Les Houdetot, Elisabeth Galos, comtesse de 1841-1925 creator Gerbault, Henry 1863-1930 text utu 2025 monographic fr 1 online resource : multiple file formats "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.) Release date is 2025-07-21 Claudine Corbasson and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF/Gallica)) Originally published: Paris: Librairie Hachette et Cie, 1894 Picture books for children Children's stories, French Umbrellas -- Juvenile fiction PZ Paris: Librairie Hachette et Cie, 1894 https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k9668782p/f1.double https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76540 https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k9668782p/f1.double https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76540 UtSlPG 260607 20260610134754.0 76540