What would you do if you lost something borrowed, something you could not afford to replace, and had to decide between confessing and covering up? In The Necklace, published in 1884, Guy de Maupassant sends a young Parisian couple down the second road, and then follows them for ten years. The ending is famous for its twist, but the real power of the story lies in how patiently it prepares that twist. This guide walks through the plot, the craft and the questions it leaves behind.
The setup: a woman who feels born for better things
Mathilde Loisel is pretty and charming, but she was born into a family of clerks, and she married a minor clerk in the Ministry of Education. She feels she has been given the wrong life. She suffers over the shabby walls of their flat, the plain food, the absence of dresses and jewels. She has a rich friend from convent school, Madame Forestier, and she cannot bear to visit her, because each visit leaves her miserable.
Then her husband arrives home pleased with himself. He has secured an invitation to a ball at the ministry. Instead of gratitude, Mathilde is angry: she has nothing to wear. He gives her four hundred francs, which he had been saving for a gun, so she can buy a dress. Still she is unhappy, because she has no jewels. He suggests she borrow something from Madame Forestier. She does, and chooses a diamond necklace.
One night, then the loss
The ball is a triumph. Mathilde is the prettiest woman in the room. She dances, she is admired, and she is happy in a way she has never been. She leaves at four in the morning, and as they wait for a cab in the cold, she notices the necklace is gone from her neck.
They search the carriage, retrace their steps, report to the police. Nothing. Her husband writes to Madame Forestier that Mathilde has broken the clasp and is having it repaired, buying them time. They find a similar necklace in a shop in the Palais-Royal, priced at forty thousand francs, and negotiate it down to thirty-six thousand. The husband has eighteen thousand left to him by his father. He borrows the rest, from anyone who will lend, signing notes that he knows could ruin him. They return the new necklace, and Madame Forestier, a little coldly, does not open the case.
Ten years of poverty
The middle of the story is a compressed account of hardship. They dismiss the maid and move to an attic. Mathilde does the rough housework, scrubs pots, carries water, haggles with shopkeepers. Her husband takes evening work as a bookkeeper and copies manuscripts at night. After ten years they have paid everything, with interest. Mathilde looks old, coarse, strong, with reddened hands. Maupassant does not soften it.
The twist, and why the necklace works
One Sunday Mathilde meets Madame Forestier on the Champs-Elysees, still young and elegant. Out of a pride that the long struggle has made honest, she decides to tell her the truth. Madame Forestier does not recognize her at first. When Mathilde explains that she lost the necklace and replaced it, Madame Forestier is stunned. Her necklace, she says, was paste. It was worth five hundred francs at most.
The story ends there, in a single line. Maupassant offers no comment and no moral. Whatever reaction you have is entirely yours.
Readers sometimes feel cheated, as if the twist were a trick. It is worth asking why it does not feel that way. First, the ending is fair: Maupassant has mentioned that Madame Forestier did not open the case, a small clue. Second, the twist changes the meaning without changing the facts. Mathilde did lose a necklace and did work for ten years. What changes is our sense of what the sacrifice was for. Third, the story has been about appearances from the first page, so a fake jewel is the most fitting possible end.
Questions the story raises
- Was it vanity or integrity? Mathilde’s early desires are shallow. Yet in the long years of repayment she shows endurance and honesty. The story lets both be true.
- Why did she not simply tell her friend? Pride and fear. Her husband’s letter shows the plan began as a delay, and delay hardened into a decision.
- Is the ending cruel? Maupassant, trained under Gustave Flaubert and loyal to realism, believed in showing life without consoling it. Cruelty is perhaps the wrong word. Chance is more accurate.
Maupassant’s craft in a few pages
Maupassant wrote hundreds of short stories in about a decade, from the early 1880s until illness ended his career, and he died in 1893 at 42. The Necklace first appeared in the newspaper Le Gaulois in February 1884. It shows his habits clearly. The prose is spare. The narrator rarely explains feelings, preferring to show money, objects and small actions. The time structure is efficient: one night takes pages, ten years takes a paragraph. That unequal weighting tells the reader where the meaning lies.
It is also a story obsessed with numbers. The four hundred francs, the eighteen thousand, the thirty-six thousand, the five hundred: the numbers build a sort of ledger, and the twist arrives as a final accounting. Few writers have made arithmetic so dramatic.
Reading it alongside others
If you enjoy this story, read Maupassant’s Boule de Suif, a longer tale of a prostitute and her respectable fellow travelers during the Franco-Prussian War, and The Piece of String, about a man ruined by a rumor. Then compare The Necklace with O. Henry’s twist stories. O. Henry’s surprises tend to be warm; Maupassant’s are bleak. Both rely on the same engine, which is a reader’s confident expectation turned over at the last moment.
Closing thoughts
The Necklace takes about fifteen minutes to read and stays with you far longer. It is a story about wanting too much, paying too much and learning too late, but it refuses to preach. When you reach the last line, try writing down your own reaction before looking up anyone else’s. Whether you feel pity, anger or a strange kind of admiration for Mathilde, the story has done what it set out to do: it has made a single piece of glass the most expensive thing in Paris.
