The definition of Richelet is almost the same. He adds, however, these words: “Only women carry Parasols, and they only in spring, summer, and autumn.” Richelet, it is true, borders upon the eighteenth century, since he died but a little before the end of the reign of Louis the Great. This brings us to the aurora of the Regency, and a renaissance then occurs in feminine coquetry. We are now about to find our Sunshade in gallant parties, supported by little turbaned negroes; already we see it decorated with fringes of gold and trimmings of silk, enhanced with plumes of feathers, mounted on Indian bamboos, covered with changing silks, embellished in a thousand and one ways, worthy, in a word, of casting a discreet shade on those rosy and delicate faces which Pater, Vanloo, Lancret, La Rosalba, and Latour did their best to reproduce in luminous paintings or fresh pastels, those enchanting pictures where the coquetry of the past smiles still.
Like all objects of adornment in the hands of women, the Sunshade in the last century became, like the Fan, almost a light and graceful plaything, serving to punctuate an expression, to round a gesture, to arm an attitude of charming reverie, in which, guided by pretty indolent fingers, its point traces vague designs upon the sand. Before the burning breath of amorous declarations, often the frail Sunshade escapes from the hands of a beauty, in sign of armistice, and as an avowal of abandonment.
Be it open, and daintily held over powdered hair, or shut, and brushing the brocaded petticoat, it is always the “balancing pole of the Graces.” It gives a value to listlessness on the rustic seat of the parks, under the vaulted roofs of grottoes, and it adds a piquancy to the frowardness of the feminine chatterers, who defend themselves by making fun of libertine attacks. In a word, in the light amorous allegories of the century, it is worthy to appear in those love-duets of Leanders and Isabellas, which Watteau often composed with so rare an art of refinement.
From the middle of the last century the Umbrella of taffety became the fashion at Paris. Caraccioli, in his Picturesque and Sententious Dictionary, gives us evidence of this: “It has long been the custom,” he says, “not to go out save with one’s Umbrella, and to trouble oneself by carrying it under one’s arm. Those who wish not to be confounded with the vulgar, prefer to run the risk of getting wet to being regarded as people who walk on foot, for the Umbrella is the sign of having no carriage.”
The Parasols were made by the purse-makers, and when, by an edict of August 1776, the manufacturers of gloves, purses, and girdles were united in one community, an article thus conceived may be read in their statutes: “They alone also still have the right to make and manufacture all sorts of Umbrellas and Parasols, in whalebone and in copper, folding and non-folding, to garnish them atop with stuffs of silk and linen, to make Umbrellas of oilcloth, and Parasols adorned and ornamented in all sorts of fashions.” According to the Journal of a Citizen, published at the Hague in 1754, the price of folding Parasols was then from 15 to 22 livres a piece, and the Parasol for the country from 9 to 14 livres.
We must, however, believe that the common folk of Paris did not yet dare to purchase Parasols, since Bachaumont, in the Secret Memoirs, dated 6th September 1769, records the following enterprise:—
“A company has lately formed an establishment worthy of the town of Sybaris. It has obtained an exclusive privilege to have Parasols, and to furnish them to such as fear being incommoded by the sun during the crossing of the Pont-Neuf. There are to be offices at each extremity of the bridge, where the voluptuous dandies who are unwilling to spoil their complexion, can obtain this useful machine; they will return it at the office on the other side, so alternately, at the price of two farthings for each person. This project has already been put in execution. It is announced that if this invention succeeds, there is authority to establish like offices in other places in Paris, where skulls might be affected, such as the Place Louis XV., &c. It is probable that these profound speculators will obtain the exclusive privilege of Umbrellas.”
Did this enterprise succeed? We cannot tell. All that is certain is, that it was tried many times in our own epoch by innovators, who had no idea that even the letting out of Parasols was not absolutely new under the sun.
A great progress was realised in the eighteenth century in the manufacture of Sunshades for ladies. The small ordinary Parasols became exceedingly light, and charmingly decorated. In a picture of Bonaventure Delord, in the Louvre, we find the exact type of these coquettish Sunshades of the last century. One, which is held by a laughing beauty in the midst of a picnic, is mounted on a long stem, and the top, made of yellow buckskin, appears to have four sides; a cap of turned copper, and of a very pretty shape, profiles its tiny Chinese gable on the grass.