of the cities i visited during three months’ continuous travel in belgium following the armistice, ghent appeared to me to be attacking her problems with greatest speed and vigor. brave old burgher city of canals and mellow buildings and bell-towers, this flemish capital is at the same time an active, modern, commercial center; which explains why bruges has been able to win from her the title she once proudly held of “queen of lace cities.”
the lace history of ghent begins with the lace history of belgium, in the sixteenth century; but her great period dates [248]from the seventeenth century and the introduction of the epoch-making mesh of valenciennes. the activity of her women and girls, following the appearance of this new lace, surpassed anything she had hitherto known; it was not long before the music of 1,000,000 bobbins rose to meet the riotous pealing of her bells. in the sixteenth century malines had undisputed first place in lace; ghent now out-stript her. one wonders if part of the fascination of this city for the men the united states sent there in 1814, to make peace with england, and who, after six months’ lingering, had to be urged to return home, lay in its clicking bobbins and the joyous garlands that blossomed under them.
there is a portrait in the h?tel de ville, where one may see the empress marie-thérèse, wearing the marvelous valenciennes and the needle point robe presented to her by the canton de gand [249]in 1743. and scarcely more than a century later, in 1853, the city made its last gift of similar magnificence—another robe, valued at 20,000 francs, on which 80,000 bobbins were employed unceasingly during six months, and this time offered to the duchess of brabant, marie-henriette. there were no succeeding world-stirring gifts of lace because ghent had begun to think of other things, of industrial and commercial development, and as she advanced in these, the art of lace-making declined, until to-day it has ceased to exist.
however, in the surrounding communes (the region counts fifty) there are still perhaps 2,000 dentellières making most of the bobbin and needle varieties, the best among them being valenciennes, flanders, duchesse, needle point, bruges and rosaline. the comtesse de bousies, chairman of the ghent lace committee during the war, did her best to encourage[250] the work in these outlying districts, and was able to help, in addition, many needy women in the city itself.
in 1917, for instance, celine appeared at the office to ask for thread. she was twenty years old, and before the war had been one of the 10,000 women employed in the linen spinning mills; her mother was ill with tuberculosis, her father without work, and also ill; there were five younger children. “i know i have not proper fingers,” she said, as she held out her rough hands, “but if you will only promise i may bring my lace, i believe i can learn.” the committee believed this, too, and because she worked with intelligence and with almost feverish eagerness, she was soon assured the minimum wage of three francs a week, and later the larger sums made possible with the committee’s success. shortly before the armistice, the mother died, and only last week celine came again to the desk to [251]ask anxiously if the committee could not somehow arrange, that even after they had disbanded, she might continue to make lace. her father had found a little work; she wanted to remain at home where she might at least direct the younger children, and she could, if only she were sure of her war-time wage. could not the committee promise the sale of her laces? often repeated question during these courage-testing days, when emergency organizations are breaking up, and poor women do not yet see what is to replace them.
among the more important communes on the ghent committee list, i found oosterzele, baelegem, and landsanter, all three producing a good quality of duchesse, flanders, needle point and venise, and counting together about 160 lace-makers; gysenzeele and destelbergen, which make fine flanders, and duchesse, knesselars, with 250 cluny [252]workers; asper with 60 in venise; the convents of scheldewinkle and eecke, the first occupied with venise, the second with needle point and duchesse, which it sells to an american house, and finally, the larger deynze district, including vynck, lootenhulle, machelin, the valenciennes convent school at ruysselede, and bachte, with perhaps 400 lace-makers in all.
i got my orientation for this last southern district from the comtesse d’alcantara, who has been indefatigable in her double r?le of chairman of deynze and vice-chairman of the regional committee. constantly throughout the war, she might have been seen starting from the handsome chateau at bachte—one of the most imposing in belgium—on bicycle or on foot on her way to one of the lace villages, with thread and money for the workers, or at night returning with the rolls of lace which she had then to get to [253]ghent and from there to brussels. the germans never succeeded in obstructing her work, nor that of her father and mother, for their villagers and for the orphans of the entire region. women came between shells to bring laces. it was a moral help just to be able to talk about their work.
as i crossed the moat and passed under the archway, i saw the spot where the last allied shell exploded, killing nineteen germans, while the family and the 200 villagers in the cellars, where they had been for two weeks, escaped unharmed. in fact, in all the deynze country i was in the midst of the destruction accompanying the final push of the liberating army, and was vividly reminded of what would have happened to the rest of belgium had the armistice been further delayed.
but already in the partially wrecked villages many of the women had gone [254]back to their cushions—their reason-saving cushions, for they furnished practically the only employment to be had, and however small the earnings, they at least insured a few francs a week, and best of all they proved that something of the past persisted.
in vynck, a poor little town of 1,700 people, i found 40 valenciennes-makers, and heard that 100 young girls were being taught at home by their mothers. i talked with two maiden sisters—one 68, the other 72—whom i spied hidden behind a window-screen of potted plants, working, with 450 bobbins each, on a kind of valenciennes one finds only on the cushions of the past generation. they could not repeat often enough their gratitude to the committee, which had been paying them 44 francs ($8.80) a meter for their lace, so much more than they had received before the war from the courtrai facteur to whom they had sold. [255]they counted on making about five meters during the winter ($44 worth), and they work from dawn sometimes till nine at night.
