Mali, and the Comtesse Elizabeth d’Oultremont, with admiration and gratitude.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PREFACE

I entered the lace-world by the grim door of war. For it was the war-time work of the women of the Brussels Lace Committee that opened the way to me.

Long before the war, Queen Elizabeth in Belgium, like Queen Margharita in Italy, had sought means to protect the lace worker, through centuries the victim of an economic injustice, not to say crime, and to rescue and develop an industry threatened from many sides. In 1911 she gave her royal encouragement to a group of prominent Belgian women who organized as “Amies de la Dentelle,” Friends of Lace, and began a lace-saving campaign by trying to remedy the deplorable condition of most of the lace schools, the defective teaching, long hours, and pitiful pay. They could insist in the schools, as they could not elsewhere, on the right to inspect, to grant or refuse patronage. They subsidized worthy institutions, and advocated the establishment of a lace normal school and of a special school of design. Education they felt to be the main road leading out of the prevailing misery, and they were making progress along this road, when suddenly the Invader poured over their borders.

While other women hurried to open refuges and hospitals and soup-kitchens, a few of the Friends of Lace remembered first the lace-makers; and by November 1914, had effected a war emergency organization, known as the Brussels Lace Committee, with Mrs. Whitlock as honorary president. Unfortunately most of the lace dealers failed to cooperate with them, but they won the approval of the powerful Belgian Comité National, which, with the Commission for Relief in Belgium, carried on the relief of the occupied territory throughout the war. And with an initial gift of $25,000 from America to be converted into lace, they were able to start their work. It soon came to be directed altogether by four women; The Comtesse Elizabeth d’Oultremont, Lady-in-Waiting to Queen Elizabeth; the Vicomtesse de Beughem, an American; Madame Josse Allard, and Madame Kefer-Mali. At the same time the aid and protection of workers on filets and other commonly called “imitation” laces, was assigned by the Comité National to another group of women, the “Union Patriotique des Femmes Belges.”

The Brussels Lace Committee employed, as trusted business director of their offices, M. Collart, generously released to them by the Allard Bank, and as technical expert, Madame Sharlaecken, before the war with the Compagnie des Indes, one of the largest lace houses in Belgium; and as the work developed, an increasing number of designers and aides necessary to a lace business were added.

During the first few months the situation seemed utterly hopeless; thread was impossible to obtain; and even if the thread were forthcoming, no one could say who would buy the laces they might encourage the women to make; the Germans were cutting off successive sections of the lace-making areas where they had established sub-committees, and were forbidding communication with them. And yet these four women continued bravely to create the foundations of a great lace business—for an extraordinary commercial organization grew from their efforts.

However, despite all their intelligence and devotion, such a result would have been impossible but for a hard-won diplomatic victory. In early 1915 Mr. Hoover forced an international agreement which permitted the C. R. B. to bring thread for the Lace Committee into Belgium, and to take out an equivalent weight in lace, to be sold in the Allied countries for the benefit of the workers. England required a rigid control of the thread, and that it be given only to establishments open to inspection by the C. R. B. At one time these thread shipments were stopt—a period of cruel anxiety for the women—but happily after a re-adjustment they were continued. And once these international guaranties were obtained, the Belgian Comité National was able to arrange for the distribution of the thread to the various, even remote, lace centers, and for the return of the finished laces to Brussels. They granted the women a subsidy of $10,000 and insured to each dentellière the chance to make at least three francs worth of lace a week—a small minimum, to be sure, but every one understood it might be increased later, and that if each of the many thousands of workers was to have an equal opportunity, it could not in the beginning be more. After this the Lace Committee had at times as many as 45,000 women on its lists. The work in the schools and out of them began to bear fruit. The sweating system, and payment in kind (in clothing and food) were practically wiped out, and inspection and control established. Everywhere the standard of design and of execution was raised; old patterns were restored and improved, and by the end of the war 2,237 new designs had been added.

But this was not advance through open country. There was constant danger that at any moment the way might be completely barred; at any time the guaranties covering the thread importations might be withdrawn. The Germans early originated a “Lace Control” of their own, and tried in every possible way to win over the Belgian workers, and to buy up all the lace in the country. They accused the Brussels Committee of being a political and patriotic body existing chiefly to defeat the occupying powers and the Flemish activists. Then there were other courage-testing difficulties. But despite all obstacles and perils, the women persisted, and continually the precious skeins of thread, with their message of “Carry On” were flung out from Brussels to the farthermost corners of the land, binding all together in a firm and beautiful web of hope and confidence. For the enemy was right in suspecting the Committee of a purpose deeper than that of merely trying to save women from the soup-line; they carried on a patriotic work of highest importance. To them I owe a personal debt of gratitude, for they permitted me to follow their devoted service closely, and they opened the door for me to a new world of beauty and interest.

INTRODUCTION

Lace is a tissue composed of mesh and “flowers” (pattern), or either one alone, produced with a needle and single thread, or with several threads manipulated by means of bobbins. It is the product of a natural evolution from early embroideries and weaving.

We possess no contemporaneous history of the origins and development of the lace art, partly, perhaps, because of the tradition, strong among the initiated, of hiding its secrets, and of the consequent difficulty of an outsider to master them, and partly because successive wars and world cataclysms have interrupted or destroyed its progress.

We have ample proof, however, that lace in some form existed in remote antiquity,—in early Egypt, in Persia, in Bysance and Syria, where it was chiefly made by slaves; the Greeks and Hebrews speak of needle lace as known throughout all time. It was not, in these oriental countries, the delicate white mesh that we call lace, which would have been most unbecoming to dark skin, but included richly colored passementeries and filets and fringes, woven of gold and silver thread, of dyed wool and cotton, and of the coarse linen fiber of the Nile Valley. It was usually of hieratic and symbolic design, and sometimes sown with gems—all capable of brilliantly enhancing the beauty of the East. Egyptian ladies of 6,000 years ago trimmed their robes with elaborate lengths of filet, and covered their dead with it. In the Cinquantenaire Museum at Brussels there is the photograph of a remarkable little woven linen bag, similar to one we might carry to-day, which was found in the tomb of a Priestess of Hathor, bearing the mark of one of the earlier dynasties. Its mesh is almost identical with that of our modern Valenciennes, and it was undoubtedly made with bobbins.

Between ancient and mediæval times, the lace-gap is unbridged by written record; we must gather what we can from the archeologist and from the works of the sculptor and painter. Occasionally we are thrilled by such a discovery as that of M. Bixio, who in excavating at Claterna, an old Roman City near Bologna, came upon a set of bone bobbins, lying in pairs, as we employ them in lace-making to-day. But interesting discoveries are rare, and the body of our knowledge of lace history so far is meager.

However, we are interested primarily, not in the ancient origins of the two great lace groups, nor in early passementeries and filets and their processes, but in the marvelous efflorescence of the lace art of the Western Europe of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, and in its still lovely expression of to-day.

In mediæval painting, before the appearance of linen and its use as trimming, or as lingerie, I know of no picture showing lace. Stuffs were stiff and heavy, and ornamented with metal, or with gold or silver thread. As they became more supple, we find, as in the portrait of Wenceslas of Luxemburg (about 1360) decoration introduced in the clipped cloth border of the collar and hood. This serrated edge suggests the first simple Cluny lace patterns that appeared later. Then we see the first linen showing through the slashed sleeve or above the corsage,—one of many paintings illustrating this development, is that of the Duke of Cleves, by Memling (second half of the 15th century). And shortly afterward the first lace edgings appear, the beginning of our lace of the middle ages, of its rebirth in Western Europe. The search for these details of progress in the paintings of European galleries is a fascinating and rewarding game; a Belgian friend of mine has spent many years at it.

The flowering of the lace-art was part of the great Renaissance (lagging behind, to be sure, the major arts) and now was no longer the work of slaves, but regarded as an important, independent métier, and happily it usually escaped the despotism of the mediæval corporations. Italy, probably through her exploitation in the early part of the 15th century of her Greek Colonies, was its first western home, and Venice, the center for the exquisite needle laces of which our museums fortunately still preserve specimens. While laces made with the needle and single thread were flourishing under the Doges, bobbin laces, twisted and braided with many threads, were being made in Sicily and in other sections of the country.

From Venice, the secrets of the art traveled easily in several directions, and probably about the close of the 15th century by way of the thriving port of Antwerp, to the industrious and beauty-loving Flanders, where the seed fell on most fertile soil. Flanders possest a multitude of workers already skilled in an allied art, that of weaving, and the necessary lace material in her valley of the Lys, the finest flax region of the world. Valenciennes, Lille, Malines, Ghent, Bruges, turned to lace-making with a veritable passion; it spread throughout wide districts of what are now Northern France and Belgium.

During the 16th and 17th centuries, the lace industry made phenomenal progress, both extensively and intensively. Holland and England sent continually larger orders to Flanders. As cloths grew finer and softer, and the mode of wearing them more graceful, and as daintier linens were increasingly employed, lace became ever more filmy and exquisite. A worker spent perhaps a whole year on a single meter of Valenciennes, one head-dress cost as much as 200,000 livres. Every lace had its time, its season. During this epoch, needle laces were supreme, as bobbin laces were to be in the 18th century.

Under Louis XIV lace reached its climax of perfection and beauty. Colbert imported lace-women from each center where they had been conspicuously successful. He encouraged the invention of new designs and technique; he subsidized schools in many cities, at Reims, Alençon, Arras, Sedan, and he threatened with the death penalty those who might attempt to carry lace secrets beyond the French borders,—in every way he sought to develop an art that should belong peculiarly to France. Thus directed and subsidized by the state, and nurtured and stimulated by a beauty-seeking court, whose love of luxury was still controlled by taste and refinement, it is not surprizing that this lace-period surpassed any other known. It was true of the Court of Louis XIV as of that of Louis XIII that a seigneur was known by the number and quality of his lace points; some of them possest several hundred garnitures. Unfortunately the workers did not profit by this brilliant development,—they seem from the beginning predestined to be the victims of a social and economic slavery.

But there were already evidences of an attempt to control a demand for luxury that threatened disaster. With the 16th century, heavy duties and excess taxes were levied upon lace. An edict, dated 1729, prohibited the wearing of it, in the hope of checking over-extravagance in dress.

FIFTEENTH CENTURY PORTRAIT

Showing heavy brocade as yet unrelieved by linen or lace trimming

PORTRAIT OF CHARLES IX (1570)

Linen collar showing picot edge made with the needle

After its apogée under Louis XIV, lace-making was caught, along with the other arts, in the tide of degeneracy. Its designs were marked by fantasy and grotesqueness, rather than by the delicacy and beauty of the preceding period; tho while it deteriorated in design, its technique grew constantly finer and more complicated, until, from the point of view of the workmanship at least, it seemed almost superhuman. But in the second half of the 18th century, wearied of complications and extravagance, people amused themselves by a return to simplicity. The Marquise de Pompadour affected laces sown with simple “flowers,” and Marie Antoinette went further in preferring a pattern of scattered “points” or peas. With this return to the primitive in design, the technique of lace reverted also. In many quarters, the sheer muslins of the Indias gained favor over lace. Trade, already burdened with the duties and imports that had grown up around the extravagant laces, suffered further from the sudden popularity of the simple costume.

The death-blow of the industry in France was to follow close on the heels of this new fashion. Since lace had been the particular pride of the aristocrat, the Revolution made it a crime to appear in it. In such one-time famous centers as Valenciennes and Lille, the bobbins ceased, tho the industry of that region sought refuge farther west, in Bailleul,—in Bailleul, dust and ashes to-day! Fortunately in Belgium, lace-making generally survived the crisis of the Revolution, tho it has suffered from succeeding disastrous influences.

