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[50] 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 [51]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 [52]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 [53]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.
[54]
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 [55]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 pique[56]uses, 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
[57]
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 [58]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 in[59]numerable 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 [60]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 [61]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 [62]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 [63]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—[64]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 [65]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. [66]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 [67]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 [68]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 [69]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 [70]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 chateau can be restored, and fine linen sheets and pillow slips with [71]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[72] 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
[73]
end of a point de paris scarf about 2? 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[74] 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 [75]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 [76]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.
