The Necklace

By

Guy de Maupassant

She was one of those pretty, charming girls who, as if by mistake of destiny, are born into a family of government clerks. She had no dowry, no expectations, no means of being known, appreciated, loved and married, by any man of wealth or distinction; and she submitted to be married to an under clerk of the Department of Public Instruction.
            She dressed simply, being unable to adorn herself, but she was as unhappy as a woman who married below her station; for women have neither class nor race, their beauty, their grace, and their charms taking the place with them of noble birth and family. Their innate refinement, their instinctive breeding, their mental hierarchy, make a girl of the common people the equal of the greatest of grandes dames.

She suffered constantly, feeling that she was born to enjoy all the refinements and luxuries of life. She suffered because of the poverty of her home, the bareness of the walls, the dilapidated state of the chairs, the hideousness of the materials. All these things, which another woman of her class would not have even noticed, tortured and angered her. The sight of the little Breton maid who took care of her humble establishment aroused in her mind despairing regrets and wild dreams. She dreamed of silent antechambers, hung with Oriental fabrics, lighted by tall bronze candelabra, and with two tall valets in knee-breaches dozing in spacious armchairs, made drowsy by the heavy heat from the stove. She dreamed of long salons furnished in old silk, with slender furniture bearing priceless trifles; and of dainty little perfumed boudoirs, made for five o’clock chats with one’s closest friends, with well-known and much sought after men whose attentions all women envy and desire.

When she sat down to dine at the round table covered with a cloth that had been used three days, opposite her husband, who, as he removed the lid of the soup – tureen, exclaimed with an enchanted air: “Ah! A good old stew! I know of nothing better that that!” she dreamed of dainty dinners, of gleaming Silverware, of tapestries peopling the walls with antique personages and strange birds in the midst of an enchanted forest; she dreamed of exquisite dishes served on a splendid plate, of gallantries whispered and listened to with a sphinx like smile, while you are eating the pink flesh of a trout or the wing of a chicken.
            She had no fine dresses, no jewels, nothing. And she cared for nothing else; she felt that she was made for these things. She would so have liked to be attractive, to be fascinating, to be envied and sought after.
            She had a wealthy friend, a former schoolmate at the convent, whom she would not go to see, she suffered so on returning home. And she wept whole days with disappointment, regret, distress and despair.

One evening her husband came home with the air of a conqueror, holding a big envelope in his hand.
“Here is something for you” he said.
She hastily tore the envelope, and took out a printed card on which were these words:
“The Minster of Public Instruction and Mme. Georges Ramponneau invite M. and Mme. Loisel to pass the evening at the Ministerial palace on Monday, January 18th”.
             Instead of being overjoyed, as her husband hoped, she tossed the invitation angrily on the table murmuring:
“What do you expect me to do with that?”
“Why my dear, I thought that you would be pleased. You never go out, and here is an opportunity – a fine one! I had the greatest difficulty in obtaining it. Everybody tries to get them, they are much sought after, and not many are given to clerks. You will see the whole official world there.”
She looked at him with an irritated eye, and demanded impatiently:
“What do you expect me to put on my back to go there?”
He had no thought after that.
“Why,” he faltered, “the dress you wear to the theatre. It looks very nice to me__”

He paused, stupefied, beside himself, to see that his wife was weeping. Two great tears were rolling down from the corner of her eyes to the corners of her mouth.
“What’s the matter?” he stammered.
But by a violent effort she had conquered her weakness, and she answered calmly, wiping her wet cheeks:
“Nothing, only I have no dress and so I can’t go to this ball. Give your card to some colleague whose wife is better equipped than I.”
He was in despair.
“Let us see Mathilde, “ he replied. “How much will it cost, a suitable dress that you can wear again on other occasions; something very simple?”
            She reflected a few seconds, making her calculations and also thinking how large a sum she could ask for without bringing forth an instant refusal and a horrified exclamation from the economical clerk.
At last she replied, hesitatingly:
“I don’t know exactly, but it seems to me that I could make out with four hundred francs.”
            He turned a little pale, for he had set aside that sum to purchase a rifle and indulge in an occasional hunting – excursion, during the summer on the plain of Nanterre, with some friends who went there on Sundays to shoot larks.
But he said:
“Very good. I will give you four hundred francs. And try to have a pretty dress.”

