He confronted the maid upon the threshold with something like a smile.

“You had better go for the police,” said he:  “I have killed your master.”

X. THE NECKLACE[*] (1885)

[* “La parure” from “Contes et nouvelles.”]

BY GUY DE MAUPASSANT (1850-1893)

[Setting.  The story is set in a Paris atmosphere of social aspiration and discontent.  The background is one of studied contrasts, contrasts between the stolid contentment of a husband and the would-be luxuriousness of a wife, between what Madame Loisel had and what she wanted, between what she was and what she thought she could be, between her brief moment of triumph and the long years of her undoing, between the trivialness of what she did and the heaviness of her punishment.  These contrasts are developed not by reasoning but by action, each action plunging Madame Loisel deeper and deeper into misery.  The author’s attitude toward his work forms also a part of the real background.  Maupassant shows neither sympathy nor indignation.  He writes as if he were the stenographer of impersonal and pitiless fate.

Plot.  Madame Loisel, a poor but beautiful and ambitious woman, borrows and loses a diamond necklace valued at $7200.  That, at least, is what Madame Loisel thought for ten terrible years, and that is what the reader thinks till he comes to the last words of the story.  The plot belongs, therefore, to that large group known as hoax plots.  In most of these stories one person plays a joke on another.  In this story a grim fate is made to play the joke.  In fact, the current phrase, “the irony of fate,” finds here perfect illustration.  We use the expression not so much of a great misfortune as of a misfortune that seems brought about by a peculiarly malignant train of circumstances.  The injury in this case not only was irremediable but turned on an accident.  Notice also how Maupassant has sharpened the poignancy and bitterness of Madame Loisel’s misfortune by making it depend not only on an accident that might so easily not have happened but on a misunderstanding that might so easily have been explained.  When Madame Loisel, just on the threshold of her life of drudgery, took the necklace bought on credit to Madame Forestier, the latter “did not open the case, to the relief of her friend.”  The irony of fate could hardly go further; but it does go further a little later, when Madame Forestier, still young and beautiful, fails to recognize Madame Loisel because the latter had lost youth, beauty, daintiness, her very self, in toiling to pay to Madame Forestier a debt that was not a debt.  Just before the final revelation Madame Loisel is made to say, “I am very glad.”  There is a unique pathos in her use of this word:  it lifted her a little from the ground that her fall might be all the harder.