Early Life
De Geyter was born in Ghent, Belgium, where his parents, originally from the French Flanders, had moved to work in the textile factories. When he was seven, the family, who already counted five children, returned to France and settled in Lille. Pierre worked there as a thread maker and learned how to read and write at workers' evening classes. At age sixteen, he enrolled at the Lille Academy where he first took drawing classes, which allowed him to find a job as a woodcarver. He later took music classes, and joined the workers' choir "La Lyre des Travailleurs", founded by the socialist leader of Lille, Gustave Delory.
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“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
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