“After this,” says Crusoe, “I spent a deal of time and pains to make me an Umbrella. I was indeed in great want of one, and had a great mind to make one. I had seen them made in the Brazils, where they are very useful in the great heats which are there; and I felt the heats every jot as great here, and greater too...; besides, as I was obliged to be much abroad, it was a most useful thing to me, as well for the rains as the heats. I took a world of pains at it, and was a great while before I could make anything likely to hold; nay, after I thought I had hit the way, I spoiled two or three before I made one to my mind; but at last I made one that answered indifferently well; the main difficulty, I found, was to make it to let down: I could make it to spread, but if it did not let down too, and draw in, it would not be portable for me any way, but just over my head, which would not do. However, at last, as I said, I made one to answer; I covered it with skins, the hair upward, so that it cast off the rain like a pent-house, and kept off the sun so effectually, that I could walk out in the hottest of the weather, with greater advantage than I could before in the coolest; and when I had no need of it, I could close it and carry it under my arm.”
And this Parasol, for a century and a half, has been popularised by the engraver, with its dome of hair and rude manufacture; and so all the poor little prisoners at school invoke it, and dream often that they carry it in some desert isle, for it represents to their eyes a life of open air and liberty.
Before Daniel Defoe, Ben Jonson had already mentioned the Parasol in England in a comedy played in 1616; and Drayton, sending some doves to his mistress in 1620—a delicious lover’s fancy—formulated in his passioned verses the following desire: “May they, these white turtle doves I send you, shelter you like Parasols under their wings in every sort of weather.”
In the relation of his Voyage in France in 1675, Locke, speaking of Sunshades, says: “These are little articles and very light, which women use here, to defend themselves from the sun, and they seem to us very convenient.” Afterwards the English ladies desired to possess these pretty Parasols, although, by reason of their climate, such things could hardly be of any use to them. It was not, however, till the eighteenth century that a London manufacturer bethought himself of inventing the Sunshade-Fan, compared with which it appears the French folding marquises were as nothing. This ingenious fabricator made a considerable fortune; but if we are to believe the Improvisateur François, his invention was rapidly imitated and much improved in Paris. Why has it not been preserved to our own days?
But let us linger in this seventeenth century, and remain awhile in France, where the Parasol was not in use, save at court among the great ladies. Men never used it to shelter themselves from the rain—the cloak and sword were still alone in fashion.
Ménage tells us in his Ménagiana, that being with M. de Beautru, about 1685, in the midst of a pouring rain at the door of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, up came a Gascon gentleman, without a cloak, and nearly wet through; the Gascon, seeing himself stared at, cried out, “I would lay a wager now my people have forgotten to give me my cloak.” To which M. de Beautru quickly replied, “I go halves with you.”
The silk Sunshade, however, properly so called, appeared in the hands of women of quality, at the promenade, on the race-course, or in the vast alleys of the royal park of Versailles, towards the middle of the reign of Louis XIV. The Umbrella of that time was an instrument astonishingly heavy and very coarse in appearance, which it seemed almost ridiculous to hold in the hand. In 1622 it was in some measure a novelty in Paris, since in the Questions Tabariniques, cited by that useful author, the late M. Édouard Fournier, in The Old and the New, we read these lines about the famous felt hat of Tabarin:—
“It was from this hat that the invention of Parasols was drawn, which are now so common in France that they are no longer called Parasols, but Parapluyes (Umbrellas) and Garde-Collet (collar guards), for they are used as much in winter against the rain as in summer against the sun.”
The most ancient engraving or documentary image of French manners in which we see a Parasol is dated 1620. It is the frontispiece of a Collection of Saint Igny, The French Nobility at Church.