Anglomania had not yet penetrated, as in the present day, into French manners; and the dandyism of 1830, which pretended that the carrying of a walking-stick required a particular skill, repelled the Umbrella as contrary to veritable elegance. The Umbrella was countrified, the property of gaffer and gammer; it was tolerable only in the hands of one who had long renounced all pretensions to any charm, and dreamed no more of setting off in the promenade the haughty profile of a conqueror. In the cross ways, in every public place in Paris, the large Parasol, red, or the colour of wine-lees, had become, as it were, the ensign of the strolling singer who retailed Béranger to the crowd; it served as a shelter for acrobats in the open air; it surmounted the improvised trestles of the sellers of tripoli, of an universal ointment; it ascended even the chariot of the quacks; later on it served as a set-off for the plumed helmet of Mangin, the pencil merchant; and it is still under a copper Parasol, commonly called Chinese bells, that the man-orchestra causes an excitement in the court-yards by ringing his little bells.
In the provinces, on market or great fair days, the Umbrellas opened in picturesque confusion above the flat baskets and provisional establishments of the country women; there were red, faded blue or chestnut ones, inexpressible green or old family Umbrellas, heirlooms descended from generation to generation, which protected the little rural tradeswomen, and added a particular character full of colour to these primitive markets of little towns.
The Umbrella! we behold it in the dreams of our school-days. Here is the severe and sombre Umbrella of the headmaster, symbol of his pedantic authority, when he passed us in review in the cold and damp playground. Here is the Riflard of the poor usher, a celebrated Pépin, covered with a mottled cotton-stuff, its bill-headed handle polished by his unctuous clasp. And here, above all, is an Umbrella greeted with loud acclaim, a festive Crusoe, which followed us when out walking, as the sutler follows the regiment on the march, the Umbrella of Mother Sun, as we used to call it: Mother Sun! an honest jolly wench, with her head in a silk pocket-handkerchief tied under her chin, who installed herself beneath the shelter of her improvised tent about our playtime, to sell to her noisy children cooling lemonade, fruit, barley-sugar, and little white rolls stuffed with hot sausages.
But let us leave these souvenirs, which carry us too far away, and return to the Sunshade between 1830 and 1870. If we wished to show only its transformations during these forty years, we should have to write a volume quite full of coloured vignettes to give a feeble idea of the history which fashion creates in an object of coquetry. About 1834, in the journal called Le Protée, we see fashion personified under the traits of a young and pretty woman visiting the finest shops in Paris; she fails not to go to “Verdier, in the Rue Richelieu, for Sunshades,” and chooses two—one a full-dress Sunshade, in unbleached silk casing, mounted on a stick of American bindweed, with a top of gold and carved coral; the other in striped wood, having a similar top with a fluted knob, and covered with myrtle green paduasoy, with a satin border.
Let us skip over some hundreds of intermediate varieties to look a dozen years afterwards, under the Second Republic, at the Sunshade described by M. A. Challamel in his History of Fashion: “As soon,” says this writer, “as the first ray of sunshine appeared, ladies armed themselves for their walks or morning calls with little Sunshades, entirely white, or pink, or green. Sometimes the Sunshades called ‘Marquises’ were edged with lace, which gave them rather a ragged appearance; or having the shape of little Umbrellas, the Sunshades could serve at need against a sudden storm. Very soon we saw Sunshades à dispositions bordered with a figured garland, or a satin stripe of the same colours, or blue or green on unbleached silk, or violet on white or sulphur.”
A fashion, not, it will be allowed, in the very best taste:—Up to 1853 or 1854, we find no innovation worthy of exciting our enthusiasm; it is only in the first days of the Second Empire that we can see a marked change. The straight Sunshades were then abandoned to introduce Sunshades with a folding stick, principally for those made in satin and in moire antique, bordered with trimmings or set off with streamers. These Sunshades were called “à la Pompadour,” and they were worthy, in a certain degree, of the beauty who personified grace and delicate elegance in the eighteenth century; they were embroidered after the old fashion with gold and silk, and on the richness of the stuffs was cast or “frilled in” Chantilly, point d’Alençon, guipure, or blonde. The folding-sticks were of sculptured ivory, of carved mother-of-pearl, of rhinoceros horn, or of tortoise-shell. It is with this light Sunshade that the Parisian ladies saluted the Empress, caracoling by the side of the Emperor, at the commencement of his reign, on their return from the Wood, in the Champs Elysées, which began to look beautiful, as everything looks beautiful at the spring-tide of years, as well as at the springtime of governments. All in nature has surely its fall of the leaf, after having had the verdure of its blossom!—all tires, all passes, all breaks: men, kings, fashions, and peoples!
The Sunshade is found to-day in the hands of every one, as it should be in this practical and utilitarian age. There is not, at the present hour, any woman or girl of the people, who has not her sunshade or her satin en-tout-cas—it seems to be the indispensable complement of the toilet for the promenade; and our modern painters have so well understood this gracious adjunct of feminine costume, that they take very good heed not to forget, in a study of a woman made in a full light, a rosy head with dishevelled hair, on the transparent ground of a Japanese Sunshade, thus producing an exquisite work with all freshness of colouring, and discreet shadows sifted upon sparkling eyes or a laughing mouth. On Sundays and holidays, in the jostlings of the crowd at suburban fêtes, it is like an eddy of Sunshades; such the spectacle of ancient besiegers, who covered themselves with their bucklers and made the “tortoise,” so in the shimmer of the summer sun in the great Parisian parish festivals: gingerbread fairs of Saint-Cloud or Vaugirard, the Sunshade is on the trestles and among the promenaders; it protects equally the girl dancing on the tight-rope and the respectable citizen’s wife in her Sunday best, who rumples the flounce of her petticoats in these popular gatherings.
Surely the Sunshade adds new graces to woman! It is her outside weapon, which she bears boldly as a volunteer, either at her side, or inclined over her shoulder. It protects her head-dress, in supporting her carriage, it surrounds as with a halo the charms of her face.