in a neighboring house was a grandmother of eighty-one and her granddaughter, and on the grandmother’s cushion such a covering and re-covering of bobbins and lace, to keep them spotless. over all she had spread a large towel, beneath it a worn napkin, then a piece of pink gingham, and below that two remnants of white and blue cloth, and it seemed appropriate that the snowy treasure, valenciennes, too, should be revealed to me only after such a ceremony of unveiling as this bent old woman of vynck performed.
i passed quickly through lootenhulle with its 125 workers, who make, among other varieties, good duchesse and rosaline; and hansbeek, which produces a superior valenciennes; and ruysselede, [256]with its excellent school for valenciennes; to cross from the south to destelbergen, which lies almost directly east of ghent. all the plain was white under the first deep snow of winter, but to enjoy its loveliness one had to be able to forget the torn roofs and fireless hearths.
at destelbergen i went at once to the atelier of mme. coppens, to whom women of both france and belgium send their old applications and spider-web meshes, for restoration. before the war she employed seventy expert lace-makers in her school, now she can depend on no more than twenty—tho there are some 100 less skilful ones in the village. on this particular january day the school was empty. as mme. coppens received me, she said, “i regret, madame, but i am without coal, and without thread; i have been forced to close my work-room; however,” she hesitated an instant, “if madame does not object to coming into the kitchen, she may yet see stéphanie, the first lace-maker of the village, at work.”
fan in needle-point
executed by three women in six weeks. “shields of the allies,” design drawn by m. knoff for the lace committee
[257]
eighteenth century marriage veil in needle-point, belonging to comtesse elizabeth d’oultremont
it would take 40 workers about a half year to copy this veil
remembering the glistening shelves and floors of other flemish kitchens, i did not mind; happily not, for in the end stéphanie was more to me than many villages. she was bending over an immaculate cushion, seventy-eight and unmarried, and all her person as scrupulously neat as her cushion, from her odd little peaked black crochet cap to the felt shoes she had made herself. she was weaving the flat surfaces of a dainty french bouquet, and as i stept toward her chair, looked up, delighted that some one was interested in what she was making. when i picked up a bruges collar on the nearby table she tried in ejaculatory flemish to make me understand, that even tho she had made parts of it, she disowned the whole as unworthy the name of lace, and she brought my eyes [258]back to the delicate texture of the leaves and petals on her cushion.
i wished to know what stéphanie was getting for a day’s work on her fine bouquets. she has been making lace for seventy years, is intelligent and quick, and her maximum wage is two cents an hour, a franc for a day of ten hours. i asked about the future—she has thought of that, not without anxiety, and is providing at seventy-eight for what she calls “old age” by trying hard to put by two cents a week. madame c. has been kind to her, and gives her as much freedom and comfort as she can offer; for instance, when stéphanie was ill for three days last week, she did not deduct her wages. she would gladly double her pay, or triple it, for she realizes there are few like stéphanie left, but the paris firm to whom she sells pays so little for her lace that she has never been able to offer more than a franc a day. [259]“if i could give two francs, i could quickly gather a company of 1,000 contented lace-makers, i am certain,” she said. “but when my old workers fall ill or die, i find no young girls willing to come to me; they prefer the twenty francs a week they can make picking wool. when stéphanie goes, i shall have no single artist to replace her.” “c’est un vrai c?ur de dentelle” (she is a true heart of lace), she said affectionately, as she patted her on the shoulder.
and then she went to fetch a cardboard box and i took a chair by the table, to watch her unfold what it might contain. she spread three beautiful widths of application on blue paper so that i might better see the tiny bouquets and scattered buds and leaves that blossomed from the fine quality of machine-made tulle; all these had come from stéphanie’s bobbins, and she was having difficulty to continue at her cushion because of her eagerness [260]to explain them. they were french designs, as their charming lines had made me suspect. in the box with the application were two rolls of point d’angleterre, the lace one finds rarely at present. we held the first one, a length of four meters, six inches wide, against the light, and then stéphanie could sit still no longer; she knew something about this piece, for she had made its first flower in 1911, and not finished its last until the war was half over. she pointed out the spaces where a special needle-worker had introduced almost microscopic open stitches into her leaves and blooms to give them even greater airiness, and showed how almost impossible it would have been to execute these needle-stitches with bobbins; and how difficult is the stitch made with a special crochet-hook required for the raised veins and outlines (brodes) of the petals and leaves, since the hook must catch and attach the thread [261]each time beneath the surface. finally, a needle-worker, again, as is always the case in point d’angleterre, had spun the clear web between the flowers, uniting them all into the finished flounce. stéphanie pointed to a single detail. “it took me five days to make that tiny bouquet, and the needle-worker one and a half days more to add the open stitches.”
since the snow-covered roads made traveling extremely hazardous, i decided that i could not stop longer, no matter how absorbing the applications and points d’angleterre, or how endearing the personality and contagious the enthusiasm of stéphanie. i said “good-by,” explaining that i had yet that day to visit the needle-lace school at zele, twenty kilometers away.
