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.
[Illustration: ROSALINE, WHICH CLOSELY RESEMBLES BRUGES]
[Illustration: 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?”
[Illustration: DOILY SET IN POINT DE PARIS IN THE “ANIMALS OF THE
ALLIES” DESIGN, EXECUTED AT TURNHOUT]
They chose specific colors, red, purple, green and others, to represent
specific movements of the threads, thus establishing a symbolic color
system of design which enables the pupil to read a blackboard drawing
as he would a written page. And they realized that before the processes
are portrayed by lines on the blackboard, they should be executed with
the gigantesque bobbins and the colored wool cords.
They then outlined the two years’ work, which they made to include
classes in practical lace-making, in design, in commerce and English,
in the history of lace-making, and religion. Because the two years’
course was already over-crowded they did not attempt to teach the
needle points, which, according to them, do not demand a system of
instruction in the same sense that the bobbin laces require it.
Besides, they look upon bobbin lace as more uniquely Belgian and as
therefore more necessary to develop. Dr. Rubbens of Zele, farther east,
plans soon to have a needle lace Normal School in operation in that
town.
In the first year class, a demonstration of the use of the tools, the
winding-wheel, the cushion and bobbins is followed at once by the study
of the Torchons, which tho they are the commonest known laces, yet
in all their varieties employ all the more important lace processes.
The Torchons once thoroughly mastered, the student has traveled a
considerable distance on the lace journey. The study of Torchon is
succeeded by Cluny in all its varieties and Cluny is in turn followed
by a kind of barbaric Russian lace, of baroque design, which is,
like the Torchons and Clunys, made of linen thread, and resembles
them closely in other ways. The finer laces, Valenciennes, Duchesse,
Flanders, and others are taught only after these first three groups
have been mastered.
Along with the actual lace-making, the students follow courses in
design, where they begin first with simple studies in geometry and
in drawing. They then execute geometric designs and adapt them to
lace-making. From these studies they proceed to drawing from nature,
and to what is more difficult, the adaption of the drawings from nature
to lace designs, for it is one thing to create a beautiful flower and
leaf arabesque, and quite another thing to draw it so that it may be
exprest in thread.
The important classes in commerce and English and those in history and
religion run parallel with the studies in lace-making and design.
Of great value to these future teachers of Belgium is the model
practise school across the court from the main rooms, where at four
o’clock each day the poorer children of the neighborhood come to be
taught. Each has her cushion and bobbins and pins and thread furnished
by the Normal, and enjoys all the advantages offered by its excellent
system; while the coming teachers find here the opportunity to perfect
their methods.
I asked if these teachers could look confidently to finding positions.
Since only the initial class had graduated before the Germans were upon
Belgium and since that class was composed almost entirely of women
sent from the already existing convent schools, who sought to improve
their methods, it is as yet impossible to answer this question. But as
this is the single training-school in Belgium (the Brussels School,
so capably directed by Mme. Paulis, being chiefly a school of design)
there seems to be every reason to hope that once the country has risen
from the chaos into which it has been plunged, the Bruges graduates
will have no difficulty in securing places. Teachers are as yet very
poorly paid, but as regards salaries, too, there is reason to hope. The
ideal plan for a school would seem to be that it should be in charge of
a graduate of the Normal School, while a specialist in design from the
Brussels school should come once a week with her charts and drawings to
give particular instruction in that branch. The vital decision as to
the part lace-making should have in the curriculum of the communal or
free public schools is still in abeyance.
Since factories have killed the lace industry in every other city in
Belgium except Bruges and Turnhout, people often ask if it can persist
much longer in Bruges. There seems to be good ground to believe it
will. Under the Germans the port of Zeebrugge acquired a momentary
prominence, but with Antwerp so near, there seems little chance that
it will ever become important, or that Bruges herself may look forward
to any large industrial development. Lovely, tranquil city guarding a
beauty of long ago, it is probable that Bruges will maintain her right
to the title “Queen of Lace Cities.” “Yes,” M. Gillemont de Cock would
add, seeing the patterns and quality of the Valenciennes and the modern
Old Flanders and Bruges, and Binche, pinned to her cushions to-day, and
remembering the exquisite delicate webs of a few decades ago, “_Une
Reine, Madame, c’est vrai, mais une Reine bien malade_”—“a Queen,
Madame, it is true, but a very sick Queen.” The Lace Normal and other
schools can help greatly to restore her.
