The Necklace: Class 10 English · Chapter 7

7.1 Before you read

Picture a big family wedding. One aunt wears a gold set borrowed from her sister, a cousin has hired a costly lehenga for a single evening, and everyone worries about what the relatives will say. Wanting to look good in front of others is very human. This story asks a hard question about that wish: what can it cost if one small thing goes wrong?

Matilda Loisel lives in Paris with her husband, a junior clerk. When an invitation to a grand ball arrives, she gets a new dress, borrows a diamond necklace from a rich friend, and then loses it. Settling the loss takes ten years, and the last few lines turn everything upside down. Read the story in your textbook first. This companion explains it part by part, then helps you practise for the board exam.

The story moves through four stages, from a woman who wants more to a final surprise, as Fig. 7.1 shows. Notice that the map hides the ending: try not to read the last page first.

7.2 Reading the story

Your textbook breaks the story with three Read and Find Out boxes. We follow them, splitting the long final stretch in two. Part I ends when the dress money is settled, Part II when the necklace is found missing, Part III when the look-alike is handed back, and Part IV with the final revelation. Each part gives the events in order, the moments that matter, and a quick check on the textbook's questions.

7.2.1 Part I: A wife who wants more

Matilda is young and pretty, but her family are clerks with no money for a dowry, so she has no way to meet a rich or important husband. She marries a junior clerk in the education office. Nothing is really wrong with her life; it is simply ordinary, and ordinary is what she cannot bear. She believes she was meant for luxury, so every plain room and tired chair feels like an insult.

The dinner table sums up the marriage. A simple homemade pie is enough to make her husband happy. Matilda, facing him, is somewhere else in her mind: at grand tables laid with silver, eating dishes she has never tasted. She owns no fine dresses and no jewels, and those are the only things she cares about. She even avoids a rich friend from her convent school days, because each visit leaves her more wretched than before.

One evening Loisel comes home beaming, with a large envelope. Inside is a printed card: the Minister of Public Instruction and Madame Ramponneau invite M. and Mme Loisel to an evening at the Minister's residence. Loisel expects delight. Instead, Matilda flings the card down. The problem, she says, is clothes: she owns nothing fit for so grand an occasion. Then she bursts into tears.

Loisel is hurt but gentle, and asks what a simple, useful dress would cost. Matilda thinks carefully about a sum he will not refuse in alarm, and names four hundred francs. The figure is no small thing for him: it is his savings for a gun, meant for shooting trips with friends next summer. He loses a little colour, says nothing about the gun, and agrees. He asks only that the dress be a pretty one.

7.2.2 Part II: Borrowed glory

As the ball draws near, the dress is almost ready, but Matilda grows gloomy and restless. When Loisel asks why, she names a fresh problem: she has no jewellery at all, and without it she will look poor. He suggests fresh flowers, which are fashionable that season. She will not hear of it. To her, looking poor in a room full of rich women is worse than staying at home.

Then Loisel has an idea that seems to solve everything: why not borrow jewels from her rich friend, Mme Forestier? Matilda cries out with joy. The next day her friend opens a big jewel case and tells her to choose. Matilda tries piece after piece and cannot decide, until she finds a magnificent diamond necklace in a black satin box. Her hands shake as she holds it to her throat. Nervously she asks to borrow just that one, and her friend agrees at once.

The ball is her night of triumph. Every eye in the room turns to her, and for a few hours she has exactly the admiration she has always craved. Loisel's evening is far less glamorous: from midnight on, he dozes in a small side room alongside three other husbands whose wives are still dancing.

They leave at about four in the morning. The plain wraps Loisel puts round her shoulders look poor beside the other women's furs, so she rushes off down the steps before he can find a cab. There is none in the street. They trudge, cold and miserable, towards the river until they find a shabby old carriage that takes them home. Loisel must be at his office by ten. Then, at the mirror, Matilda cries out in horror: her neck is bare. The necklace is gone.

7.2.3 Part III: A lie and a debt

The search that follows is frantic. The gown, the cloak, the pockets: nothing. Since she felt the necklace on her as they left, they guess it slipped off in the cab, but neither noticed the cab's number. Loisel spends the rest of the night retracing their walk. The next day he tries the police, the cab offices and a newspaper notice offering a reward. All of it fails.

To buy time, Loisel tells Matilda to write to her friend that the clasp has broken and is being mended. She writes down his words. It is a small lie, but it is the turning point: from now on, the Loisels choose silence over the truth. After a week without news they give up hope, and Loisel, who seems to have aged five years, decides they must replace the necklace.

In a jeweller's shop at the Palais-Royal they find a string of diamonds that looks just like the lost one. It is priced at 40,000 francs, though the jeweller will accept 36,000. Half of that sum is the 18,000 francs Loisel's father left him; the other half he has to borrow. He signs reckless promises and takes loans from usurers and anyone else who will lend. Then he pays for the necklace in full, as Fig. 7.2 shows.

When Matilda returns it, Mme Forestier takes it back coolly, complaining only that she might have needed it sooner. Matilda had dreaded that her friend would open the case, spot the switch and think her a thief. But Mme Forestier never even looks inside.