At the opening of the 19th century and under the Empire, taste was heavy, design rigid and military, with nothing in common with true lace motifs. During the opening years of 1800 the invention of machine-made tulle, brought from England to Calais, effected further sad changes in the lace-world; scarfs, veils, entire robes of tulle, ornamented with applications of needle or bobbin-made details—often palms and laurel wreaths—were all the mode. People preferred these to the exquisite lace jabots and flounces of the preceding century. In 1833 cotton thread began to be used instead of the stronger linen of the best lace periods. The delicate lace-art continued to suffer with all the others under the general decadence of the reign of Louis Philippe and the Second Empire. Industrial and commercial development was the note of the age; the rich amused themselves in travel, in new scenes and sports, rather than in fostering the arts. In fact, during the thirty years following the war of 1870, lace seemed almost forgotten except in America. The number of workers in Belgium fell from between 100 and 150,000, to 50,000 or less.

But before the world was plunged into this last, most destructive of wars, there had been signs of a renaissance in the decorative arts. People had begun to read and compare, and refine their taste. The rulers of Italy and France and Belgium were winning results in their attempts to rescue, and to revive and develop the lace-art, which had seemed threatened with extinction. Then came the war—and the devastation of entire lace regions, like that of Bailleul in France, and of Ypres in Belgium. It is true that many of the refugee lace-women have been employed and encouraged during the four years, by certain committees in France and free Belgium. And in occupied Belgium, the unceasing efforts of the Brussels Lace Committee have borne rich fruit. Whether the higher standards of lace design and technique, and the improved condition of the lace workers—better education, shorter hours, higher pay—will be maintained under post-war conditions is yet to be proved. Over this difficult hour of reconstruction, of transfer from war to what we fondly call normal conditions, we can but hope to carry the hard-won gains of the testing period.

In this little book I make no attempt to present a history of lace, or a detailed analysis of its processes. I have wished merely to set down in simple form a few of my observations in the lace districts of Belgium, as the war has left her. To follow them one does not need even an elementary knowledge of the important lace forms, tho that is easily acquired. For there are but two large groups; the needle-lace group, and the bobbin-lace group, between which we learn quickly to distinguish. We can not prove the time of their respective origins; as we know them, they seem to have existed side by side, as they do in the Belgium of to-day. Sometimes one was more popular, sometimes the other.

To place a piece of lace, we have first but to ask the question, “Was it made with a needle, and by looping and twisting and weaving a single thread; or was it made by braiding and twisting and weaving several threads, by means of bobbins and a round or a square cushion?”

In general, there is but one technique for all needle laces, tho there is no limit to the variety of stitches the needle worker may employ. I have seen a scarf, made during the war for Queen Elizabeth, in which there were many hundred different points. One comes soon to recognize the important needle laces; the exquisite French Alençons and Argentins of earlier days, with their meshes made with a buttonhole loop, and their flowers stiffened with horsehair; the various Venetian points,—Venise, Burano, and Rose point; and the extremely popular Brussels point, with its gauze mesh and raised flowers. It is characteristic of these needle laces, that the flowers are thrown into relief, sometimes high, sometimes scarcely perceptible.

Bobbin laces may be made with a dozen or with one hundred times as many threads, according to the design and width of the lace. They fall into two sub-groups, the first including laces made with uncut threads, in a single piece; the second, those made detail by detail, in which the threads are cut as each is finished, the completed lace piece being made by joining these separate parts. This second method was not introduced until the latter half of the 17th century.

In the first group, made with uncut threads, are the early Clunys and the common Torchons, Old Flanders, the beautiful Valenciennes, Point de Paris, Point de Lille, Malines and Binche, with their delicate round, or square or hexagonal meshes, from which the pattern blossoms. Their flowers are flat, never lifted in relief, tho a heavy outlining thread often sets them off brilliantly from the surrounding field.

The second bobbin group, in which the final lace piece is composed of united details, includes black and white Chantilly, Blonde, popular with Spanish peoples, Brussels Duchesse and Bruges Duchesse, most frequently displayed in our American shops, and the finer Rosaline, which was in great demand when the war broke out. This group of bobbin laces admits a kind of relief.

PORTRAIT TOWARD CLOSE OF SIXTEENTH CENTURY

Showing collar ornamented with bobbin-made cluny

Some laces combine both needle and bobbin points. In the lovely Point d’Angleterre, increasingly difficult to obtain, bobbin-made flowers are united by an airy needle mesh. And the coarser Flanders lace has the same composition.

ANNE OF AUSTRIA BY VAN DYCK

About 1635, cluny lace made with bobbins

There are, besides, the familiar and often beautiful Applications, in which either needle or bobbin-made flowers are stitched, or appliquéd on machine-made tulle, or, rarely, on a tulle made by hand. And various mixed laces, fantasies and embroidered tulles, as well as a whole company of cheaper tissues called lace, but which can not honestly claim the name, are trying always to crowd the true lace from the market.

Naturally, the technique of any given kind of lace has undergone various transformations through the centuries. The Valenciennes mesh, for instance, first had round spaces, while square ones became more popular later. During a certain period the introduction of jours, or open-work effects, added an airy lightness to many laces.

I had the pleasure recently of being with a friend of mine, the sister of the Belgian Consul-General at New York, Madame Kefer-Mali, who has devoted twenty years to the study of lace, when she first examined a lace collection lately presented to the Cinquantenaire Museum. With magnifying glass I followed from case to case, as she placed each specimen in its country and century, according to its design, its mesh, the manner of directing the threads, the relief of the flowers, the various stitches or the kind of thread employed. As I listened to her, it was easy to appreciate why lace may become an all-absorbing interest. Madame Kefer-Mali’s love for the lace itself is now subordinate to her passionate desire to secure justice for the lace-worker. As she takes a filmy length in her hand, her first thought is of the talent and patience of the girl or woman who made it, of the eye-straining, meticulous labor it represents, and of the pittance still paid her for her gift to the world of art. Madame Kefer-Mali has already won something for the dentellière and she will continue to fight for more.

Tho there are lace sections in widely scattered parts of Belgium, none (except Turnhout) is so important as those of the two Flanders. Western and Eastern Flanders form an almost continuous and unrivalled lace region, which breaks up irregularly into districts, each celebrated for a particular kind, or for several kinds of lace. However, it would be impossible to draw an accurate map illustrating the Belgian lace situation, either from the point of view of the varieties made and their quality, or of the workers. It seems, indeed, at times that lace was invented to defeat the statistician, for he no sooner reaches a conclusion than it proves inexact; a factory rises near a certain river and the lace women desert their cushions to accept its better wages; in a village long devoted to Needle Point, young girls discover that the bobbin-made Clunys pay better, or they marry and make no lace at all until their children are partly grown; poor crops and resulting misery may send others who have not for some time been listed as workers back to their cushions. For, since despite the many schools and work-rooms, the great majority of women still work at home, lace-making is peculiarly sensitive to every change in family and community life. We may say, however, that despite constantly shifting conditions, Western Flanders forms a great bobbin-lace area, unquestionably the most important in the world to-day, while Eastern Flanders has been for centuries and still is, famous for its needle points.

Unfortunately, too, because of the miserable lace-wage (in Belgium, before the war, it averaged about a franc a day) this industry has been regarded always as a supplementary occupation, on which the family could not rely for its main support, and which was not capable of organization and amelioration as other industries are. The slavery conditions have undoubtedly been due chiefly to lack of good schools and constructive lace training, and to the system by which a facteur, or first buyer, collects the laces, to re-sell them to a fabricant, or dealer, who in turn may sell them to a larger fabricant—a system permitting any number of intermediaries—and also to the fact that the women, scattered as they are throughout the agricultural regions, have never protected themselves by forming syndicates. The first step toward emancipation has been taken; the new teaching is under way. The fatal system of the many intermediaries remains to be dealt with—to be swept away. And it is hoped that feeling the new power education will give them, the dentellières will at last find ways either through unions or by other means, of protecting themselves.

For the rest, fixt data are difficult to obtain. The lace industry can not be captured and subjected to cold analysis and tabulation. It must be studied differently from other industries that can be localized. As in learning to know the garden flowers of a country, one must go from doorstep to doorstep, so if one wishes to understand lace, one should become familiar with its milieu, the family and community life from which it springs. In a sense, then, these little journeys to lace districts which are the subjects of my chapters, may suggest more about what lace really is than a more technical and formidable volume.

I
TURNHOUT
Lace Children of the North

Lace is the flower of Belgium; the white blossom that springs from the teeming plains of the Flanders, from the agricultural districts, and from the mournful Campine of the North. During the long and solitary winters, when work in the fields is impossible, thousands of women and girls and little children turn to their lace cushions, and dreary rooms are enlivened by the music of the flying bobbins. If the lace is Needle Point, and lacks the accompanying click-clack of the shifting fuseaux, it nevertheless gives purpose and value to the otherwise almost unsupportable winter days. However, despite the time that must be subtracted for weeding, for gathering the all-important potato crop, and for other farm duties, summer with its bright light and long day, is the true lace season; it is only then that some of the finest varieties can be executed. Coarser pieces must be substituted for the dull, eye-straining days.

To be sure, some lace-making is still carried on in certain cities, but very little. This delicate métier can not successfully combat the influences of the social and industrial groupings of the larger centers; the living wage, the shorter hours, the distractions of cinéma and café. The cities remain the logical centers for the normal and training-schools, for assembling, and display, and sale; but the age-old patience of the lace-maker is born of a certain ignorance and isolation. This does not mean that the industry may not persist still on the fringes of some of the larger cities, or flourish in nearby villages—it does; and in three conspicuous instances, until the war, it remained the dominating activity of a city. Bruges, Ypres, and Turnhout, could truly be called “lace cities.” Now there are but two; for Ypres, the pearl of Flanders, is gone.

Turnhout, a town of 24,000 inhabitants, in the Northern Campine district, is not only a “lace city,” counting 6,000 workers, but if one considers its long list of excellent lace-schools, the fine varieties made there, and the quality of the workmanship, it appears sufficiently important to challenge the leadership of Bruges. However, Turnhout stands practically alone in the north, while Bruges is the center of western Flanders, one of the largest lace contributing areas in Belgium, and promises, therefore, to hold for a long time her title of first lace-city.

It is strange to think of Turnhout as a remote town, since it is scarcely two hours by motor from Antwerp; but the first glimpse of the intervening sand wastes of the Campine region awakens at once a sensation of loneliness, of isolation. I made the journey in late November, reaching Turnhout about noon of a low gray day, just as hundreds of golden-haired children—no mists could dull the bright gold of their hair—were clattering along the stone sidewalks in their wooden shoes, on their way home from school. As always, I marveled at the way they could leap and run without losing their sabots. They were “lace children,” nearly all of them part of the little army of 1,800 in the lace-schools, and because of the intelligent work of the soup-kitchens and dining-rooms for debilitated children during the four years of war, were probably, many of them, in better physical condition than they had been at its beginning. The women of the Brussels Lace Committee had succeeded, too, in augmenting their food ration from time to time. Their chief visible need was for stockings and shoes—and I knew from the teachers later that they sadly lacked underclothes. Mothers can patch and repatch, and add in various ways to outer garments; but after a certain number of washings, undergarments simply disappear.

I went first to the convent of the Abbé Berraly which, during the war, encouraged by the advice and support of the Lace Committee, has developed into the model school of Belgium. It is situated in a crowded part of the town, but its own fine brick buildings cluster about a spacious courtyard and vegetable gardens. In summer the children work much out of doors, tho when they are inside their class-rooms it seems still impossible for the teachers to break with the tradition of the closed window.