VI
KERXKEN
_Sister Robertine_
On a wet, cheerless day between Christmas and New Year’s, I started
with Madame de Beughem and Madame Allard for the most important lace
district of Eastern Flanders. The Alost region, which in 1896 counted
8,500 workers, is known throughout the lace world for its Needle Point
and Venise.
We went first to Alost itself, the center of the area, where, however,
modern industries have won their already oft-repeated victory over the
lace. It was in Alost, the 16th of November, 1918, that my car had
scarcely been able to push its way between the two lines of Belgian
soldiers of deliverance holding back the smiling, tearful population,
and where, too, I passed Burgomaster Max free after four years in
prison in Germany, on his way to King Albert at the Army Headquarters
near Ghent.
A short distance south of Alost we passed Haltaert, from which this
lace section might more justly take its name, since in Haltaert there
is scarcely a household without its needle or bobbin workers. And but
a little farther south lay Kerxken, which even in the rain, looked a
friendly village and where beside fully three-fourths of the windows
women were plying their needles.
Before the war companies of the men of this region went to France to
work in the harvest, as many as 40,000 migrating annually, because even
before the war, France was short-handed agriculturally and the French
fields offered higher wages than their own. The women and girls helped
those who remained to gather the crops, and in the fall, when the
men came back and the season for working the farms had passed, whole
families turned to lace-making as a means of piecing out the gains of
the summer. Sometimes the men cared for the children or assisted with
the housework so that the women might sit uninterruptedly before their
patterns, and in certain instances they themselves made lace—the
census of 1896 lists 117 men lace-workers in Belgium. In Kerxken we
found that thirty young men who had been silk weavers before the war
had during the occupation been able to make lace—not true lace, but
such imitations as filet, really a form of embroidery. They made, too,
Application, not genuine Application where true lace details, made
either with the bobbin or needle, are sewed upon the tulle base, but
tulle ornamented with machine-made lacets, narrow braids of various
sorts that come to the region from Calais. Lacets usually have a strong
thread along one edge, which can be drawn so that the braid may be more
swiftly fashioned into curving leaves or flowers. These distressing
imitations, which unfortunately pay much better than the true laces,
since they can be made with great speed and find a ready market, are a
constant menace to them. “_Voilà notre ennemie!_” said Madame Allard,
as we looked into a work-room where the table showed little piles of
lacet collars. The only method of fighting this enemy is through higher
wages for the genuine lace.
We could not see Adele Rulant, once with hardly a peer in Needle Point,
to whom people from far and near had sent their old pieces, even
shreds of their family treasure, for restoration, knowing that almost
certainly her artist’s needle would recapture the lost mesh or flower.
Adele Rulant had died and we realized again how surely one by one the
famous dentellières of the last half of the 19th century are dropping
out.
We turned down a lane and were soon at the green door of the convent
of the black-robed Franciscaine Sisters, who dismayed, but smiling,
hurried forward to greet us, very fresh looking in their white lined
coiffes and collars. I say dismayed, because through an error they had
expected us the day before and had kept a fire burning for hours, a
supreme expression of hospitality in this bitter, coalless winter; this
was Saturday afternoon, there was no fire, and the lace-workers were at
home scrubbing their tiled floors and doorsteps. But they would light
a fire at once, and send a Sister to the nearest houses to recall at
least a few of the women; they would prepare lunch for us, a plate of
little cakes and a bottle of wine had already been set on the table.
Such an apologetic bustle of welcome was heart-warming on a cheerless
day. Nothing less, I am certain, would have made it possible for me to
drink an entire glass of sour red wine at 10:30 o’clock in the morning.
I wished particularly to visit the convent because I had known during
the four years of Sœur Robertine’s successive victories over the
Germans. After they refused to let laces pass except through their
hands, which taxed and had frequently stolen from the parcels, time and
again she outwitted them, crossing the forbidden village frontier and
carrying the precious rolls herself to the office of the Committee at
Brussels.
Beneath the calm of that office there was always tense expectancy; at
any moment anything might happen, even the worst thing. One day after
weeks of being entirely cut off from many of their lace sections,
when the women were more strained and anxious than ever before, the
door opened quietly and Sœur Robertine, of Kerxken, a prohibited
district, stood before them. Fear for her quite overcame their joy at
seeing her; they quickly turned the key and hurried her into a rear
room. “But why have you come? We did not send for you—we should never
have allowed you to take such risks!”
