Octave Uzanne

“ It seems that woman, that exquisite and delicate flower, blossoms in fur, as those white gardenias of the conservatory which half open and develop themselves in a nest of perfumed wadding.
In childhood, we delight to play with the large maternal Muff, to pass our hands over it the wrong way to excite the electricity of the long hair, to plunge our faces in the pungent heady odour of its down, and to make use of this furred sack in inconceivable tricks, in playing at hide-and-seek with small objects, or in burying therein the familiar cat, who becomes lazy in its warmth. ”

“ When we shall have unfurnished our skull of those delicate things, the Sunshade, Glove, and Muff, to carry thither a current of more serious conceptions, we shall perhaps have leisure to read again our little work as strangers, and not as producers, and thus, doubtless, we shall reflect with a satisfied smile, that there was much more in us of wisdom than carelessness in not tarrying too long amongst such charming trifles! ”

“ 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. ”

“ Sometimes, in fine, in a fantastic sketch of an album, which one reads as a riot of the imagination, is perceived some human being excited to a singular degree, with hair tossed by the wind, and haggard eye, floating at the will of the tumultuous waves on a Parasol turned upside down, to the handle of which he clings with the energy of despair. The plates of the Voyage de Ricord, and especially the old Japanese albums, are useful to consult in order to understand better the varieties of forms of the Sunshade in Japan. ”

“ Admirable interpretation of things glimpsed at!
Everywhere on the exquisite decorative combinations of Japan, we see a large Parasol opened amidst delicate peach-blossoms, gracious flights of strange birds, indented leaves, and rosy ibises. Sometimes, on the inimitable paintings of the enamelled vases, the Japanese Sunshade shelters a king’s daughter, escorted by her followers, who makes her chaste preparations for entering the bath; sometimes, on a thin gauze, the Parasol half hides women, promenading on the margin of some vast blue lake, full of ideal dreams. ”

“ For us, who, à propos of the Sunshade, the Glove, and the Muff, have just cast a glance upon the museum of this female ruler, we are in a state of dread from the inconceivable variety of objects which were for an hour a woman’s pleasure, and, if we have not conducted our readers before all the glass cases of this national museum, great as the universe, or “the vastest in the world,” as all large milliners’ shops entitle themselves, it is because around the ornaments of women the fickle Loves will always dance their frenzied round, which only a madman can ever hope and wish to stop. ”

“ Here the Sunshade has the floating appearance of a glorious standard. It symbolised also the power of life and death, vested in the savage conqueror over the unfortunate conquered, delivered up wholly to his mercy.
In ancient India, the cradle of the human race, as it is said, the Parasol in every time, and more than anywhere else, is unfolded in its splendour and the grace of its contexture, as an immutable symbol of royal majesty. ”

“ The charming lady, dressed in a fresh striped blue and white robe, with a fawn-coloured shawl half falling from her shoulders, has on her head a large black felt hat, ornamented with feathers—one of those hats which have done more for the vulgarisation of the glory of Gainsborough than all his studies and portraits. Mrs. Siddons is seated, holding on her lap with her left hand a comfortable Muff of fox or Siberian wolf, of which she appears to caress the fur with her right hand, as if to show off the beauty and whiteness of her spindle-shaped fingers. ”

“ The Sunshade shows more favourably in the hour of peace, during the Restoration. All the journals of fashion of the time give us curious and varied specimens of it in their steel engravings, hand-coloured, which show us, during those days of a lull, languid ladies in the midst of amusing decorations, in winter amidst snowy country scenes, in summer in a park of profound distances, on some rustic bridge, where the mistresses of the manors of that time allowed their romantic reveries slowly to wander. ”

“ The Sunshade and the Fan are in fact presented by these magicians of the East with particular graces in the jugglery of the most varied exercises. Here it is a ball of ivory which rolls with the bickering of a babbling stream over the lamels or ribs of the Sunshade; there it is a Parasol held in equilibrium on the blade of a dagger, and a thousand other astonishing inventions. ”

“ At the opera ball, in the surge of masks and of dominoes, in the midst of the comings and goings on that staircase so exalted, it needs but a Glove imprisoning a little hand to allure at once the passion of a man of delicacy—a long white Glove lovingly glued to a hand divinely small, a fine delicate wrist, and the exquisite roundness of the forearm. This is enough to transport a lover of the fair sex. The Glove appears not only in all festivals where grace and beauty preside ”

“ 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. ”

“ The hand, in a word, is the most perfect instrument given by God to man; but I ought not to forget, my fair friend, that poets seldom wear gloves, and philosophers never; and that, philosophising as I am, I remain outside the Glove, and, above all, appear to forget that axiom of Fontenelle: Had we our hand full of authenticated facts or truths, we should but half open it, and that after a feeble fashion. ”