I began my visit in a little room at the right of the entrance hall, where six older girls were still at work, tho the 500 other pupils had gone for their lunch. Dozens of rubbed carbon copies of lace patterns were pinned to the walls along with executed samples of the lace they represented. This was a piqué class-room; the young women seated at high, narrow tables, were carefully at work on pieces of glossy green cardboard on which the lace design had been drawn and which they were pricking with pins, or covering with tiny holes, that indicate the position of the pins that must hold the thread as it is twisted or looped or braided, by the worker. The cardboard piqué is in a sense both the beginning and the end of the lace course; the beginning, since no pupil can start his lace without the piqué, or interpreted pattern, and the end, since it is the most difficult of all the processes in the technique of the lace. The piqueuse must understand the design and its practical execution, must interpret the picture to the worker in terms of pin-pricks marking the progress of her thread. A good piqueuse knows immediately, on looking at a drawing, whether it is a true lace design, or must be adapted, and also in which kind of lace it can be best exprest. As she shifts a pin-prick less than a hair’s width to the left or to the right she varies appreciably the resulting mesh or flower. She has considerable liberty in deciding which particular stitches will be most effective to fill in the jours, or open-work spaces indicated in the pattern.

One of the great evils of the past has been the absence of training-schools, and the consequent lack of piqueuses; in each generation there have been but a few good ones, who have, in a sense, held the lace industry in their hands. Before the war, Ypres had two famous piqueuses, to whom patterns were sent from an entire region; and in the town of Turnhout to-day, with its thousands of workers, tho there are several less experienced piqueuses, there is but one woman to whom the finest and most complicated drawings can be entrusted for interpretation. She is the only person, for example, who could make the piqué for the beautiful scarf, which I saw later being executed in the Point de Paris room—for that she received 90 francs. It is a common saying that one must be born a piqueuse to succeed; at least it remains true that in addition to her capacity for an intricate and most meticulous labor, the piqueuse should possess a high sensitiveness to art values.

The little room in the Abbé Berraly’s school is one expression of the Lace Committee’s conviction that the emancipation of the industry and of the lace-maker will come only through education.

ABBÉ BERRALY SCHOOL, TURNHOUT

General view

NINE-YEAR-OLD CHILDREN MAKING POINT DE PARIS

In general the women of the past have sat dumbly before their cushions, helpless to do anything but continue to execute, year after year, the particular cardboard pattern the facteur, or lace agent, placed before them. They had little or no conception of the rich art world of which their flowered flounces were a part, and no feeling at all of their power to influence that world by interpreting a design for themselves, or by correcting or improving it, or even perhaps by creating a new one. Not that all workers should become designers, or even piqueuses—progress depends, as it does in other industries, on specialization; but at least trained workers will enjoy the freedom to choose and the feeling of independence that comes from a thorough knowledge of their métier.

In this room then was a class of specialists, six smiling, intelligent young women between 16 and 18 equipping themselves as experts in interpretation. The designs on which they worked, many of them revivals of classic ones long forgotten, or beautiful recent creations of Belgian artists, had been sent up to them from the Committee’s central room of design in Brussels. Before the war, they would have come from the particular lace dealer to whose agent their laces were sold.

Opening from the little pattern room I found the office with its great oak armoire, where the costly finished laces are stored until the day they are taken to Brussels, to be combined into beautiful confections for the salon or bedroom or dining-room, or for personal adornment. Of course, some are always resold by the meter, but one of the chief successes of the Lace Committee has been the employment of motifs and yard laces in the production of cloths and spreads and innumerable articles of a loveliness hitherto unknown.

From the office and the little room where the pricked cardboard patterns are prepared for the cushions, I went further along the hall, and turned to the left, where at the foot of a staircase were new wooden benches awaiting the sabots of the returning children. These benches were new because the Germans, who, here as elsewhere, had driven the children from their school, had burned their benches, and not only the benches, but all visible wood—they had torn casements from the windows and doorways, as well as removing every knob and fixture. This was disgusting, but more or less understandable. Their country demanded more cannon, therefore they took brass and copper; they were cold, so they ripped off the nearest available piece of wood. But wood and metal failed to satisfy them; upstairs at one end of the largest room there is a pretty stage arranged for school festivals, with a painted forest background, and side wing-drops picturing meadow-lands. These fathers and brothers of German children slashed and ripped the painted canvas forest and ran their bayonets through the foreground meadows, with no spur beyond that of the pleasure in the act; for no inch of the canvas had been taken away—I could have replaced the whole from the rags.

It was still only a little past one o’clock, and the children had not yet returned. I went into the beginners’ room, where large windows let in all the light there was on this gray day, and saw the long, even rows of low rush-seated, high-backed chairs, with the school-room sabots (where the children were fortunate enough to possess this second pair) hanging from the backs. Before each chair was a round or square work-cushion and over each cushion a white cloth carefully spread to protect the precious thread-bearing bobbins beneath. The whole empty, silent place seemed prepared for a ceremonial or religious rite; and every snowy cushion a tiny altar awaiting its ministrant.

At last they were coming back, the younger children clattering in ahead of the older girls, to deposit their muddy street sabots on the benches. Such a rush of yellow-haired babies for their chairs—several of them were no more than seven years old; many were between nine and ten. Little feet slipt into the clean sabots, white cloths were carefully lifted and folded, sisters and teachers began their rounds of inspection and instruction, as tiny hands took their positions over the heaps of bobbins—one at the left, one at the right—and the cadence of the clicking wood began. It was impossible for me to follow these incredible little fingers as they twisted and braided from pin to pin. I had seen scales so rapidly played that the successive motions were only a blur, but these shiftings back and forth of the bobbins were even more bewildering. More strangely moving than the picture of any great orchestra where gifted fingers wrung melody from a myriad of strings, was this of the play of hundreds of baby hands over threads and bobbins, as the flowers blossomed beneath them. It is said that to become a good lace-maker one must begin, as he would if he expected to become a distinguished pianist, at latest at the age of seven or eight.

The greater number of these little girls were making Point de Paris edgings. They had their pricked patterns pinned near the top of the square linen-covered cushions and were working the threads vertically toward them. Since the pins which hold the threads in place must be constantly moved along as the work proceeds, it is very important that the cushion should be stuffed with something that the pins can easily penetrate. These particular cushions were stuffed with wool, some contain straw, and the linen covering was blue, tho it is often the natural color. Besides guiding the tiny brass pins (which vary with the delicacy of the lace) that hold the thread, each child must know how to manipulate the long brass pins which separate the various groups of bobbins not in actual use. She learns, too, to roll each finished section of her lace in blue paper and tuck it carefully away in the little drawer below the upper part of the cushion; the true lace-maker prides herself on the snowy whiteness of her lace, which she protects in every conceivable way.

While I was moving from one to another, a sister had gathered a group of seven to ten year olds nearer the stove—a company of Fra Angelico angels they looked, as I bent over them to watch their little hands. They placed brass pins in the holes pricked in the pattern to hold the rather coarse thread, twisted first two threads to the right, then two to the left, then braided them to form the familiar hexagon of the Point de Paris mesh. When they reached the pattern, a most simple conventional one, other bobbins had to be brought into play. They held the threads always from the top of the cushion vertically toward them, with the seam edge of the lace to the left and the border to the right. Even these babies had from 50 to 200 bobbins to keep in mind, rather long beech-wood bobbins, these for Point de Paris, with the thread tightly wound at the top, and a considerable pear-shaped bulge at the end. Each lace is supposed to require a particular bobbin, especially suited to the weight of thread employed, but workers often use them indifferently. Some fortunate ones pride themselves on their fine ebony or ivory sets. Of course, bobbins must be constantly resupplied with thread, and in a corner of the room I saw a white-haired grandmother with her dévidoir, or spindle, busily winding thread on the bobbins for the children. She made a beautiful picture there at her wheel with a dozen little girls with their cushions crowding near her. I asked if the beginners were able to earn something and found they were making about 10 and 15 cents a day.

POINT DE PARIS CLASS

On dark days lamps are lighted behind bottles filled with water, the rays passing through fall in spotlights on the cushions

WINDING BOBBINS FOR THE CHILDREN

In this model school, for all children under sixteen years of age the lace work alternates with regular lessons, as it should of course, in every school. Those above that age may give their entire day to the lace. The hours for girls between nine and thirteen are: from 8 to 11 o’clock, lessons; from 1:30 to 4 o’clock, lessons again; and from 4 to 6:30 o’clock, lace. This is still a sadly long day for growing children, but it nevertheless registers a most cheering improvement over the former cruelty of a far longer day. It has been the Committee’s hope that such a system as this might be instituted throughout Belgium, and that from it they might advance to still better conditions. Children from thirteen to sixteen come at 7:30 o’clock, make lace till 11:30, and again from 1:30 to 4:45 o’clock. From 5 until 6:30 o’clock they have regular school lessons—one wonders how much education can be crowded into one and a half hours at the end of a day that began at 7:30 o’clock! The girls over sixteen years of age make lace from 7:30 until 6:30 o’clock. One thing to remember always, in looking at these distressing figures, is the frequent number of holidays in Belgium; the children are saved by their numerous fête days.

It was not easy to leave the tragic and marvelous primary room; the fairy-like fingers and the golden heads above the cushions. But I had to go on to room number one on the ground floor where there was another Point de Paris class, for girls about twelve years old. In the Abbé Berraly school the girls must pass through at least three classes in Point de Paris before they proceed to Point de Lille, to go on from there to the “spider-web,” or delicate and most difficult Malines.

The first striking difference between this room and the primary, was in the number of bobbins piled on the cushions—there were hundreds now instead of dozens. The cushions were larger, too, and most of them were round, for many of the pupils were working on collars and doily and handkerchief edgings. The designs were already complicated, one of them represented, for instance, the animal symbols of the allied nations. This class promotes to the advanced class in Point de Paris, where I found several cushions with over 500 bobbins heaped upon them, and girls of fourteen and fifteen years shifting that number with a swiftness not to be followed.

Since the heavy rain was making seeing difficult, the teachers moved a number of iron stands (resembling umbrella stands) to various points in the room, placing on top of each stand, in the middle, a small kerosene lamp, and, near the edge, a large globular carafe, filled with water. The light from the lamp passes through the bottle to fall with concentrated and magnifying effect directly on that spot on the cushion where the work is in progress. The rack may be turned, the bottle raised or lowered, and usually four girls profit by the light from one lamp. It is a picturesque and primitive system, which many still prefer to the more modern and expensive electricity, because it is an advantage to have the working spot on the cushion thrown into high relief, while at the same time the bottle light is softer and less tiring to the eyes than electricity. These iron stands and lamps were very practical and satisfactory, but I have often seen, in poor little rooms, the bottle set on the table on a rough wooden block, with a rude oil dip in a cup propped up on bits of stick or stone behind it to lift it to just the proper height; as the work progresses, the position of course must be altered.

While the girls were pulling their chairs closer to the bottles I talked with the teachers about the place of Point de Paris in the lace world. There is no fine lace, they told me, which is so much in demand to-day as Point de Paris, for no lace so successfully combines durability and beauty. It is more used for dainty lingerie than any other variety. Paris buyers seem never to be able to secure sufficient Point de Paris, which tho it was christened by that city and was largely produced there during the 17th century, must now be supplied by Belgium. Its strength depends on its solid hexagonal mesh, always the test of lace, which is made with eight cotton threads, usually of fairly coarse quality. From this substantial mesh may blossom a pattern of extreme grace and beauty, the closely woven flat parts or toile, being relieved by open-work spaces, or jours, and the whole design outlined and thus thrown into a kind of relief by a heavier thread. The roses of the Queen design, drawn for the Brussels Committee by Mlle. Brouhon (who has since died), is one of the loveliest of the recent ones. I saw, the other day, a box scented with lavender and filled with rolls upon rolls of this rose pattern lace, ready for the day when a château can be restored, and fine linen sheets and pillow slips with their Point de Paris edgings can once again be spread on the beds.