The day of the ball drew near, and Madame Loisel seemed sad, disturbed, anxious. Her dress was ready, however. Her husband said to her one evening:
“What’s the matter? Tell me; you have been very queer for three days.”
And she replied:
“It annoys me to have not a jewel, not a single stone, nothing to put on. I shall look as poverty-stricken as can be. I should almost prefer not to go to the ball.”
“You might wear natural flowers”, he rejoined. “ They are very stylish at this season. You can get two or three magnificent roses for ten francs. “
She was not convinced.
“No, there is nothing more humiliating than to look poor among a lot of rich women.”
“How stupid you are!” cried her husband.
“Go to your friend Madame Forestier and ask her to lend you some jewels. You are intimate enough with her to do that.”
She uttered a cry of joy.
“That’s so. I hadn’t thought of that.”
The next day she went to her friend’s house, and told her of her trouble.
Madame went to a wardrobe with a glass door, took out a large jewel box, brought it to Madame Loisel, opened it and said to her:
“ Take your choice, my dear.”
She saw first of all bracelets, then a pearl necklace, then a Venetian cross in gold and precious stones, a beautiful piece of work. She tried them on before a mirror, hesitated, could not decide to part with them, to replace them. She kept asking:
“You have nothing else?”
“Why, yes. Look. I don’t know what may take your fancy.”
Suddenly she discovered in a black satin case a superb diamond necklace, and her heart began to beat with an immoderate longing. Her hands trembled as she took it up. She fastened it about her throat, over her high dress, and stood in ecstasy before her own image.
Then she asked, hesitatingly, in an agony of suspense:
“Can you lend me this, just this and nothing else?”
“Why, yes, to be sure.”
She sprang upon the neck of her friend, kissed her passionately, then fled with her treasure.

The day of the ball arrived. Madame Loisel had a triumph. She was prettier than any of the others, stylish, gracious, smiling and mad with joy. All the men stared at her, asked her name, requested to be presented. All the clerks in the department wanted to waltz with her. The minister noticed her.
She danced madly, in a frenzy, intoxicated by pleasure, regardless of everything in the triumph of her beauty, in the pride of her success, in a sort of cloud of happiness composed of all the homage, of all that admiration, of all those newly kindled desires, of that complete victory which is so sweet to a woman’s heart.
She went away about four in the morning. Her husband had been asleep since midnight in a little, deserted anteroom, with three other gentlemen whose wives were enjoying themselves hugely.
He threw over her shoulders the wraps he had brought for her to wear home – modest garments of every-day life, whose shabbiness contrasted with the elegance of the ball-dress. She felt this and insisted on hastening away to avoid being noticed by all the other women, who were wrapping themselves in rich furs.
Loisel detained her.
“Wait a moment; you’ll take cold outside. I will go and call a cab.”
She would not listen to him however, but hurried down the stairs. When they were in the street, they could find no cab; and they set out to look for one, shouting after the drivers whom they saw passing in the distance.
They walked towards the Seine, in dire discomfort, shivering with cold. At last they found on the quay one of those ancient nocturnal coupes which are seen in Paris only after nightfall, as if they were ashamed to show their shabbiness during the day.
It took them to their door on Rue des Martyrs, and they went sadly up to their apartment. It was all over, for her. And he was thinking that he must be at the office at ten o’clock.
She removed the wraps with which her shoulders were covered, standing in front of the mirror, in order to see herself once more in all her glory. But suddenly she let out a shriek. Her diamond necklace was no longer about her neck!
Her husband, already half undressed, asked:
“What’s the matter with you?”
She turned to him, half distracted:
“ I have – I have – I no longer have Madame Forestier’s necklace.”
He sprang to his feet in dismay.
“What? What do you say? It’s impossible!”
And they hunted in the folds of the dress, in the folds of her cloak, in all the pockets, everywhere. They could not find it.
“Are you sure that you had it when you left the ball?” he asked.
“Yes, I felt in the vestibule of the palace.”
“But, if you had lost it in the street, we should have heard it drop. It must be in the cab.”
“Yes that is probable. Did you take the number?”
“No. Didn’t you look at it?
“No”.
They stared at each other in utter dismay. At last Loisel dressed himself.
“I am going to walk back over the whole distance we walked into the cab,” he said, “to see if I can find it”.
And he left the room. She sat there in her ball-dress, without the strength to go to bed, cowering in a chair, without a fire, without a thought.
Her husband returned about seven o’clock. He had found nothing.

He went to the Prefecture of Police, to the newspaper offices, to offer a reward; to the cab companies-everywhere, in short, that a ray of hope suggested.
She waited all day, in the same state of benumbed dismay in face of this terrible disaster.
Loisel returned at night, pale and hollow-cheeked; he had discovered nothing.
“You must write to your friend”, he said, “that you have broken the fastening of her necklace, and that you are having it repaired. That will give us time to turn round.”
She wrote at his dictation.

At the end of the week they had lost all hope; and Loisel, who had aged five years, declared:
“We must think about replacing the jewels.”
The next day they took the box that had held it and went to the jeweller whose name was inside. He consulted his books.

