then, that I have no personal literary pretensions in this work. As the sage Montaigne says in his Essays, “I have here but collected a heap of foreign flowers, and brought of my own only the string which binds them together.”

Octave Uzanne.

THE SUNSHADE
THE PARASOL —— THE UMBRELLA

THE author of a Dictionary of Inventions, after having proved the use of the Parasol in France about 1680, openly gives up any attempt to determine its precise original conception, which indeed seems to be completely concealed in the night of time.

It would evidently be childish to attempt to assign a date to the invention of Parasols; it would be better to go back to Genesis at once. A biblical expression, the shelter which defends from the sun, would almost suffice to demonstrate the Oriental origin of the Parasol, if it did not appear everywhere in the most remote antiquity—as well in the Nineveh sculptures, discovered and described by M. Layard; as on the bas-reliefs of the palaces or frescoes of the tombs of Thebes and Memphis.

In China they used the Parasol more than two thousand years before Christ. There is mention of it in the Thong-sou-wen, under the denomination of San-Kaï, in the time of the first dynasties, and a Chinese legend attributes the invention of it to the wife of Lou-pan, a celebrated carpenter of antiquity. “Sir,” said this incomparable spouse to her husband, “you make with extreme cleverness houses for men, but it is impossible to make them move, whilst the object which I am framing for their private use can be carried to any distance, beyond even a thousand leagues.”

And Lou-pan, stupefied by his wife’s genius, then saw the unfolding of the first Parasol.

Interesting as these legends may be, handed down by tradition to the peoples of the East, they have no more historical credit than our delicate fables of mythology: they preserve in themselves less of the poetic quintessence, and above all seem less connected with that mysterious charm with which Greek paganism drowned that charming Olympus wherefrom the very origins of art appear to descend.

Let the three Graces be represented burned by Apollo, tired of flying through the shadows, where Fauns and Ægipans lie in ambush, or let these three fair ones be painted in despair at the fiery sensation of sunburning which brands their epidermis; let them invoke Venus, and let the Loves appear immediately, bearers of unknown instruments, busily occupied in working the little hidden springs, ingeniously showing their different uses and salutary effects; let a poet—a Voltaire, a Dorat, a Meunier de Querlon, or an Imbert of the time—be kind enough to forge some rhymes of gold on this fable; let him, in fine, inspired by these goddesses, compose an incontestable master-piece, and behold the Origin of the Sunshade! graven in pretty legendary letters on the temple of Memory, not to be contradicted by any spectacled savant in the world.

But if no poet, in smart affected style, has told us in rhyme the Story of the Parasol, many poets of all times have recalled the use of it in precious verses, which appear to serve as landmarks for history, and as references to discoveries of archæology. In ancient Greece, in the time of the festivals of Bacchus, it was the custom, not then confounded with fashion, to carry a Sunshade, not so much to extenuate the ardour of the sun, but as a sort of religious ceremonial. Paciaudi, in his treatise De Umbellæ Gestatione, shows us on the carriage on which the statue of Bacchus is placed a youth seated, the bearer of a Sunshade, a sign of divine majesty. Pausanias, in his Arcadics, mentions the Sunshade in describing the festivals of Alea in Argolis, whilst later on, in the Eleutheria, we see the Parasol also. Lastly, after having painted for us, in a marvellous description of Alexandria on a holiday, the hierophants, bearers of emblems and the mystic vase, the Monads covered with ivy, the Bassarids with scattered hair wielding their thyrsus, Athenæus suddenly shows us the magnificent chariot of Bacchus, where the statue of the god, six cubits high, all in gold, with a purple robe falling to his heels, had over his head a Sunshade ornamented with gold. Bacchus alone, of all the gods, had the privilege of the Sunshade, if we rely on the evidence of ancient monuments, earthen vases, and graven stones drawn from the museums of Stosch and other archæologists.

As a result of their frequent relations with the Greeks after the death of Alexander the Great, the Jews appear to have borrowed from the Gentiles, in the celebration of their Feast of Tabernacles, the use of the Sunshade. The subjoined medal of Agrippa the Old, struck by the Hellenised Jews, in some sort supports this, although Spanheim, in a passage relating to this medal, says he has hesitated a long while as to the signification of the symbols which it represents. Do the ears of corn mark the fertility of the governed provinces, or do they refer to the Feast of Tabernacles? As for the tent on the obverse, it is little probable that it represents a tabernacle according to Moses’ rite, since the roofs of these tabernacles, far from being pointed, were flat and cloven in the midst, so as to allow rain, sun, and starlight to pass through. It must then be the Sunshade, the emblem of royalty; this at least seems probable.

The Parasol played among the Greeks a very important part, as well in the sacred and funeral ceremonies as in the great holidays of nature, and even in the private life of the noble ladies of Athens.

The Parasol in its elegant form may be seen drawn on the majority of Greek vases, either painted with straight or arched branches, concave or convex, or in the shape of a hemisphere or a tortoise’s back. But the Sunshade with movable rods, opening or shutting, existed at that time, as is sufficiently indicated by the phrase of Aristophanes in the Knights (Act v. Scene 2)—“His ears opened and shut something like a sunshade.”