In the Journal and Voyage of Montaigne in Italy, the good philosopher, who teaches us so few matters beyond his own personal sufferings, deigns, nevertheless, to aver that the supreme good taste of the women of Lucca was to have incessantly a Parasol in their hands.
“No season,” says also elsewhere this charming epicurean essayist, “is so much my enemy as the sharp heat of sunshine, for the Sunshades, which are used in Italy since the time of the ancient Romans, charge the arms more than they discharge from the head.”
So, too, Thomas Coryat, an English tourist of that time, in his Crudities (1611), speaks of the Italian Parasols, after having noticed the presence of Fans in the towns through which he had travelled: “Many Italians,” he says, “do carry other fine things of a far greater price, that will cost at the least a ducat (about seven francs), which they commonly call in the Italian tongue Umbrellæs, that is, things that minister shadow unto them for shelter against the scorching heat of the sun. These are made of leather, something answerable to the form of a little canopy, and hooped in the inside with divers little wooden hoops, that extend the Umbrella in a pretty large compass. They are used especially by horsemen, who carry them in their hands when they ride, fastening the end of the handle upon one of their thighs, and they impart so large a shadow unto them that it keepeth the heat of the sun from the upper parts of their body.”
Fabri, in his useful and remarkable work, Diversarum Nationum Ornatus (additio) confirms this fact from 1593, in taking care to represent a noble Italian, travelling on horseback with a Parasol in his hand: “Nobilis Italus ruri ambulans tempore æstatis.”
What variety this simple detail, more propagated or rather better vulgarised among our romancists, would have thrown into the great romances of adventure! We should have seen the protecting Sunshade marking from a distance, by its colour and elevated shape, the presence of the rich traveller to be robbed, in the mountains of Tuscany, while the brigands of the time kept their watch in the folds of the rocks; then, too, we should surely have witnessed, in passionate recitals of heroic combats, the buckler Parasol, already full of holes, torn into shreds, yet still serving to parry victoriously the blows of the ferocious cut-throats and cloak-snatchers.
And how many sonorous and unforeseen titles are there of which we have been deprived by this fact of our ignorance: The Knights of the Sunshade—The Heroic Parasol—The State Courier, or the Sunshade Recovered! . . . . and who can say how many more!
The Arsenal, the old Hotel de Sully, preserved for a long time one of those Parasols, which librarians named the Pepin (seed-fruit) of Henri IV. It was very big, and entirely covered with blue silk, with long and distinctly precious flowers of the golden lily scattered over it. This Parasol, ministerial or royal, is doubtless lost, and we speak of it only after the description which the learned bibliophile Jacob has given us.
Daniel Defoe, who published his Robinson Crusoe in 1719, was one of the first to mention to any extent the Parasol in England. Before him, as we shall see farther on, it had been named only very summarily in literary works. So firmly fixed in our imaginations as men, the children of yesterday, is the great Umbrella of Crusoe, and his dreadful alarm on seeing the print of a man’s foot on the shore, as well as his walks with his dog and Friday the good Caribbee; it presents itself, moreover, so clearly in our first literary remembrances, that we will reproduce the passage of the journal where it is mentioned:
