By far the greater number working at home make Torchon, Cluny and Valenciennes, tho the Bruges district is celebrated, too, for Rosaline and Binche and Old Flanders, and above all for the Duchesse de Bruges, once so named because it was thought worthy to adorn a Duchess. Bruges lace has always been made entirely with bobbins, in separate flowers, or details that are united not by mesh, but by little picot-edged cords or bars. There are many varieties of this familiar lace; between the coarse, much marketed modern Bruges, with its well-known roses and trefoils, sometimes scarcely meriting the name of lace, and the Bruges of the robe presented in 1901 to Queen Elizabeth, then the Princess Elizabeth, there is a deplorable distance. The individual trefoils and arabesques and roses of the coarser kinds are made very quickly on the round cushion, which can be readily turned, and are produced in great quantities in many of the communes of the Bruges region, while fortunately in such a village as Saint Michel one can still see exquisite examples of the finer Bruges in the making.
BED COVER IN DUCHESSE, OR BRUSSEL’S LACE
Made with bobbins; executed in Flanders by 30 women in three months; design by The Lace Committee
Rather than be introduced to the lace-making of Bruges by the younger workers in the schools, or in one of the thousand homes given over to it, I preferred to go first to the place where probably more strangers, especially English and Americans, have been initiated into the mysteries of the cushion and its bobbins than anywhere else in the world. There have been other famous Béguinages in Belgium—congeries of houses maintained by private endowment, for women, who, while they object to taking the vows of the convent, yet wish to live in a kind of partial retreat from the world and under the protection of the church—but none lovelier than this one of Bruges, with its sixteenth century buildings of pure Flemish architecture, grouped about a wide green court shaded by elm trees. Naturally the Béguinage has not been a mecca for travelers and artists merely because several of the gentle old ladies in retreat there made beautiful lace; they have come in search of its quaint pignons and doorways, its inner gardens, the bridges that span the surrounding canals where the swans paddle peacefully. And they have been delighted to find included in the picture the white-capped women before their lace cushions, intent (doubtless unconsciously) on perpetuating other beauties, as old as those of the buildings encircling the court, the designs of Valenciennes that have been handed down by French and Belgian mothers to their children through generations. These ladies of the Béguinage may keep their private fortunes and pay for the privileges of the retreat. They are supposed, however, to live austerely; their charming brick houses are white inside—wall-papers (as being too gay) are forbidden—while the floors are covered with a kind of pretty, rude rush carpet. They may not go on journeys, and no man outside, except the clergy, may enter the sacred precincts of the court, the gates of which are closed at 8 o’clock. Can one imagine an atmosphere more encouraging to hours spent patiently in lace-making? It is recorded that in the Béguinage of Ghent, in 1756, there were as many as 5,000 women engaged in making the Valenciennes for which that city was famous. But the day of this particular kind of retreat has passed, and even at Bruges many of the houses are vacant; when the old die, there are few who wish to take their places. And it is only because those few who remain preserve the best traditions of the lace that they count in the lace-world of to-day; the quantity produced is negligible. Nevertheless, I was delighted that my first knowledge of Bruges lace should come through the few wide Valenciennes flounces of exquisite flower and vine pattern and firm and even workmanship that I found still pinned to the cushions of the Béguinage.
Curiously enough, in this retreat, pervaded by the sadness that 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.