Point de Lille could never be successfully used for either lingerie or table or bed linen for it is not sufficiently durable. In room 3, girls from fourteen to sixteen years were beginning to execute this more difficult lace. Its clear, transparent mesh originated in the city from which it is named, where in 1788 there were as many as 16,000 women employed on it. Its fragility results from the fact that but four threads (instead of the customary eight of Point de Paris and Malines, and of the mother of them all, Valenciennes) are used in twisting and braiding the meshes. On its light, clear mesh, the designs are now often very elegant and free, tho the traditional Point de Lille edging has a straight border and rather rigid pattern. They are always outlined by a heavier thread, as are the flowers of the Point de Paris and Malines, but unlike these other laces, the Point de Lille is characterized by little pois, or peas or dots, scattered through the mesh. It is sometimes confused with Malines because of the transparency of its mesh, which, however, is not so delicate as that of Malines, nor so difficult to make, nor, because of its fewer threads, so solid.

One of the most popular and more solid varieties of Point de Lille is better known as Point d’Hollande, because it is chiefly sold to the well-to-do Dutch peasants for their handsome bonnets. It is wide and often of sumptuous design, a sole branch or flower frequently furnishing the entire wing of a bonnet.

POINT DE LILLE, OR POINT D’HOLLANDE; MESH SHOWING “ESPRITS” OR DOTS CHARACTERISTIC OF THIS BOBBIN LACE

END OF A POINT DE PARIS SCARF ABOUT 2½ YARDS LONG ON WHICH COLETTE WORKED ONE YEAR

IN THE ABBÉ BERRALY SCHOOL, COLETTE, 16 YEARS OLD, WORKS WITH 1,000 BOBBINS

In the class-room, I went directly to a dark-haired Josephine, whose cushion seemed to hold the largest mounds of bobbins—“Yes, there are over a thousand,” she admitted shyly and smilingly. The directress came to help her open the little drawer beneath her round cushion, and to shake from the blue paper a most lovely wide scarf with a charming flower design. “I began it last January,” she added, “and I hope to finish it this January of 1919.” One year with a thousand bobbins, and at best 50 cents a day for her work—which was so much more than she could have made before the war that she had no thought of complaining! I wondered if the woman who would throw this filmy flower-sown veil over her shoulders would care to know about the dark-eyed Josephine and her year with the 1,000 bobbins.

But there is much more beautiful lace than either Point de Paris or Point de Lille taught in the Turnhout school. The girls pass from the Lille room to Malines, known in the city of its birth as the “spider-web of Malines.” Nothing could be more airy and exquisite than its delicate hexagonal mesh, much more difficult to make than either of the preceding varieties because it must be worked without the aid of pins, with only the eye to guide in securing the requisite uniformity and exactness. No lace demands greater skill or greater patience; since in addition to the difficulty of working without supporting pins, is the difficulty of handling the extremely fine thread employed. The patterns are usually of delicate flowers and leaves, with open-work stitches introduced to add ever greater lightness to the whole.

The dentellières in the Malines room work chiefly on insertions and flounces to be used for handkerchiefs or fichus or dainty blouses, or perhaps for wedding gowns. The Committee has given them, too, many orders for inserts for table centers or doilies, so exquisite that one feels they should be used only under glass.

Scarcely an important family in Belgium but treasures a bit of old Malines. Among my rarest pleasures were those I enjoyed, when the conversation turning upon lace, a friend has said: “But would you care to see my mother’s Malines, or my great, great-grandmother’s?”—and she has brought from a brocade box a filmy, ivory-colored collar or flounce, or a scarf or bonnet, all of a breath-taking loveliness and delicacy never to be reproduced. I remember, too, a Christmas mass and the marvelous flounce that fell from beneath the white and gold chasuble worn by Cardinal Mercier over the scarlet of his robe.

It is only in Turnhout that any considerable quantity of Malines is yet made, and despite all the efforts of the Committee and of other lovers of beautiful lace, there is little hope that it will live much longer. When the old artists, for so they should be named, die, few young women are found willing still to sacrifice their years to the spider-web.

The women of the Lace Committee believe there is no future work more important than that of improving the 200 and more lace schools of their country. In the lace normal school at Bruges, in the national school of design at Brussels, the excellent Needle Point school at Zele, and in such schools as this one at Turnhout, they see the hope of the lace art; they urge that the Government increase its subsidies to these and other deserving institutions. Education and ever better education of the lace-woman is their watchword.

II
COURTRAI
Early Home of Valenciennes

For years I had heard of the blue flax fields of the valley of the Lys, and of the season between April and September, when along miles of its course, the river is filled with boxes floating the finest linen fiber of the world, the flax of Belgium, North France and Holland, which can be better prepared in its waters than anywhere else.

Unfortunately I could see it only under a January rain, but Monsieur de Stoop, a prominent weaver of Courtrai, the town of 36,000 inhabitants which is the valley center, made the Flanders fields bloom again as he described to me the successive steps which lead from them to the woven linen his factory produces—I should say, produced, for the Germans left his plant, along with seven others, an utter ruin. He was unable to explain and apparently no analysis has yet determined, just why the waters of the Lys river surpass all others in their power to rot the encasing straw and generally to cleanse the flax; but one thing is clear, they have established Courtrai as a world market for fine raw linen. Sometimes the stalks need be floated only two or three days, sometimes it requires very much longer to macerate them, the period depending chiefly on the weather, and particularly on the temperature.

BELGIAN LACE MESHES (Plate I)

After Pierre Verhagen in “La Dentelle Belge”

All meshes made with bobbins: 1 and 4, Valenciennes, round mesh; 2, Valenciennes, square mesh; 3, Valenciennes, mesh almost round; 5, Chantilly; 6, Old Flanders; 7, Point de Paris

BELGIAN LACE MESHES (Plate II)

After Pierre Verhagen in “La Dentelle Belge”

Meshes, 8 to 12, made with bobbins: 8, Binche; 9, Malines; 10, Point de Lille, made for France; 11, Point de Lille, destined for Holland; 12, Gauze Point, made with needle, used in Point d’Angleterre; 13, Brussels machine-made net; 14, Ordinary machine-made net.

After its soaking and cleansing, the linen fiber starts again on its journey, this time to the various countries where it is to be made into thread and woven into tissues. Much goes to England and to Ireland, to such firms as Beth and Cox. From there it returns to Belgium in the form of linen thread for fine laces, quite a different variety, of course, from that employed in sewing. Lace thread, both cotton and linen, may be used for sewing, but never sewing-thread for good lace. An outsider can scarcely estimate the importance of the quality of the thread to the lace-maker. Of two skeins bearing the same number, one may be supple and easily led, while the other is brittle and wayward. We hear many stories of how women used to spend their lives in damp cellars, in order to keep their thread moist and soft. I have been told several times, for instance, that a certain piece of lace had been made below ground, because only there was its marvelous technique possible. Whatever the degree of truth or legend in these assertions, it is known that the rarest laces require certain atmospheric conditions, and are, above all, dependent on a superior fineness and pliability of the thread.

The English and Irish spinneries lead the world; they produce most of its lace thread. One of them; the Coates firm of Paisley, has established in Belgium branches in which Belgian capital is interested,—at Gent are the filteries, which prepare thread for weaving, and at Alost and Ninove are the filatures or spinneries which turn out the finished sewing and embroidery thread. The cottons and linens of these mills are too coarse for the delicate laces; however, during a single war year, the Brussels Committee was happy to be able to buy from Alost as much as 600,000 francs worth of thread. By some miracle, the Ghent filteries escaped the practically universal ruin visited on mills and factories, and should be operating before peace is signed, but for the spinneries of Alost and Ninove, the future is still dark.

During two years the enemy, feeling they might one day run the mills where they stood, left them intact, tho they requisitioned their stocks of thread. Then as they saw they might not perhaps be able to continue their beneficent occupation of Belgium, even if they won the war, they began to remove the mill machinery to Germany. They were especially ruthless when the mills were known to be of English or French ownership. They stole the secrets of the factories and finally they deported the workmen. These men are scattered everywhere. Even if the machines of the factories were not completely destroyed it would be impossible under a considerable time to reassemble the skilled workmen essential to the spinning industry. The Germans will undoubtedly try to capture the trade, and to market their goods, if they must, through such neutral countries as Denmark and Switzerland.

When I arrived at Courtrai, Monsieur and his family were just moving back into the house from which they had been ejected. They apologized for the room they so hospitably offered me, in which the original bed had been replaced by an iron one they recognized as having belonged to an English family of Courtrai. The brass trimmings were gone, and the mattress had of course been removed, but Madame had been able to find one stuffed with sea-moss for me. The curtains were slashed, blocks of wood nailed to the once handsome walls, there were no lights, no metal knobs or fixtures of any kind, no service wires left. Below, the cellar had been almost filled with concrete to provide the conqueror a safe refuge during danger periods. It requires a special kind of courage to take up life again in a place like this, but these good people said: “We can not complain, we are so much better off than others, and at least we have saved our health; with that we can be sure of being able to build again what they have destroyed.”

From there I went to Baron de Bethune, a connoisseur of laces, who had before the war opened a lace museum in Courtrai, chiefly for Valenciennes. I found him ill in a little house in the town; he had long before been driven from his château in the suburbs. His sister, who had with great difficulty made her way from Louvain, received me with apologies in the midst of a heterogeny of boxes and packages, the few personal possessions they had gathered together in the hope of some day having a home again. I was not to see the old Valenciennes and other specimens of the famous lace days of Courtrai; fortunately for his museum, Monsieur had succeeded in getting them to Brussels where they were still, to my personal regret, hidden away. However, I was not surprized, for I had been unable before starting for Flanders to see the celebrated collection of the Cinquantenaire Museum at Brussels, for that, too, had been successfully secreted. Museums are slow in rehanging their treasures. Even tho the presence of the three neutral Ministers, the Spanish, American and Dutch, in the capital, was supposed to be a guaranty of protection to the national collections, and undoubtedly it was only their presence that prevented in Belgium what happened to the Museums of Northern France, the Belgians with unwearying ingenuity concealed what they could. Whenever I hear of hidden laces, I am reminded of a morning at Malines and a sad little basket containing a fine collection of old Malines lace, I saw exhumed. It had been buried deep in a box, along with the family silver, and as the daughter of the mother who had worn it took its once lovely flowers and webs, now gray and earth-stained, between her fingers, they powdered to dust.

Monsieur suggested that I see Mlle. Mullie, a leading dealer of Courtrai, who still handles a large output of Valenciennes; tho Courtrai, which was once a brilliant production center, is no longer of great importance. After the French Revolution, which killed Valenciennes-making in its original home, it migrated to other parts of Northern France, and to the two Flanders; to Ypres, where it enjoyed an especially happy development, to Bruges, Ghent, Dixmude, Furnes, Menin, Nieuport, Poperinghe and elsewhere. For a long time Ghent led all these, with over 5,000 workers listed in 1756. But starvation wages and successful imitations have told against this, as against other laces. Nevertheless, in the census of 1896, Bruges was still credited with 2,000 Valenciennes workers, and Poperinghe with 500, while there were scattered groups of considerable importance in a great number of the villages of Western, and some of Eastern Flanders.

