Les Mémoires d'un Parapluie by comtesse de Elisabeth Galos Houdetot
"Les Mémoires d'un Parapluie" by comtesse de Elisabeth Galos Houdetot is a children's novel written in the late 19th century. Told as the witty “memoirs” of a sentient umbrella, it follows its journeys from hand to hand, using everyday episodes to explore kindness, vanity, poverty, and integrity. Readers meet a range of owners—from a prudent schoolgirl to a struggling seamstress—while the umbrella observes human foibles with gentle humor and moral clarity. The
opening of the story traces the umbrella’s “birth” in a shop, its education among veteran umbrellas, and its sale (after hard bargaining) to a mother for her daughter Marthe as a New Year’s gift. Loaned up the chain to a bureaucrat, it finds its way back, only for Marthe’s feckless brother’s gambling and theft to push the family into a raffle where the umbrella becomes the prize and is won by the careless Madeleine. Forgotten at a Guignol show and filched backstage by Fifine, it lands in a destitute household, proves too risky to use, and is pawned; at the Mont-de-Piété the umbrella witnesses a gallery of human misfortune, then is auctioned to a secondhand dealer who sells it cheaply to Marie, a devoted young worker buying a fête gift for her mother. Soon the mother falls ill after a humiliating incident at work, and, late at night, Marie bravely sets out alone to fetch a doctor, encountering a boisterous group on the quay just as the excerpt breaks off. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
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About this eBook
| Author | Houdetot, Elisabeth Galos, comtesse de, 1841-1925 |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | Gerbault, Henry, 1863-1930 |
| Title | Les Mémoires d'un Parapluie |
| Original Publication | Paris: Librairie Hachette et Cie, 1894. |
| Credits | Claudine Corbasson and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF/Gallica)) |
| Reading Level | Reading ease score: 66.6 (8th & 9th grade). Neither easy nor difficult to read. |
| Language | French |
| LoC Class | PZ: Language and Literatures: Juvenile belles lettres |
| Subject | Picture books for children |
| Subject | Children's stories, French |
| Subject | Umbrellas -- Juvenile fiction |
| Category | Text |
| EBook-No. | 76540 |
| Release Date | Jul 21, 2025 |
| Copyright Status | Public domain in the USA. |
| Downloads | 206 downloads in the last 30 days. |
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