FLAX AND HEMP
WHILE listening to what Jacques was saying about wool, Emile examined
his handkerchief attentively. He turned it over and over, felt it, then
looked through it. Jacques foresaw the question Emile was getting ready
to ask him, and he said:
“Handkerchiefs and linens are not woolen. Certain plants, cotton, hemp,
flax, and not sheep, furnish them; for, you see, I don’t know much about
those things myself. I have heard tell of the cotton plant, but have
never seen it. And, besides, I am afraid talking to you will make me cut
the sheep’s skin.”
In the evening, at Jules’s request, they took up the history of the
materials with which we clothe ourselves, and Uncle Paul explained their
nature.
“The outside of hemp and flax is composed of long threads, very fine,
supple, and tenacious, from which we manufacture our fabrics. We clothe
ourselves with the spoils of the sheep, we make ourselves fine with the
bark of the plant. The fabrics of luxury, cambric, tulle, gauze,
point-lace, Mechlin lace, are made from flax; the stronger ones, even to
coarse sacking, are of hemp. The cotton plant gives us the fabrics made
of cotton.
“Flax is a slender plant with little delicate blue flowers, and is sown
and harvested every year. It is much cultivated in Northern France,
Belgium, and Holland. It is the first plant used by man for woven
fabrics. Mummies of Egypt, the old land of Moses and the patriarchs,
mummies which have lain buried four thousand years and more, are swathed
in bands of linen.”
[Illustration: Flax]
“Mummies, did you say?” interposed Jules. “I don’t know what they are.”
“I will tell you, my dear child. Respect for the dead is found among all
people and in all ages. Man regards as sacred what was the seat of a
soul made in the image of God; he honors the dead, but the honors
rendered differ according to time, place, customs. We inter the dead and
put over the burial place a tombstone with an inscription, or at least a
humble cross, divine emblem of life eternal. The ancients burned them on
a funeral pile; they piously gathered the bones bleached by the fire and
inclosed them in priceless vases. In Egypt, to preserve the cherished
remains for the family, they embalmed the dead; that is to say, they
impregnated them with aromatics and swathed them in linen to prevent
decomposition. These pious duties were so delicately performed that,
after centuries and centuries, we find intact in their chests of
sweet-smelling wood, but dried and blackened by years, contemporaries of
the ancient kings of Egypt, or the Pharaohs. These are what are called
mummies.
“Hemp has been cultivated all over Europe for many centuries. It is an
annual, of a strong, nauseous odor, with little, green, dull-looking
flowers, whose stem, of the thickness of a quill pen, rises to about two
meters. It is cultivated, like flax, both for its bark and for its
grain, called hemp-seed.”
“That is the grain, I think,” said Emile, “we give the goldfinch, which
it cracks with its beak when it breaks the shell to get out the little
kernel.”
“Yes, hemp-seed is the feast of little birds.
“The bark of the hemp has not the fineness of flax. The fibers of this
latter plant are so fine that twenty-five grams of tow spun on the
spinning-wheel furnishes a thread almost a league long. The spider’s web
alone can rival in delicacy certain linen fabrics.
“When hemp and flax reach maturity, they are harvested, and the seeds
are separated by thrashing. The next operation, retting, then takes
place, its purpose being to render the filaments of the bark, or the
fibers, as they are called, easily separable from the wood. These
fibers, in fact, are pasted to the stem and stuck together by a gummy
substance that is very resistant and prevents separation until it is
destroyed by rot. They sometimes do this retting by spreading the plants
in the fields for a couple of weeks and turning them over now and then,
until the tow detaches itself from the woody part or hemp-stalk.
“But the quickest way is to tie the flax and hemp in bundles and keep
them submerged in a pond. There soon follows a rot which gives out
intolerable smells; the bark decays, and the fiber, endowed with
exceptional resistance, is freed.
“Then the bundles are dried; after that they crush them between the jaws
of an instrument called a brake, to crush the stems into small pieces
and separate the tow. Finally, to purge the tow of all woody refuse and
to divide it into the finest threads, they pass it between the iron
teeth of a sort of big comb called a heckle. In this state, the fiber is
spun either by hand or by machine. The thread obtained is ready for
weaving.
“On a loom they place in order, side by side, numerous threads composing
what they call the warp. By turns, impelled by a pedal on which the
operator’s foot presses, one half of these threads descends while the
other half ascends. At the same time the operator passes a transverse
thread in a shuttle through the two halves of the warp, from left to
right, then from right to left. From this inter-crossing comes the woven
fabric. And it is finished; the garb of the plant has changed masters;
the bark of the hemp has become cloth, that of flax a princely lace
worth some hundreds of francs by the piece.”
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