Courtrai and the nearby villages where the lace is actually made, still stand, tho many buildings have been destroyed, but while her people were not forced to become refugees, lace-making was seriously interrupted; workers were evicted from their homes and their schools. And they suffered further because there was scarcely any thread left, the dealers often asking as much as 20 cents for ¾ of a yard of lace thread, about the previous value of the same length in finished lace. Under these conditions it was especially easy to see the importance of the efforts of the Brussels Lace Committee, which furnished thread at the normal price, and gave more for the lace than was ever offered before the war.

BOBBIN LACES

First column: Malines, Malines, Point de Paris, Point de Paris, Valenciennes (square mesh)
Middle column: Point de Paris
Third column: First three, Valenciennes; fourth, Point de Paris

CUSHION COVER REPRESENTING BELGIUM’S GRATITUDE TO AMERICA FOR BREAD

Point de Paris lace combined with linen. The lower right-hand centerpiece shows the rose design, emblem of Queen Elizabeth

Unfortunately the German facteurs (agents for lace dealers) worked cleverly here, too, as in other districts. They had always plenty of requisitioned thread to offer, and succeeded in buying considerable lace, for which they offered high and varying prices.

The younger women of the Courtrai region have been rapidly giving up Valenciennes to make Cluny, which pays better. A Valenciennes beginner, for example, must work a year as an apprentice, during which time she is able to earn scarcely more than five cents a day. The wages of the good workers have advanced, but unless they can be increased even more, there are few who will continue to make this difficult lace.

After 60 years’ experience in lace, and latterly she has employed 1,000 women, Mlle. Mullie says that one is fortunate, among 5,000 workers, to find five who can execute a sample from a drawing not already interpreted or pricked for the worker. Before the war there were two good piqueuses in Ypres to whom Courtrai sent her difficult patterns, but only one of these still lives.

In peace-time the greater part of this Courtrai lace goes to Paris (some is sent to New York), which is all one needs to say in tribute to its pattern and its quality. Paris knows lace better than any other city in the world; she accepts only the best. We were talking of the 60 per cent. duty the United States Government levies on imported laces, and the harm it works to the Belgian industry. “That is our greatest discouragement, but there are other Government stupidities,” Mlle. Mullie smiled. “France, for instance, charges 10½ francs on a kilo of Valenciennes, and the same amount on an equal weight of Cluny; the Valenciennes may be worth several thousand, and the Cluny three or four francs!”

The true old Valenciennes mesh, called “Rond,” is still made at Courtrai, as well as at Bruges; the modern Valenciennes commonly has a square mesh, which is preferred by many connoisseurs, since it is more transparent and sets the flowers off more strikingly. “Whether or not you prefer it to the square, you must see the traditional round Valenciennes mesh,” Mlle. Mullie said, and we started off in the rain for a group of tiny brick houses, the Gottshuisen (God’s houses) which the city furnishes free to certain old people.

Before we reached the first, I saw two white heads near a window, bending over cushions; and once inside, on those cushions, lengths of snowy Valenciennes of the old round mesh, of an admirable regularity and loveliness. These two women were both over 70 years old, and they sat before their bobbins, twisting and braiding the eight threads of the mesh as they had twisted and braided them for over a half century, and still cheerfully hoping that they might some day win more than 15 or 20 cents a day for their work. “Now we must have more,” they said gently, “because thread and oil are so much more expensive than they were before the war.”

In the next house, the old woman whose sister was ill could afford no light at all; when dusk fell she had to leave her bobbin mounds and her mesh and flowers and go to bed—what else could she do without coal or oil?

It was the last day of 1918, and I decided that Mrs. Bayard Henry of Philadelphia, who had sent me a little money to use as I chose, would be happy to give to these sweet, faithful women and their thirteen neighbors, candles and oil as hope symbols for the New Year. I left her gift with Mlle. Mullie.

It was already very late, and I had not time to go to Wevelghem and Gulleghem, two of the most important lace-villages contributing to Courtrai. Mlle. Mullie was facing the future with courage. “I am sure,” she said, “that Peat, from whom I have bought thread for forty years, will not forget me, and that I may be able to count on a shipment from England at a just price as soon as anything can come through. That I have been cut off during four years will make no difference. I shall write, too, to a friend in France, and from Puy I may have a few skeins. The question of pins and bobbins is serious—they seem to have disappeared, and one can not start a worker on less than a dozen bobbins. Those I have thus far succeeded in finding cost 95 centimes the dozen, as against the 28 centimes of pre-war times. There seem literally to be no pins. However, despite everything, I, at least, hope to see my thousand women at some not too distant time again busy over their cushions. A few have already sought me out to let me know they are ready, waiting only for the precious thread. I regret infinitely the passing of the fine ‘Val,’ but we shall continue to produce as much as we can, and at any rate we shall try unceasingly to raise the standard of the Clunys and Torchons.”

III
THOUROUT-THIELT-WYNGHENE
In the Important Bobbin Lace Area

On a spring-like Saturday in early January, I left Bruges by the Thourout road for Thielt. As I turned beyond the Porte, I found myself speeding toward the great arms of one of those Dutch windmills that so frequently, in the lowlands, close the long vista. The farther I rode into the Thourout region, the more it seemed the loveliest bit of Western Flanders I had yet seen. The gentle outlines of the low red brick farmhouses followed with satisfying harmony the landscape contours. Farm succeeded farm in swift succession, small farms, where every square foot of soil was green with sprouting grain or vegetables, and in the morning sunlight the thickly sown cottages shone like jewels on the plain.

Pink and white geraniums blossomed behind many of the quaint windows, and I knew that near them grandmothers, or mothers, or daughters (or possibly all three together) were sitting before their cushions, and from pin to pin were twisting and braiding Cluny and Duchesse, the characteristic laces of this section. This was an excellent day for lace-making with its sunshine of summer.

To the south and east of the badly shelled town of Thourout, I visited the districts of Iseghem, Thielt and Wynghene, all celebrated for their guipures. Guipure, a rather vague commercial term covering two widely different groups of lace, may be loosely defined as bobbin lace without a mesh base. One group of guipures includes the Clunys (named after the Cluny museum in Paris because they employ many old Gothic designs) which are made in one length or piece. They closely resemble the more common Torchons, surpassing them, however, in fineness and firmness of execution, and in brilliancy of design—the distinguishing connecting bars of Cluny often throw the figures into conspicuous relief. While this one-piece lace is usually made of the coarser threads, fine linen or cotton, or even silk thread, is also employed. In the second group of guipures are those made in separate small bits, or details, which are afterward joined to make the flounce or piece, the most common of these varieties being Flanders and Duchesse. In the schools of Thielt and Wynghene all the kinds are taught. Because they are made of coarser thread and therefore more quickly than such laces as Valenciennes or Needle Point, are less taxing to the eyes, and pay better, these guipures have gained ground in almost every lace center in Belgium, and often threaten the very existence of the finer laces. If it had not been for the leadership of the “Amies de la Dentelle,” of a few of the more intelligent and disinterested dealers, and above all of certain convents to whom Belgium owes the preservation of many of her finest designs and varieties, it is a question if any but the few remaining old women, who for forty or fifty years have preferred to follow one pattern, would still produce the old meshes and points. Much hope now centers in the corrective influence of the recently founded Normal School at Bruges and of the other schools of Belgium, but, despite all the efforts of these combined groups, delicate laces like the Malines have been fast disappearing.

The little farmhouse, if one can call two rooms a house, I visited on the edge of Thielt demonstrated clearly what is happening. It was Saturday afternoon and the mother of the large family of boys at play on the neat brick path outside, was scrubbing the tiled floor, moving the small baskets of potatoes and heaps of tobacco leaves and sabots and the winter sled from place to place as she proceeded. The socks to be darned, each already a fantastic patchwork, were piled on the window-sill, where there was room beside for a geranium and a fern. The stove and the table were also crowded into this, the general living-room, which despite all attempts to arrange things, boasted scarcely one unincumbered foot of floor space. However, over near the window with its two plants, were the customary chair and the cushion, and the girl of sixteen, absorbed in her lace, quite oblivious of the water her mother was splashing about her feet.

The adjoining room was similarly crowded; it had to serve as bedroom for this large family. There was the mantel-piece with the familiar row of bright plates and vases,—the place where the family’s art sense finds concentrated expression. Fortunately, this room, too, had a window with other plants, and before it sat the grandmother in her black cap and shawl, who, as I entered, was just slipping her battered eye-glasses into the little side drawer beneath her cushion. She smiled a friendly greeting, and uncovered her lace, a filmy flounce of Valenciennes about four inches wide, firm and regular, and of a good old design. She had been making Valenciennes all her life; she would make it to the end. She was delighted to show me how she twisted four threads to form one side of the hexagon of the mesh, and four to form the opposite, and the union points where the eight met. Then she held up a length of her lace and told us that a facteur (neighborhood buyer for a large business house) had been there just before we arrived, to try to buy her flounce at nine francs the aune, which would be roughly, about $2.50 a meter. The committee has been giving her 19 fr. 50 c. ($3.90) for the same amount, and she asked anxiously, tho still smilingly, if she might not continue to hope for the committee price, even tho the war had stopt. It is pathetic, day after day, to hear that question repeated, and not yet to be certain of the answer. However, one can always reply truthfully, that the women of the “Friends of the Lace” will work unceasingly not only to hold wages where they are, but to advance them.

I turned from this delicate lace to the granddaughter’s cushion—she was making guipure de Cluny, of coarse linen thread. Marie’s pattern happened to be a good one and she was working swiftly and evenly, sure of a fair day’s wage.

Here, then, was a suggestive contrast, and however one may regret it, it exists in the large majority of lace-making households in Belgium, and is only to be expected. It is but the deserved penalty of a past and present economic blindness or callousness. Where they are not making Cluny, the younger women of this district give their time to ordinary varieties of guipure which they call Bruges and Milan, or Point de Bruges, and Point de Milan.

BOBBIN LACES

(1) Torchon (2) Cluny (3) Old Flemish (4) Binche

TABLE CLOTH SHOWING ARMS OF THE ALLIES

Cut linen with squares of Venise surrounded by filet and cluny. Venise made with the needle, cluny with bobbins

While I had been watching the Valenciennes and Cluny, the mother of the household, who had the mop of fuzzy dark red hair often seen in this region, had hurried her scrubbing to an end, and wiping her hands on her blue apron, was ready to uncover her own cushion. I looked at the chapped, rough skin and the hands used to pulling weeds and digging potatoes and scrubbing, and realized that they could not possibly hold a piece of fine sewing—the thread would catch with every stitch—and yet that she could turn from her scrubbing-brush to the little wooden bobbins (her fingers need not touch the thread) and proceed without difficulty on a snowy bit of Valenciennes—for happily she was following her mother in Valenciennes.

There are three schools in Thielt, of which the convent schools de la Charité and de l’Espérance are the more important. I went first to the Convent de la Charité, with Mlle. van der Graeht, who has throughout the war been devoted to the workers and the lace. Tho Thielt lay in the danger zone, she refused to choose a safer city, remaining to share the work of her father, who added to his arduous duties as administrator of the arrondisement, those of the representative of the Brussels Lace Committee. Two weeks before the end, however, the Germans drove these patriots from their house (three bombs from Allied aeroplanes had already fallen on it) and they were denied the experience they had been waiting for throughout all the years, that of seeing the Allied soldiers march into Thielt. One of the Germans was frank enough to tell them that they were being forced away chiefly to prevent their “assisting” at that deliverance.

