At Bruges, an ancient turreted house of the fifteenth century, the Gruuthus mansion, now restored, contains one of the finest collections of lace in the world—a collection of Flemish laces presented to the town by the Baroness Liedts. Bruges itself, and the country round, is full of lace-workers, some working in factories or ateliers at the guipure de Flandres, others working at the coarse cheap torchon, sitting in the sun by the quiet canal-sides, or in the stone-cobbled lanes of the old city, where their house-door opens into a room as dark and narrow as a fox-earth, and leading a life so poor that English competition in the cheaper forms of lace is impossible.
Within the last few years the immense development of the Belgian lace trade has overthrown the characteristic lace of each city. Lace, white and black, point and pillow, may at the present time be met with in every province of the now flourishing kingdom of Belgium.[[392]]
CHAPTER VIII.
FRANCE TO LOUIS XIV.
"Il est une déesse inconstante, incommode,
Bizarre dans ses goûts, folle en ses ornements,
Qui parait, fuit, revient, et renaît, en tout temps:
Protée était son père, et son nom est la mode."—Voltaire.
"To-day the French
All clinquant, all in gold."—Shakespeare.