“It was not I who sold the necklace madame,” he said; I simply furnished the case.
They went from one jeweller to another, looking for a necklace like the last one, searching their memories, both fairly ill with disappointment and mental anguish.
In a shop at the Palais Royal they found a string of diamonds which seemed to them to be absolutely like the one they had lost. It was worth forty thousand francs, but they could have it for thirty-six thousand.
They requested the jeweller not to sell it for three days.  And they bargained with him-that he should take it back for thirty-four thousand francs if the other be found before the end of February.
Loisel had eighteen thousand francs left him by his father.  He would borrow the rest.
And he borrowed, asking one person for a thousand francs, another for five hundred; five louis here, three louis there.  He gave notes, made ruinous agreements, dealt with the whole race of moneylenders. He mortgaged the whole latter portion of his life, risked his signature without any certainty that he would be able to honour it; and, dismayed by agonising thoughts of the future, by the black poverty that was about to fall upon him, by the prospects of all sorts of physical privations and mental torture, he went to buy the new diamond necklace, and laid upon the jeweller’s counter thirty-six thousand francs.
When Madame Loisel carried the necklace to Madame Forrestier, the latter said to her with an injured air:
“You should have returned it sooner, for I might have needed it.”
She did not open the case, as her friend dreaded. If she had discovered the substitution, what would she have thought, what would she have said?  Would she not have taken her for a thief?
Madame Loisel came to know the wretched life of the needy.  She made the best of it, however, at the outset, heroically.   That dreadful debt must be paid.  She would pay it.  They dismissed their servant; they changed their lodgings, and hired an attic chamber under the eaves.
She became acquainted with the heavier kinds of housework, the odious tasks of the kitchen. She washed the dishes, wearing her pink nails away on the greasy earthenware and the bottom of the saucepans.  She washed the soiled linen, the shirts and the dishcloths, and hung them out to dry on a line; she carried the slops down to the street every morning, and carried up the water, stopping on every floor to take a breath. And, dressed like a woman of the common people, she went to the fruiterer’s, to the grocer’s, to the butcher’s, with her basket on her arm, bargaining, insulted, doling out her paltry money sou by sou.
Each month they had to meet some notes, renew others, beg for time.

The husband worked evenings straightening out a tradesman’s accounts; and he often copied manuscript at night at five sous the page.
And this life lasted ten years.
At the end of that time they had paid everything, everything, the charges of usurers and the accumulation of the compound interest.
Madame Loisel seemed an old woman now. She had become the strong, tough, rugged woman of impoverished households. Always unkempt, with red hands, and skirts askew, she talked loudly while washing the floors with a great splashing.  But some-times, when her husband was at the office, she would seat herself at the window and think of that evening of long ago, of that ball, at which she had been so lovely and so feted.
What would have happened if she had not lost that necklace? Who knows? Who knows?  What a strange, changeful thing life is! How little is needed to ruin and save us!

One Sunday, when she had gone out for a walk in the Champs-Elysees, for a little recreation after the labours of her week, she suddenly observed a woman wheeling a child.  It was Madame Forestier, still young, still beautiful, still fascinating.
Madame Loisel was greatly excited.  Should she speak to her?  Yes, to be sure. And now she had paid, she would tell her the whole story, why not?
She approached her.
“Good day, Jeanne.”
The other did not recognise her, and was surprised to be addressed thus familiarly by that bourgeoise.
“ But – Madame,” she said hesitatingly, “I don’t know – You must have made a mistake.”
“No, I am Mathilde Loisel.”
Her friend uttered and exclamation:
“O my poor Mathilde, how you have changed!”
“Yes, I have had some very hard days since I saw you, and much suffering – and all on your account!”
“On my account? How so?”
“You remember that diamond necklace that you lent me to wear to the ball at the ministry?”
“Yes, well?”
“Well, I lost it.”
“How is that since you brought it back to me?”
“I brought you another just like it. And for ten years now we have been paying for it.  You can understand that it wasn’t easy for us, having nothing.  However, it is done, and I am mightily pleased.”
Madame Forestier stopped.
“You say you bought a diamond necklace to replace mine?”
“Yes. You didn’t notice it! Did you? They were very much alike.”
And she smiled with a proud and naïve delight.
Madame Forestier, deeply moved, grasped both her hands.
“Oh my poor Mathilde!  Why, my necklace was paste.  It was worth at most five hundred francs!”

Guy de Maupassant 1885

Translated by George Burnham Ives in 1903

Note for english speakers: all of Maupassant’s short stories and novels are available in alright translation online or in most good book shops in Oxford and Penguin editions.