Immediately after the armistice they returned, and installed themselves comfortably once more on the first floor of their almost roofless house. When I arrived they had not yet come in from their first inspection trip of the communes just behind the lines, and I was welcomed by pretty, brown-haired Flavia and her six-year-old Albert. Flavia’s husband had been killed at the front during the first months of the war, and she had served in this household throughout all its terrible duration. As I looked from the windows of the drawing-room, still intact, across the rear garden, to the mass of wreckage that was once the neighboring house, I understood the feeling of the impotence of all effort produced by the casualness of these bombs, that spare here to strike there, and why in the war one inevitably becomes a fatalist. And as I looked across the garden, Flavia told me something of her experience with the thirteen Germans who took over the house when they drove her master out and of how whenever the shelling was severe they ran to the cellars, and several times tried to persuade her to go with them but she always refused. “I preferred,” she said, “to die alone with my little boy in the open, to risking being killed with them in the cellar.” On Sunday, October 13, between 11 and 2 o’clock, sixty shells fell on Thielt, and all day Monday and the following days they continued to fall, until on Saturday the 19th, the French marched into the town. To add to the horror of this period, people were dying in large numbers of influenza. Flavia told me of the street-sweeper who died at the corner with her broom in her hand. By some miracle she and her little boy escaped both shell and pestilence, and when Monsieur and his daughter returned they found her scrubbing and restoring as best she could after the flight of the enemy. This was one of the centers where during the four terror-years a bright beacon burned for all the surrounding territory, for it was here that the people of the villages and the convents could bring their laces for the committee, knowing they would be accepted and paid for. In 1916, the Baron van der Graeht was encouraging the work in no less than seventeen communes and of as many as 3,500 lace-workers. Flavia smiled as she remembered something—“What good luck, there will be a sister coming this very day about 2 o’clock, with her laces.” As she said this, the door opened—father and daughter were back from their pony-cart expedition to the front-lines.

Monsieur was still visibly moved by what he had seen, even after his own four years’ experience. “Madame,” he said, “I can not describe my emotion on going about in those little shattered villages just behind the lines, where the women have insisted on remaining, and where day by day, and year after year, they have sat calmly before their cushions making lace, while the shells burst before and behind them. After such a victory as theirs, the lace industry of Belgium must live.”

Mademoiselle gave me the list of the badly destroyed villages, and then the names of those which had suffered less and that, with Thielt, produced the most lace. Among them were Pittham and Ardois (which specializes in old Bruges); Ruysselede (with an excellent school for Valenciennes), Aerseele, and Maria Loop. Thielt, itself, had at the beginning of 1919 about 300 workers, of whom a hundred were in the school of the convent de l’Espérance, and about 60 in the Convent de la Charité. There had been times of great discouragement; in one particularly dark hour in 1917 many of the workers had turned back to the old facteurs, or village agents, for help, and unfortunately some of these sold to the Germans, who were constantly trying to win them by offering large sums for their laces. Since he was under no obligation to turn over a fixt wage to the workers, the facteur might reap any profit he could secure.

We abandoned this unpleasant subject to talk of the schools, the hope of the future, and after lunch I went with Mlle. to visit one of these, the Convent de la Charité, on the edge of the town, with its 60 girls, who have supplied the committee with much old Flanders and Cluny. Even tho this was a Saturday afternoon in winter, 45 of the 60 chairs were occupied by girls between 12 and 16. One rarely finds a girl over 18 in the schools; once she has learned her trade, she prefers to work at home with the mother and grandmother.

Unfortunately in this, which is considered a “good” school for Flanders, I found the longest hours I had yet met, that is, summer hours. In winter, because of the poor light, they are shorter. It seems unbelievable, but the sisters told me that in summer the children come at 5:30 o’clock and work until 8 at night—with only three half-hours for recreation—one at 8:30 o’clock, one at 12, and one at 4. A day of 13 hours for growing children, and girls who are maturing! It is such cruel conditions as these that the Committee have done their best to ameliorate. In this case, tho the hours are still criminal, the wages have been improved.

However, “improved wages” leave much still to be fought for. I talked with a girl of twelve in the front row, an apprentice, and found that she earns between 40 and 50 centimes a day, or about 10 cents for her 13 hours’ labor, which tho it is almost double what she could have earned before the war, is nevertheless only 10 cents per day. The Committee was able to add the war-time subsidy of 20 per cent. to this. Naturally, the learner can not yet make what is called good lace, and unfortunately her parents are often only too content to have her bring home 10 cents a day. The older, more experienced girls, were earning from one to two francs a day, or from 20 to 40 cents, that is, on a summer’s day or full day.

Monsieur told me later that in his region if the wage of the good worker can be raised to 50 cents per day, she will be able to live, and will be content to remain at home before her lace cushion rather than to go to the shoe and cotton factories of Thielt.

The advanced pupils were eager to uncover their treasure. Nearly all of them had protected their round cushions with a circular piece of thick blue glazed paper, with a hole in the middle. Through the hole they worked with their rather heavy cherry wood bobbins, on the meshless guipures of Cluny and Bruges and Flanders, which this school prefers. Several were finishing the collar and cuff sets of rather coarse but pretty Bruges with its characteristic rose and trefoil, seen so commonly in shop windows, and which are especially effective when worn with cotton or linen frocks. The Guipure de Flandres pupils were making square insets for table and tray-cloths of simple, geometric designs. Two girls were at work on what they called Guipure de Milan, of a wide spreading branch and flower pattern.

However, the most interesting lace was not the guipure but the Point de Flandres or Old Flanders, with its elaborate mesh base, just now experiencing an interesting and encouraging revival, in which the zealous Baron van der Graeht felt Thielt should assist. A half-dozen older girls were executing doily and table center rounds in this lace, after the Committee’s very popular Swan pattern. They were using a fairly coarse linen thread, and working the rich, solid mesh with eight bobbins. “Whoever would make the Old Flanders mesh must be willing to play a game of patience,” Madame had once said to me. The dull, plain woven parts of the pattern are brilliantly outlined by a still coarser thread, and in the “jours” or open-work spaces are the much loved snow-balls characteristic of Binche lace. Because of its combined strength and beauty, there could hardly be a more successful lace for general use than this Old Flanders, sometimes called Antik.

While it was once the most generally made and most celebrated of Flemish bobbin laces (it was known in every part of Flanders in 1500), it had been almost forgotten for generations, but even tho it has been little remembered for some time, Old Flanders may be said never to have died. In certain regions, that of Antwerp for instance, it is found continuously on the garments of priests. It is the lace that remained always at the base and from which the other bobbin laces, from time to time, sprang. It is to be hoped that the Committee’s laudable effort to revive it will bear increasing rewards.

Tho they could understand no French, and I knew only a few words of Flemish, these little and big girls found much amusement in my visit, and in my inability to follow their swift fingers. These were fingers accustomed, too, to weed the fields and to dig potatoes, for there is practically no lace made here during the weeks of August and September when the potato-crop is gathered. The Sisters of Charity, teachers in this school, were poor themselves, as their surroundings testified. They had no fine carved oak armoire for their laces, but brought from some safe place a tin box, like an ordinary bread-box, in which were the dainty white packets ready to be sent to the Committee at Brussels. As they were exhibiting piece after lovely piece, they unfolded the swan pattern doily rounds of Old Flanders, and after a moment’s hesitation, Sister A. ventured, “There is one thing you might do for us, Madame; when you return to Brussels, could you not tell the Committee that while the small swan doily rounds are sufficiently paid, this large centerpiece round is not? It is our fault in estimating; we did not realize how long it would take to make it.” I could not resist teasing them a little and replied that I should be delighted to carry the message were it not for the fact that it was precisely this set of swan doilies (as it was) that the Committee had given me for Christmas. “Should you like me to tell them,” I asked, “that they had not paid enough for my present?” They were covered with confusion, as I expected they would be, and then how they laughed, those frail little sisters. “Mais, Madame, that would indeed be difficult; we will write; we had forgotten. Non, Madame, you certainly could not tell them that! But we can write letters now whenever we wish—can we not? One loses the habit in four years.” And then they laughed again all together.

It was already late when I reached Wynghene. The shell-pitted roads of western Flanders had made all my traveling difficult and I could not see Mlle. Slock, one of the rare lace dealers who has looked beyond her immediate purse and has taken time to revive old models and invent new ones, seeking in every way to raise the standard of the present production in all her region, which is chiefly devoted to Cluny. I had not time to stop in the village, but hurried on beyond it to a cheerful red brick manor house set in a forest, the home of the Burgomaster of Wynghene, whose wife has been the untiringly devoted representative of the Committee for this section.

As we sat at tea together, near the conservatory windows, where we could look through the naked garden trees across a meadow to the forest beyond, the Burgomaster told me of the morning when they stood at these windows, after the shells had been falling for days all about them, waiting and watching, scarcely daring to breathe, and of how as they watched, he saw through the trees of the forest what looked like a brown shadow, but the brown shadow moved, and then running across the meadow, where he had always believed they must break through, came the Belgian soldiers, the soldiers of deliverance. “I know our hearts stopt beating; we stood choking, incapable of motion, as we watched them come—still unable to believe after four years of waiting.”

We were silent for a few minutes, then we began to talk of the lace. As his wife turned to get the list of her villages, I asked if the Germans had attempted to get her workers away from her. “They had their agents here, as everywhere,” she answered, “and I regret to admit that one of their most successful ones was a Belgian woman, who had been a facteur, or lace gatherer for larger houses, before the war. When the Germans offered her large prices, she consented to serve them. If she had been sacrificing herself for what she believed to be the good of the workers, we might have forgiven her, but it was obvious that she was not—she is pretty and likes pretty clothes—Voilà tout! Along with several other disloyal citizens, she was imprisoned the other day, but unfortunately after only twenty-four hours, succeeded in freeing herself. However, the people will never forget that she trafficked with the enemy.”

I had known of the German lace organization first through seeing the huge sign, “Allgemeine Spitzen Centrale” (Central lace depot), just across from our C. R. B. offices. And as soon as I got in touch with the loyal work of the women of the Belgian Lace Committee, I was daily hearing of this or that attempt of their oppressors to capture the designs and the output of the country. They might succeed with the simpler, more helpless workers, who because of their great misery may be forgiven for selling to them—and with the deserters and activists—but they were daily defeated by the Committee patriots. I was thoroughly interested to hear, now, from one of the patriots, that the idea of the German “Lace Control” possibly had its birth in Wynghene. In February, 1915, a certain Freiherr Von Rippenhausen was stationed at Wynghene. He had with him his young American wife—they had been married but a short time, and the people of the village were kind enough to say they believed she was not German by conviction! However that may be, the Von Rippenhausens requisitioned lodgings in the house of one of the lace buyers of Wynghene, and in this house they naturally discovered much regarding the lace situation, the lack of thread, and the distress of the workers, and of the Belgian system by which the facteur furnishes the thread to the worker and buys the finished products, which he in turn sells to a big lace house, reaping what profit he can as intermediary. Frau von Rippenhausen, in particular, informed herself thoroughly, and together she and her husband, it is said, organized the German “Lace Control,” with headquarters at Brussels.

Since the Germans had requisitioned all the thread they could lay their hands on, of which there were enormous stocks in Belgium, it was not difficult for them to offer it to the workers. They sent German soldier facteurs into every corner of the country to offer large prices to native facteurs or to individual workers. On receiving a piece of lace, they supplied an equal weight of thread to the workers, thus establishing a continuing chain of material and product. And they claimed to be selling their lace in America! They were clever enough to profit, in 1917, by the Committee’s apparent inability to go on at that moment, exercising every pressure they could, and naturally they gained ground. No one can say yet how much lace they were able to buy, but the amount of inferior lace was considerable.

