The lace history of Ghent begins with the lace history of Belgium, in the sixteenth century; but her great period dates 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 Hôtel 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 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 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 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 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 rôle of chairman of Deynze and vice-chairman of the regional committee. Constantly throughout the war, she might have been seen starting from the handsome château 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 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 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. 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.