At first only Sœur Robertine’s twinkling, keen gray eyes answered,
as she slowly threw off her long black cape and from beneath other
garments began unwinding meter upon meter of lovely white lace, till
the billowy lengths covered all the table. “It was very simple—I
had to come. For weeks our thread has been exhausted; the women are
suffering for need of their earnings. I found a way, and I’ll find a
way back, never fear; we’ll all return safely to Kerxken—the thread
and the money and I—even tho we may have to slip in under the very
nose of the Boche!” She was still laughing and still producing lace,
little packets now of square insets and bouquets, when I had to leave.
It was a delight to meet her again here freely directing her
convent—she who had so bravely held her right to freedom. Her parents
had been shop-keepers and she had brought to the Order a goodly store
of practical knowledge and a general alertness and good sense, which
added to her unselfishness and swift sympathy and ever-ready laugh,
easily explained the admiration and affection generally felt for her.
[Illustration: POINT DE FLANDRES, OR FLANDERS LACE
Flowers made with bobbins, mesh with the needle: designs by The Lace
Committee]
[Illustration: HANDKERCHIEF IN NEEDLE-POINT
Made near Alost. Both mesh and flowers made with needle]
[Illustration: DETAIL SHOWING SEVEN DIFFERENT FILLING-IN STITCHES]
While we were sitting in the large, cold reception room, waiting for
the workers to reassemble, I asked Sœur Robertine about a painting
over the door—a striking portrait which proved to be that of the Curé
Van Hoeimessen, who, in 1857, founded the convent in an attempt to
relieve the misery of the village. A short time before this, greatly
distrest by the idleness and poverty of his parishioners, he had asked
that a teacher be sent to Kerxken to instruct a few girls in the art
of lace-making, and since there was no building in which to start a
school, he called the class of five or six girls together in his own
house. Then, later, as the experiment succeeded, he invited a group of
sisters to come and founded for them the convent of the Franciscaines,
which from that day has held unswervingly to the traditions of its
foundation in teaching and executing the fine needle laces. There are
at present 15 sisters, and about 150 true lace-workers in their lace
school. In addition, 300 makers of filet and “imitation” are connected
with the convent.
From the salon we went to the work-room, which looks on a deep
walled-in garden, a treasure-plot for potatoes and cabbage during
the famine years. About a dozen girls and women had dropt their
brushes and brooms and hurried through the rain in their wooden shoes
to take up their patterns and go on with the delicate traceries of
Needle Point and Venise. It was easy to pick out their leader—a
beautiful-faced, white-haired woman wearing a black crochet cap, at
work on a Venise insertion. She was Sidonie, the best piqueuse, or
interpreter of design, in the convent. There were no cushions here, as
in the bobbin-lace classes, and the workers held the small, shining,
black cloth pattern in their hands, following the pricked holes with
their needles; there were fewer of these guiding pin-pricks than in
the bobbin-lace picqués. The patterns for Venise and Needle Point are
usually small because most women object to large details, as difficult
to turn in the hand. Later in a neighboring convent I noticed that the
patterns were considerably larger than those at Kerxken, and Sœur
Robertine, pointing to them said, “I should have to cut those in two
for my girls.” Fortunately a detail can usually easily be separated
and later rejoined. To protect her lace, the worker covers it with
thick blue paper, cutting a hole about the size of a twenty-five-cent
piece through which the needle and thread may move freely. Here it
was not the marvel of the flying fingers, as in the bobbin-rooms at
Turnhout, that most won our admiration, but the skill in directing the
fine threads in complicated designs of incredible delicacy. I chose
to sit beside fifteen-year-old Colette who held the partly finished
section of a handkerchief square beneath her needle. She explained
that it was Point de Gaze, gauze point, a name more recently given
the old Needle or Brussels Point. And the fragile hexagonal mesh she
was weaving between two beautiful full-blown roses, whose raised
petals curved outward from elaborately worked centers, seemed most
appropriately named. Her cotton, for Needle Point is made with cotton
thread, was so fine that I could not, despite her amused reiterations,
believe it did not break with every second stitch. A heavier thread
had been used to make the flat, closely woven portions of the flowers,
and a still heavier one to outline each finished petal or leaf with
the _cordonnet_ (cord) or _brode_, produced by an extremely firm and
regular buttonhole stitch. This cord throws the flowers into very
brilliant relief.
