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.)