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 [170]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 [171]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[172] 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 [173]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 [174]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 s?ur 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 [175]lace sections, when the women were more strained and anxious than ever before, the door opened quietly and s?ur 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 s?ur 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. [176]“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.
point de flandres, or flanders lace
flowers made with bobbins, mesh with the needle: designs by the lace committee
while we were sitting in the large, cold reception room, waiting for the workers to reassemble, i asked s?ur robertine about a painting over the door—a striking portrait which proved to be that of the curé van hoeimessen, who, [177]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.
handkerchief in needle-point
made near alost. both mesh and flowers made with needle
detail showing seven different filling-in stitches
from the salon we went to the work-room, which looks on a deep walled-in [178]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 [179]noticed that the patterns were considerably larger than those at kerxken, and s?ur 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 [180]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.
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 [181]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.
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.
[182]
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 [183]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 s?ur 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 s?ur robertine to share with us. and after lunch, the orphan and refugee children [184]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. s?ur 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.
s?ur robertine had never ridden in [185]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. s?ur robertine herself sat silently and ecstatically in a corner, determined to miss no part of this extraordinary experience.