“ When Love, who is represented blind, sets a mask on Venus-coquette, one might think the trickster boy was for burning the universe, for behind those yawning apertures of the black velvet mask, behind those murderous loopholes, two woman’s eyes are lying in ambush, pitiless, turn by turn laughing, burning, blazing, drowned in pleasure, charged, in a word, as with grape-shot, with all the shafts of the Cupidonian quiver. ”

“ The learned man, or the elegant man of the world, who would search out in every epoch the costumes of a people, would compile the most interesting history and the most rationally true. . . . . To ask the origin of shoes, of alms-purses, of hoods, of the cockade, of hoop-petticoats, of farthingales, of Gloves, of masks, is to drag a modilogist into the frightful maze of sumptuary laws, and upon all the battlefields, where civilisation has triumphed over the gross manners imported into Europe by the barbarism of the Middle Ages. ”

“ With the Egyptians, the hand was a symbol of force; with the Romans, a symbol of fidelity. We please ourselves in clothing the occult powers, such as Time, Nature, Destiny, with a human hand: the hand of Time overthrows empires, and impresses wrinkles on our brows; the hand of Nature is prodigal to us of gifts, which are ravished from us by the hand of Death; the hand of Destiny or of Providence, in fine, conducts us across the paths of life. ”

“ From that little warm satin nest, where pretty chilly little hands ensconce themselves in silk, carrying with them a lace handkerchief, a box of lozenges, a bouquet of Parma violets, or a tender loving billet-doux, a thousand trifles spring up to please us, like a swarm of souvenirs and caressing thoughts of our first years passed at home, and of our first roving loves. ”

“ Accept then favourably this act of contrition, and let me be fully pardoned, if, à propos of the Glove, I bound along madly like a young kid, without pity for the history of costume and historic documents, which I trample under my feet, rather than see myself buried under their pyramidal bundles. ”

“ One may admire there the state Umbrella of Indore, in the form of a mushroom; the Sunshade of the Queen of Lucknow, in blue satin stitched with gold and covered with fine pearls; next the Parasols of gilt paper, others woven of different materials, some entirely covered with ravishing feathers of rare birds, all with long handles in gold or silver, damascened, in painted wood, in carved ivory, of a richness and an execution not to be forgotten. ”

“ Are we not, as Saint Evremond said, in the hands of love, as the balls in the hands of tennis-players—and the first happiness which love can give, is it not, according to Stendhal—and all the truly sensitive—the first pressure of the hand of the woman we love? ”

“ Thus, out of the midst of furs, woman, that mignonette plant, that mimosa pudica, throws off beauty more mysterious, more warm, more full of promise, more enveloped and more enveloping, as if from the electricity of that peltry, there was spread in the ambient air of the provoking daughter of Eve an attractive sensuality, like a subtle caress, which rustles against our senses in its passage. ”

“ The Glove is worthy of entering into the legend of a fairy tale, and remaining there always, as the slipper has entered into the poetry even of fable, with the theme of Cinderella. An ancient King of France was indeed in love all his life with an unknown woman, only from having seen her Glove in the midst of a masked ball given to his court. ”

“ To-day the monkey, blue fox, beaver, swan, and ermine are metamorphosed into Muffs; to-morrow will come the furs of sable, of otter, of chinchilla, of squirrel, of marten, of wolf, &c. Women and furs change, and will change, soon and often.
Fashion is the everlasting Fairy; whether she take the Sunshade as a rod at the end of her gloved hand, or the Muff as a surprise-box or a cornucopia, she is never short of inventions, of prodigies, of follies, and of ruins ”

“ Let, then, the head of this new and great goddess be adorned with a weathercock helmet, of which Love will furnish the magnetic arrow, and let a statue be raised to that great first French citizeness, who from Paris governs the world with so formidable a despotism, against whom none ever dreams of raising a revolt. ”

“ How many charming signs of the head, how many intoxicating and magic looks, has the Sunshade protected from jealousy and indiscretion! How many emotions, how many dramas, has it hidden with its cloud of silk!”
M. Charles Blanc, less dithyrambic, in his Art in Dress and Ornament, commences his chapter on the Sunshade—“Do you imagine that women have invented it to preserve their complexion from the heats of the sun? ”

“ The Muff which warms so many pretty hands brave and toiling, seems in winter to be the refuge of virtue, shivering but victorious.
How much luxury is there, on the other hand, in the Muffs of the fine world during the last twenty years! They have been made very small, of sable tails, and very expensive; but there have been also some more modest, made with that marten of Australia which took the place of the Astrakhan, which passed out of fashion in 1860. They have been manufactured also in velvet plush or in cloth, with borders of fur or feathers, and a large bow of ribbons in the centre. ”

“ The search is useless; it is impossible for him to pay;—the proprietress indignant, almost rude, threatening to make a disturbance, is only satisfied by the gentleman taking from the hands of his companion a Sunshade of green silk, with fringes, mounted on a reed, and a yellow glove, and giving them to the irascible lady, saying to her, “Well, madam, keep this Sunshade as a pledge, and give it to no one unless he offer you a Glove the fellow of this.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”