There is no denying the art of this story, but it is art without heart.  The author is a craftsman rather than a creator, a master of the loom rather than of the forge.  Maupassant did perfectly what he wanted to do, but his greatness and his limitation are both revealed.  “What would have happened,” he says, “if she had not lost that necklace?  Who knows, who knows?  How strange life is, how changeful!  How little a thing is needed for us to be lost or to be saved!” The greatest art may begin but not end this way.

Characters.  The man is only a foil to his wife.  He is introduced to bring into sharper relief her unhappiness and her powerlessness to better her condition.  He is not a bad man, nor is she a bad woman.  To say that the story turns entirely on his honor and on her false pride is to miss, I think, the author’s purpose.  There is nothing distinctive in these characters; he is better than she, but both are puppets in the grip of brute circumstance rather than everyday characters shaped by the ordinary pressures of life.  They are not types as Rip is a type, or Scrooge, or Oakhurst.  Maupassant shows in his stories that he is interested not so much in the free play or the full reaction of personality as in the enslavement of personality through passion or chance.  He saw life without order because without center, without reward because without desert; and his characters are made to see it through the same lens and to experience it on the same level.  They either do not react or do not react nobly.  Had Madame Loisel and her husband been shaped to fit into a less mechanical scheme of things, they would have recognized in their ten years’ trial the call to something higher.  They could have used their testing as a means of understanding with keener sympathy the lifelong testing of others.  They could have attained a self-development that would have brought a happiness undreamed of before the fateful January 18.  But this is Browning’s way, not Maupassant’s.  The latter prefers to make Madame Loisel and her husband chiefly of putty so that they may illustrate the blind thrusts of accident rather than the power of personality to turn stumbling-blocks into stepping-stones.]

She was one of those pretty and charming girls who, as if by a mistake of destiny, are born in a family of employees.  She had no dowry, no expectations, no means of becoming known, understood, loved, wedded by any rich and distinguished man; and so she let herself be married to a petty clerk in the Bureau of Public Instruction.

She was simple in her dress because she could not be elaborate, but she was as unhappy as if she had fallen from a higher rank, for with women there is no inherited distinction of higher and lower.  Their beauty, their grace, and their natural charm fill the place of birth and family.  Natural delicacy, instinctive elegance, a lively wit, are the ruling forces in the social realm, and these make the daughters of the common people the equals of the finest ladies.