[Illustration: VENISE DESIGNS BY THE BRUSSELS LACE COMMITTEE]
Colette had not woven the roses, for because of the difficulty in
making it, workers usually specialize on the various individual parts
composing this extremely popular lace. A second girl had made the
flowers, and a third the exquisite open-work details introduced to
lighten the whole. Considerable freedom is allowed the lace-worker
in the execution of these open-work stitches. If she has talent she
may obtain many interesting original results in filling in, for there
is apparently no limit to the number of stitches she may employ.
In Colette’s little handkerchief square, I discovered miniature
marguerites and stars and airy balls. Each group had been made by a
specialist (many women have spent their lives in making just tiny stars
or wheels), and sent to the convent to be bound together with the
leaves and roses into a beautiful whole by the clear mesh that dropt
hexagon by hexagon from Colette’s swift needle.
[Illustration: HANDKERCHIEF AND JEWEL BOXES, FLANDERS AND VENISE OVER
SATIN AND VELVET]
Colette’s neighbor was making the same mesh, but as a background for
bobbin-made clusters, sent here from a bobbin-lace village to make
the rare Point d’Angleterre, a small quantity of which Kerxken still
produces.
In the corner of this class-room were the shelves with the essential
skeins of thread; cotton for the Needle Point, linen for the Venise.
The linen is more and more difficult to obtain, and since it is hard
to handle and breaks easily, has been largely supplanted by cotton
thread. There were large cardboard boxes for the drawings and the
pricked working patterns; others for the little bobbin-lace roses and
leaves and vines that were to be worked into Brussels Point; and still
more boxes for the finished meters and insets ready to be sold to the
Committee, and later to the dealer who will replace the Committee.
While we were examining the boxes a pretty, dark-haired dentellière
of about sixteen came in, with work she had finished at home, two
handkerchiefs with Brussels Point borders, and two and a half meters of
Venise, on which she had worked five and a half months and for which
she asked 160 francs, or $40.00.
In the “imitation” room we passed quickly by the lengths of inferior
filet and the piles of cheap collars made by men; there was little
temptation to linger there. The only defense against that room is more
pay for the work across the hall.
We climbed the stairs shivering and looked into the neat little
bedrooms with their white board floors, and into the icy chapel where
Sœur Robertine declared she could be quite comfortable with only a
small black woolen shawl over her shoulders.
We had brought our lunch, but were not allowed to eat it. Sister A.,
an excellent cook, had prepared hot soup, potatoes and meat, and a
dried apple mousse which we persuaded Sœur Robertine to share with
us. And after lunch, the orphan and refugee children came in to shake
hands, also Janiken, the poor “_idiote_” who is forty-nine years old,
but still a child, with a strange, animal-like expression on her face.
Sœur Robertine held her hand for us to shake, otherwise little
Janiken seemed able to direct her own movements. She smiled and chatted
in Flemish, then waddled off quite happy with the candies and cakes we
had brought. Janiken spends her days making bead collars and bracelets
for the sisters, whom she loves, and when her bead boxes are empty she
places them at the foot of the statue at the end of the narrow corridor
upstairs, and prays the good Saint Anthony to refill them, that she
may weave more necklaces. At night as the sisters pass silently by the
statue, they snap the threads of their former gifts, letting the beads
shower into the boxes, and in the morning Janiken is happy again.
Sœur Robertine had never ridden in a motor, and when we proposed
that she accompany us to the Franciscaine convent at Erembodeghem, not
very far away, her eyes shone. And I shall not forget the faces of the
others, as after a further bustle of leave-takings and good wishes,
they leaned from the green doorway in the rain, clasping their hands
and laughing and nodding, while we tucked their beloved sister into
our car. Sœur Robertine herself sat silently and ecstatically in a
corner, determined to miss no part of this extraordinary experience.
VII
EREMBODEGHEM
_The Queen’s Cloth_
Erembodeghem is a commune of about 6,000 inhabitants, tho the pretty
winding street by which we entered, with the picturesque, red-tiled
houses clustered irregularly along both sides of it, suggests a smaller
village. Nearly all the women in this town, as in Kerxken, make lace,
and again it is chiefly Needle Point and Venise. The convent, which
furnishes the customary directing and stimulating center, has no
superior in the country for its particular laces, unless one grants
preference to its own mother house at Opbrakel.