title: The Necklace
author: Guy de Maupassant
source: http://www.americanliterature.com/
genre: short story
published: 1884
first line: SHE WAS ONE OF THOSE PRETTY AND CHARMING GIRLS BORN, as though fate had blundered over her, into a family of artisans.
The short story The Necklace is about a woman named Mathilde Loisel who is unhappy with her lot in life. She feels she deserves to be rich and have all sorts of fancy and expensive belongings.
She suffered endlessly, feeling herself born for every delicacy and luxury. She suffered from the poorness of her house, from its mean walls, worn chairs, and ugly curtains. All these things, of which other women of her class would not even have been aware, tormented and insulted her.
One day her husband hands her an invitation to a party but Mathilde is upset complaining that she has nothing to wear.
Her husband gives her his savings to buy a dress for the event. Mathilde is still unhappy because she has no jewelry to wear.
She ends up borrowing a diamond necklace from her friend, Madame Jeanne, who is well off. Mathilde is a hit at the party with her beautiful dress and diamond necklace. However, when she arrives home that night, she notices the necklace is no longer around her neck.
In a frenzy her husband runs out trying to retrace their steps, but the necklace is nowhere to be found. Their only hope is to replace the necklace so they begin to go to jewelers trying to find its match.
Mathilde's poor husband uses his entire inheritance plus borrows money from friends and takes out loans just to buy the new necklace.
He mortgaged the whole remaining years of his existence, risked his signature without even knowing it he could honour it, and, appalled at the agonising face of the future, at the black misery about to fall upon him, at the prospect of every possible physical privation and moral torture, he went to get the new necklace and put down upon the jeweller's counter thirty-six thousand francs.
After ten years, the debt was paid off with much suffering and hard work. Mathilde didn't have any nice clothes or extras at all now and aged prematurely.
Now she really knew what poverty was.
Madame Loisel looked old now. She had become like all the other strong, hard, coarse women of poor households. Her hair was badly done, her skirts were awry, her hands were red. She spoke in a shrill voice, and the water slopped all over the floor when she scrubbed it. But sometimes, when her husband was at the office, she sat down by the window and thought of that evening long ago, of the ball at which she had been so beautiful and so much admired.
While out one day Mathilde runs into the her friend who lent her the necklace all those years ago. Madame Jeanne does not recognize Mathilde, she has aged so badly.
Mathilde blames her friend for her misery and tells her that all those years ago she lost her diamond necklace and has been paying off the debt ever since.
Madame Jeanne reveals a sad truth about the necklace.
I enjoyed this short story by Guy de Maupassant. There is a twist ending that I saw coming but it still gave me a little shock when I read it.
The moral of the story: All that glitters is not gold.
Henri Ren Albert Guy de Maupassant (Aug 5, 1850 - Jul 6, 1893) is considered one of the fathers of the modern short story and his work influenced Somerset Maugham, O. Henry, Anton Chekhov and Henry James among others. He was a popular French writer and fought in the Franco-Prussian war as a young man. He drew heavily on that experience and that war provides the setting for many of his stories which often depict the tragedy and suffering of innocent civilians caught in war's path.
Read The Necklace free online here.
