NEEDLE-POINT ILLUSTRATION FOR THE FABLE OF THE FOX AND THE GRAPES
IN THE ZELE LACE SCHOOL; JOINING DETAILS OF THE NEEDLE-POINT SCARF PRESENTED TO QUEEN ELIZABETH
I felt that I must fetch Stéphanie to see this, but Dr. Rubbens advised hurrying now to the school, where there was something still more beautiful to be seen—the scarf just completed that will be presented to Queen Elizabeth, and so far the chef-d’œuvre of the Zele lace-makers. I told Stéphanie about it on our way through the village.
Once arrived, we went directly to the most advanced class, where Stéphanie might find most to interest her. The young women were at work on Needle Point collars and medallions, a series of tableaux from the legend of the Fox and the Grapes, and she was all eyes and ears as she went eagerly from chair to chair, trying to see what these girls had been taught that she had missed learning, and to add to her lore, if she could. I believe it is only in such a modern school as this that an outsider would have been allowed to examine, as Stéphanie did, the stitches and patterns, for the tradition of the locked door and the carefully guarded secret still prevails in the lace word.
I was impatient to see the school’s masterpiece, the royal scarf, and it was now brought from the safe and held before us by three young women, as the directress led us from point to point in the airy mesh spun between its rose garlands and medallions. On either side of the center medallion, the arms of Belgium, were two others, in which human figures symbolized cities the war has made immortal. For Nieuport a fisher-maiden stood on the shore with her basket, and about her the net took up a cockleshell motif; Poperinghe had the graceful hop-vine as its device; for Furnes there was a dairy-maid with her churn in the midst of blossoming butter flowers; while Ypres was represented by a beautiful Flamande sitting before a lace cushion heaped with bobbins—countless stitches, occupying 12,000 hours, and the entire weight 125 grammes! And yet, at the end, Stéphanie tilted her dear old head and said: “Nevertheless, Madame, for the Queen, I should have made the mesh yet finer.”