Madame Van der Bruggen’s records show that before 1917 there were in Wynghene, contributing to the Committee, 400 workers on Cluny and Duchesse, about 200 on Cluny and Valenciennes in Beernem, 200 on Valenciennes in Oedelem, and 350 in Oostcamp, all grateful to have the Committee’s fixt minimum of three francs’ work a week insured to them. Some of these villages, Beernem and Oostcamp for instance, are usually included in the Bruges district.

She praised the Committee’s method of raising the wage by standardizing the values of certain designs as executed by an average worker; the poorer workers then gained less, the superior ones, more. “I thought I realized,” she said, “how cruelly underpaid our women were, but it was not until I saw their joy when the Committee promised them that at least they should always have a minimum of ten centimes an hour for their work, that I really understood. Ten centimes (two cents), just a postage stamp, for a whole hour’s straining effort; and they were happy because that was so much more than they had been sure of winning before the war!”

[IV]
GRAMMONT
Belgian Home of Chantilly

The Committee was discouraging about Grammont. When I told Madame de Beughem of my plan to go there to see Chantilly lace in the making, she answered, “But that will be a futile journey; the women have had practically no black or white silk thread since the war, and the few who were still working in 1914 will have stopt; that one-time important branch of the industry has almost ceased to exist.” I decided, however, to visit the tomb of Chantilly, the lace so closely identified with Grammont that in Belgium it takes its name from that city, rather than from its original French home.

And Grammont itself, a town of 13,000 inhabitants, was well worth the journey, situated as it is in a lovely region of rolling hills, and deriving its name from the steep slope (Grand Mont) to which part of the city clings. The surrounding undulating country is dotted with quaint, clustered villages, some with thatched, some with tiled roofs, and only twenty miles away is the charming town of Audenarde—poor Audenarde, so cruelly wounded by the war!

I reached Grammont about noon, having lost an hour on the way through the difficulty of passing camions and artillery and marching companies of Canadian soldiers. Between Ninove and Grammont, too, were many squads of German prisoners at work on the ruined road. They were guarded by the French, but it was a rather lenient surveillance, at any rate the sullen groups in their trailing gray capes appeared to be casually tapping the mud with their spades instead of being genuinely at work.

A “MARIE ANTOINETTE” IN CHANTILLY LACE, MADE WITH BOBBINS, NEAR GRAMMONT

CUSHION COVER

Center Venise, borders Valenciennes, lace executed by 12 workers in one month, embroidery and mounting by four women in two months, design by M. de Rudder

TEA CLOTH

Point de Paris, cock design

My Belgian chauffeur, whose health is broken after three years of forced labor in Germany, would have been delighted to run them down, and at one point did succeed in splashing a group with mud, as he called “Boches” and something I did not catch. I began to understand the ruling that released Belgian prisoners shall not be placed over Germans still held here.

After lunch I started with Madame Cuseners to the little lace school whose director has courageously carried on during the four years. We walked through a narrow arched passageway beside a brick building and into a large hall at the rear which was at one time the lace class-room. Instead of lace-workers, however, we found Scotch and Canadian soldiers busy tacking the Union Jack and Belgian flags on the wall, and hanging boughs and festoons of colored paper rings—they were making ready for a “grand” New Year’s Eve dancing party. In the courtyard still farther back a half-dozen Scotchmen had built a campfire, protecting it with a low canvas roof, and it was burning brightly despite the dismal rain.

It shone on the windows of the long, narrow room at the side of the court, which looked like a conservatory, but which had become the refuge of the lace-workers, when because of lack of thread and fuel, they could no longer occupy their hall. I found fifty sweet-faced girls between thirteen and fifteen busy over their cushions, a faithful, tired-looking old Abbé and an enthusiastic young woman teacher. They were not making black nor the less important white silk Chantilly, for they had long been entirely without silk thread. Nevertheless, they were preserving the art of making it, since they had been kept at work on Chantilly designs executed with bobbins and the white cotton thread furnished by the Committee. They had some fine flounces, which were not, however, to be compared with the traditional black silk ones of the great Chantilly days.

For Chantilly has seen great days. It appeared first in France about 1740, where it achieved a phenomenal popularity, which was unfortunately rudely ended by the Revolution, for since it was a favorite lace at court, the Revolutionists made it a crime to appear in Chantilly. Later, under the Empire, it enjoyed a revival, the fabrication of the silk laces spread in France; Bayeux became a celebrated center; and, finally, toward 1835, it crossed to Belgium, where Grammont was early recognized as its home. In 1851 all of the forty-nine schools of that province taught the technique of this lace. Then toward 1870 true Chantilly seemed doomed a second time to extinction by the success of the machine imitations of St. Pierre des Calais, and also because the vogue for black lace had passed. But again the pendulum has swung back; the imitations are now greatly in favor and there is a cheering increase in the demand for the true lace flounces.

The Abbé brought out from dusty drawers the school’s stock of designs, elegant groupings of bouquets and foliage, with occasional striking geometrical details introduced, all joined by a fine hexagonal mesh, which resembled at first that of Malines, and later, more closely, the Point d’ Alençon mesh. The fact that this lace is often used for scarfs and gowns, and that the customary flounce is of generous width, has encouraged the development of elaborate patterns. Some of the sketches were divided by heavy pencil lines into the separate narrow strips on which the lace-maker actually works. To achieve the wide flounce, these strips are attached one to another by special workers who employ a joining stitch that defies detection. The individual pattern strips include both mesh and flowers and follow irregular lines, curving, it may be, to include a full-petaled rose. When one examines the fineness of the clear hexagonal mesh that forms the base of Chantilly, it seems all the more remarkable that the division lines are not visible. This Chantilly mesh has differed during various periods and besides there are always almost as many varieties as there are workers, for one weaves more closely or more firmly than another. I came soon to realize how great a difference in effect results from a practically invisible variation in the thickness of the thread, or in the manner of twisting or looping it or in the placing of the pins. One of the distinguishing characteristics of Chantilly is the relief produced by a heavier thread that outlines the pattern and forms the twigs and veins of the leaves. In securing a brilliant relief, the French have always succeeded better than the Belgians.

These Grammont pupils were also making Blonde, a favorite lace with the Spanish people, and introduced into Belgium from France at the same time as Chantilly. Its processes are very similar, tho it is easily differentiated from its sister by the heavy glossy petals of its flowers and their conspicuous open-work centers in the Point de Paris stitch. The name Blonde is derived from the écru silk which was first employed in its making; now it is made of white or of black silk, and chiefly in the form of scarfs or mantillas. The girls were making their war-time Blonde of cotton, the good Peat cotton of Nottingham, brought in by the C. R. B. for the Lace Committee. It is practically only in the Grammont and Turnhout regions that Blonde is still made.

The instructress showed me the little bundles of poor, crooked brass pins that were all that remained after four years of the occupation, explaining what harm poor pins can work in a fine mesh like that of Chantilly. Then she asked if I could not tell them when they might expect new ones. Alas, these disheartening months of the winter of 1918–1919 when one hope after another has been deferred; so many things to be done at once, and all depending on the re-establishment of a system of transportation utterly destroyed.

I went from the school-room, past the fire in the courtyard, back to the large hall where the Canadians were still decorating for their party, and where we wished one another a Happy New Year—brave Canadian boys well loved by the Belgians—then on to the house of Madame’s mother, who for a half-century has been a lace fabricant, or dealer, and whose front room served easily as combined salon and office. Precious laces need very little space; they can be stored in a handsome carved oak armoire, which is at once a safe and a beautiful article of furniture. This old lady’s hair was still dark and glossy, as is so often the case with grandmothers in Europe, and her brown eyes were bright and keen. She talked of the time when there were more than twenty dealers employing over 2,000 workers on Chantilly in the Grammont region, and of the gradual decline of the industry. “Certain empty houses on the heights above the town tell the story. Long ago the lace-makers left the valley at the foot of the slope, and seeking the brighter light on the hill, formed a lace colony there; but they have come down again, the houses on the hill are deserted. One by one the skilled old workers have died, and their secrets with them. There is only one really excellent piqueuse left and she is a baker-woman who exercises her talent of pricking patterns between baking! And I believe that instead of the former thousands, we have not more than eight hundred dentellières to-day. Here, as elsewhere, factories have come, and the lace has fled. With us it is the cigar and the match that have banished it, they furnish better wages and our women follow. However, if we can win a higher pay for the lace, and can but develop the little school you have just visited, and continue to train our girls, we shall yet be able to restore Chantilly. Especially,” she added, “if we can be helped by that fickle Mistress Fashion, who last year smiled again on the black lace gown. Some of our patterns for robes can be made in a few weeks, but the truly fine ones take months, even a year to make. All depends on the design and the number of threads. We have had much to combat in the success of the marvelous Calais machine imitations of Chantilly, but true lovers of lace will never be content with them, however clever they are.”

She shook out a folded triangular shawl. “There is no lace in the world more beautiful than this,” she said, as she spread it on the white tablecloth, the better to display the wealth of its black flower clusters and long fronds, and then had me squeeze the delicate mesh in my hand to test its resiliency. I could not but agree with her. Her daughter brought out an exquisite collar, a tendril and flower pattern, with long tabs that could be crossed in front and let fall like a sash behind, a “Marie Antoinette” of most tempting loveliness; then a dainty parasol and a fan and a few filmy winged butterflies—all pieces made before the war, before the Germans set a wall of fire between the women of Grammont and the silk thread (Grenadine d’Alays) which meant their bread.

I was glad to have a few hours of sweeping hill country between these elegant black laces and the Valenciennes I was next to see; for the moment all white lace seemed negligible.

V
BRUGES
Queen of Lace Cities

After a day beside the graves of Nieuport and Dixmude and Ypres, the first glimpse of the singing towers of Bruges against the evening sky seems an unearthly vision. During four years no one had known that Bruges would not perish as her sisters had perished. One must have come direct from the desolation of Nieuport, to her pignons and bridges, from the skeleton of Les Halles of Ypres to her Hôtel de Ville, to estimate her incomparable beauty. Since Ypres is dead, only Bruges and Turnhout remain as true lace cities of Belgium; Ghent, the elegant neighbor of Bruges, and herself once a Queen in the lace world, has turned to her factories and no longer counts. Except Turnhout, then, with its famous schools for fine laces, no Belgian city to-day challenges the leadership of Bruges, and beyond Belgium, she has but one great rival—Venice.

LACE-MAKERS OF BRUGES

This claim to leadership rests on a solid foundation. Bruges is of ancient lineage in the lace world; she has preserved unbroken, through at least four centuries, the traditions of that world. There are those even who believe that mediæval bobbin lace had its origin in her territory, and they are at least supported by legend. A pretty story tells of a poor and infirm widow, who with her many children lived in a little street of Bruges. The entire family depended only on the work of Serena, the eldest, who from dawn till dark turned her wheel. She had long been loved by a neighbor, Arnold, the son of a great merchant, and she did not view him with disfavor. But as winter and misery settled again on the poor little hut, and Serena saw that all her efforts appeared vain, she vowed to the Virgin never to marry unless her family could be rescued from their suffering. Then one day when near the Minnewater, as she was making sad thoughts, suddenly she saw a light, and from the Virgin threads descended toward her, which, skipping the branches, dropt in her lap, where they by chance designed lovely patterns. Serena understood this to be the response to her prayer, and she tried at once to reproduce the arabesques in linen thread. She ended by attaching little woods to them and by aiding them with pins. And thus to the great emotion of Bruges bobbin-lace was born. And all the rich seigneurs and bourgeois wished to possess it. Ease came and Serena married Arnold, and they had many daughters, all of whom she taught to make lace.

BRUGES AND SIMILAR BOBBIN LACES

First column: Bruges
Middle column: Bruges, Bruges, Bruges, Rosaline
Third Column: Rosaline, Old Flanders, Old Flanders, Duchesse

The often quoted picture in the Louvre Gallery, painted by Hans Memling (14— to 1494) and representing the Virgin and the Infant Christ surrounded by gift-bearers, among whom is a rich Brugeois wearing a gray costume trimmed with a bobbin-lace edging, certainly indicates that the industry existed in this epoch, and possibly had its center at Bruges, then the principal city in Flanders and the seat of the court. Furthermore, records prove that already at the opening of the 16th century, lace-making was included as a necessary part of the education of women. The edicts of Charles V requiring that it should be taught in all the schools and convents, greatly stimulated its development in Bruges, as well as throughout the entire Flanders and the provinces of Hainaut, Brabant and Antwerp. It became so popular an occupation for women that Charles’s successor, Philip II, required that the magistrates of Ghent and Bruges restrict the number of lace-workers in their cities, in order that the rich might find some women left willing to serve them. Another enlightening document shows that in 1544 Bruges counted 7,696 poor among her population, and that the department of public charity required of the young women among them that they should cease to walk the streets and should learn the lace industry. There were at that time many lace schools. During the following centuries, Bruges maintained her position as a lace center and was able to survive the death-blow the French Revolution dealt the industry. For we find, about the middle of the 19th century, the city still counted seventy-nine schools, attended by 2,722 pupils, while in Valenciennes, for example, lace-making no longer existed.

There is, then, a rich and ancient past back of the clicking bobbins of the Bruges of to-day. After four years of German rule it is still difficult to give accurate statistics, but generally speaking, in this city of 54,000 inhabitants, as many as 5,000 women and girls make lace of some sort. If you question the average woman, she will probably look at you in surprize and say: “How many lace-makers? Why, everybody; there is hardly a house in Bruges without its cushion and bobbins.” While if you put the same question to such a celebrated lace dealer as M. Gillemont de Cock, who counts gold and silver medals from many nations, he will be very apt to answer: “Madame, before the war I knew of about thirty, now I can not say!” The Lace Committee at Brussels considers 5,000 a fair estimate for Bruges and her contributing villages, which is the number given, too, by Professor Maertens of the Normal School.

By the Bruges district is meant chiefly Bruges, quite the contrary of the usual situation. One hears of the Alost region, for instance, and finds that while the villages of the surrounding area count thousands of workers, in the city of Alost itself very few are left. However, Bruges, too, counts some few outlying villages. Madame Ryeland, representative during the war of the Brussels Lace Committee, told me that forty communes contributed to her committee, the most important being Syssele (where Valenciennes is the favorite lace), Maldeghem (applications and filet), Saint Andre (Cluny and Valenciennes), Oostcamp and Lophem (Valenciennes), Saint Croix (Cluny and other guipures), and Saint Michele (an unusually beautiful Duchesse de Bruges).

In Bruges itself there are three important convent lace schools, working largely for the shops, but which also execute private commands; the convent school of the Apostolines, typical of those where the children learn a little Flemish, a little French, much catechism, and for the rest make the laces of the region from morning till evening; the school Defoere, and the well-known school Josephine. Each has between 100 and 200 dentellières, who make the popular Torchons and Clunys and Valenciennes, and also the more difficult Binche, with its mesh characterized by the airy “boules de neige,” snow-balls. They make, too, Old Flanders, which has a particularly strong and elaborate mesh; and of course the Duchesse de Bruges, or Bruges, for which the city is famous. In addition to the convent schools and a few other less important laique schools and some work-rooms, one finds in the Hospices, or free homes for the old, another goodly company working together. In their picturesque retreats some 200 old women pass their days making lace, chiefly Valenciennes.

There remain the individual households; to the common statement that in each one, some member makes some kind of lace, one might add, at some time during the year. If the children from these homes do not go to the schools to learn, they are taught by their mothers and grandmothers. A favorite Christmas gift to children is a cushion and set of bobbins, with which they soon learn to produce simple patterns. For example, Madame Roose, the daughter of the concierge of the Groothuis Museum, which houses the marvelous Baron Liedts collection of old laces, accustomed from childhood to see and hear of these laces, became herself a lace-maker and later a successful dealer and now has five daughters of her own, all of whom she has herself taught to ply their bobbins. The Lace Committee told me that during the war the clothing committee had difficulty in finding young girls and women who could darn and sew even moderately well; since childhood they had given all their time to lace-making. Conscious of the danger in this situation, the Lace Normal School preaches that until she has learned other necessary things, no young girl should be allowed to spend more than half a day over her cushion.

LACE NORMAL SCHOOL, BRUGES, BEGINNER’S CLASS

Symbolic color pattern on left-hand easel; demonstration bobbins attached to colored threads at right

By far the greater number working at home make Torchon, Cluny and Valenciennes, tho the Bruges district is celebrated, too, for Rosaline and Binche and Old Flanders, and above all for the Duchesse de Bruges, once so named because it was thought worthy to adorn a Duchess. Bruges lace has always been made entirely with bobbins, in separate flowers, or details that are united not by mesh, but by little picot-edged cords or bars. There are many varieties of this familiar lace; between the coarse, much marketed modern Bruges, with its well-known roses and trefoils, sometimes scarcely meriting the name of lace, and the Bruges of the robe presented in 1901 to Queen Elizabeth, then the Princess Elizabeth, there is a deplorable distance. The individual trefoils and arabesques and roses of the coarser kinds are made very quickly on the round cushion, which can be readily turned, and are produced in great quantities in many of the communes of the Bruges region, while fortunately in such a village as Saint Michel one can still see exquisite examples of the finer Bruges in the making.

BED COVER IN DUCHESSE, OR BRUSSEL’S LACE

Made with bobbins; executed in Flanders by 30 women in three months; design by The Lace Committee

Rather than be introduced to the lace-making of Bruges by the younger workers in the schools, or in one of the thousand homes given over to it, I preferred to go first to the place where probably more strangers, especially English and Americans, have been initiated into the mysteries of the cushion and its bobbins than anywhere else in the world. There have been other famous Béguinages in Belgium—congeries of houses maintained by private endowment, for women, who, while they object to taking the vows of the convent, yet wish to live in a kind of partial retreat from the world and under the protection of the church—but none lovelier than this one of Bruges, with its sixteenth century buildings of pure Flemish architecture, grouped about a wide green court shaded by elm trees. Naturally the Béguinage has not been a mecca for travelers and artists merely because several of the gentle old ladies in retreat there made beautiful lace; they have come in search of its quaint pignons and doorways, its inner gardens, the bridges that span the surrounding canals where the swans paddle peacefully. And they have been delighted to find included in the picture the white-capped women before their lace cushions, intent (doubtless unconsciously) on perpetuating other beauties, as old as those of the buildings encircling the court, the designs of Valenciennes that have been handed down by French and Belgian mothers to their children through generations. These ladies of the Béguinage may keep their private fortunes and pay for the privileges of the retreat. They are supposed, however, to live austerely; their charming brick houses are white inside—wall-papers (as being too gay) are forbidden—while the floors are covered with a kind of pretty, rude rush carpet. They may not go on journeys, and no man outside, except the clergy, may enter the sacred precincts of the court, the gates of which are closed at 8 o’clock. Can one imagine an atmosphere more encouraging to hours spent patiently in lace-making? It is recorded that in the Béguinage of Ghent, in 1756, there were as many as 5,000 women engaged in making the Valenciennes for which that city was famous. But the day of this particular kind of retreat has passed, and even at Bruges many of the houses are vacant; when the old die, there are few who wish to take their places. And it is only because those few who remain preserve the best traditions of the lace that they count in the lace-world of to-day; the quantity produced is negligible. Nevertheless, I was delighted that my first knowledge of Bruges lace should come through the few wide Valenciennes flounces of exquisite flower and vine pattern and firm and even workmanship that I found still pinned to the cushions of the Béguinage.

Curiously enough, in this retreat, pervaded by the sadness that inevitably reigns where the old order changes, I found the young and enthusiastic Vicaire, Professor Maertens, assistant director of the new Lace Normal School of Bruges. He lives with his aunt, who is the mother director of the Béguinage and called “Madame, la Grande Dame,” tho she is still Mademoiselle. The Béguinage may in one sense represent the despair of the lace, since what is happening there is happening throughout Belgium. But in the person of Professor Maertens of the Normal School, the Béguinage represents, too, the hope of the lace. In the plain little room of his charming Gothic house, he explained with admirable clarity the necessity which led to the founding of this Normal School by the State in 1911, and the system which it has developed. He then arranged that I should “assist” at the réouverture of the school the following morning. There was to be a reopening because, in common with so many schools of Belgium, the Lace Normal had been driven from its quarters by the Germans, and tho after their eviction the teachers had persisted in continuing their classes in a convent, where their persecutors forced them to receive two Austrian pupils (from whom, however, they concealed much), they were in the true sense to begin again on January 7, 1919. That was fully four weeks after the invader had had to evacuate, for eager as they were to commence, with their best effort, they had not been able before this to prepare three school-rooms and a few smaller ones on the ground floor for use. We are accustomed to the pictures of the territories desolated by the Germans, but unless one goes from house to house in the districts supposed to be left unharmed, he can have no conception of the state in which they were left. However, by Thursday morning the few rooms on the ground floor had been disinfected and whitewashed, and the Lace Normal School of Belgium re-opened its doors at 8:30 o’clock. Poets have described the shining faces of children on their way to school—but after pupils and teachers have been ground under the heel of an implacable oppressor for four years there is still another light in their faces as they reassemble in a free school-room. It was generous of them to allow me to share their first morning.

The teachers’ course covers two years. In order to insure careful individual training the directors prefer to have no more than eight or ten earnest students in each year’s class; they prefer, too, that these shall not have been lace-makers before entering, and that they be between sixteen and thirty years of age. There are, then, two class-rooms, light and airy, and equipped with blackboards and charts, and the all-important large demonstration cushion with its gigantesque bobbins attached to heavy colored wool threads to aid the eye and brain. Each young woman records the steps of her progress in a series of copy-books so beautiful in their penmanship and their drawing as to recall at once the manuscripts of long ago.

What, then, is the instruction which they receive? Since there had never been a system of teaching lace-making in Belgium, the directors of the Normal School were obliged to develop one, and as it exists to-day, logical, comprehensive, far-seeing, it belongs exclusively to the School of Bruges. By the defective method employed before, a pupil was taught to make one kind of lace, then another, and another, but tho she might become proficient in the execution of thirty kinds, she might still be incapable of executing a new thirty-first variety if it were presented to her, because she had not been taught the underlying principles.

ROSALINE, WHICH CLOSELY RESEMBLES BRUGES

DETAILS FOR BRUGES LACE

Made with bobbins on round cushion

The Bruges directors found, after a long and careful analysis of the processes employed in all known laces, that they depend on but between twenty and thirty major operations, and that, in the final analysis, for the bobbin laces, these reduce themselves always to the simple question, “Does the thread pass from left to right, or does it pass from right to left?”

DOILY SET IN POINT DE PARIS IN THE “ANIMALS OF THE ALLIES” DESIGN, EXECUTED AT TURNHOUT