7.2.4 Part IV: Ten years and the truth

Poverty, the thing Matilda always feared, now arrives for real, and the surprise is how bravely she meets it. The maid is dismissed and the couple move to rooms under the roof. She takes on every heavy household chore, climbs the stairs with water, and haggles over every coin at the market. Loisel keeps accounts for traders in the evenings and copies documents at night for five sous a page.

It takes ten years, but they pay back every debt. By then the work has aged Matilda far beyond her years. Her hands are red and rough, she no longer fusses over her hair, and her voice has grown loud. Still, alone at the window, she sometimes thinks back to that one glittering night when every eye was on her. The narrator pauses here to wonder what life would have been without the loss, and remarks that the tiniest event can wreck a life or rescue it.

One Sunday, strolling on the Champs-Élysées after a hard week, Matilda sees Mme Forestier with a child. Her friend is still young and lovely. With the debt paid, Matilda decides to tell her everything. Mme Forestier does not recognise this worn woman, and is startled to be greeted by her first name. When Matilda says who she is, her friend cries out at how much she has changed.

Matilda explains, with a touch of pride: she lost the borrowed necklace, returned a look-alike, and has spent ten years paying for it. Now it is over, and she is content. Deeply moved, Mme Forestier takes both her hands and reveals the truth: “Mine were false.” Her necklace was worth five hundred francs at most. The story stops right there, and we never learn what happens next. Fig. 7.3 traces the whole journey of the necklace.

7.3 Thinking about the story

Board answers on this story earn marks for evidence. Whenever you name a quality or an idea, back it with something a character does or says. This section gives you that material: the three main characters, the themes, and the irony that makes the ending famous.

7.3.1 The characters

Matilda Loisel is at the centre of the story, and she changes more than anyone. At first she is pretty, vain and endlessly dissatisfied. She judges her life by what richer women have, so a loving husband and a decent home give her no joy. Her vanity drives the plot: it makes her weep over the dress, refuse flowers, pick the grandest jewel and flee the ball in shame. After the loss, though, a different Matilda appears. She works without complaint for ten years and pays every franc. She ends the story poorer, older and tougher, but more admirable.

M. Loisel is a simple, contented man who wants his wife to be happy. He brings home the invitation to please her, gives up his gun money for her dress, suggests flowers and then the loan, and searches all night after the loss. For ten years he carries crushing debts and works extra hours without blaming her. He is loving, patient and self-sacrificing. His one serious mistake is the cover-up: it is he who dictates the letter about the clasp and chooses to replace the necklace rather than confess.

Mme Forestier is Matilda's rich school friend. She is generous, lending any jewel Matilda likes without hesitation. She is also a little careless and cool, grumbling about the late return and never checking the case. At the end she is moved by her old friend's suffering. She does nothing wrong, yet the Loisels' fear of her is what traps them: one honest visit to her would have saved ten years. The way Matilda's mood rises and falls around these people is traced in Fig. 7.4.

7.3.2 Themes and message

A theme is a big idea that a story makes you think about. The Necklace carries several, and board questions often name one of them.

• Pride and appearances. Matilda wants to look rich more than she wants anything real. One night of showing off costs ten years.
• Appearance and reality. A fake necklace passes for diamonds, a clerk's wife passes for a society lady, and a disaster turns out to have been unnecessary.
• Honesty. One honest conversation the morning after the ball could have saved everything. Fear of shame makes the Loisels hide the truth, and the hiding ruins them.
• Contentment. Loisel is happy with little; Matilda is miserable with enough. Envy can spoil a life that was not bad at all.
• Chance and character. Bad luck loses the necklace, but character decides what follows. Her pride sets up the loss; her courage pays the debt.
• Dignity of work. Hardship strips away Matilda's vanity and reveals strength and discipline she never knew she had.

These ideas link up into a chain of cause and effect, shown in Fig. 7.5. Notice how most links are choices, not just bad luck. That is why the story is often read as a warning against living for show.

7.3.3 Irony and the twist ending

The story is famous for its twist ending. In the last lines we learn that the necklace was fake, so ten years of suffering were for nothing. This is situational irony: the result is the opposite of what the characters, and the readers, expected. The Loisels wore themselves out to protect their good name, when the truth would have cost them very little.

The twist is fair, because Maupassant plants clues that a careful reader can spot afterwards. Mme Forestier lends the necklace instantly, as if it were nothing special. When it comes back late, she complains but never opens the case to check it. Neither detail proves the necklace is fake, but together they make the ending believable. Fig. 7.6 sets what seems against what is.

The title. The necklace is at the centre of every turn in the plot: the night of glory, the loss, the debt and the shock. It is also a symbol of the false glitter Matilda chases, beautiful on the surface and worth little underneath.

The narrator. A third-person narrator tells the story, mostly from Matilda's side, so we share her longing and her fear. Once, in Part IV, the narrator steps forward to comment directly on how a tiny thing can ruin or save a life. That comment is the story's message in a single line.

7.4 Talk about it

The textbook ends with three topics for discussion. The first is a puzzle about language; the other two are values that the story puts to the test.

7.4.1 What language are they really speaking?

You read the story in English, but the Loisels would never have spoken it. The Necklace is a translation from French, and the text is full of clues that give its origin away. Look at them as a detective would, sorting them into titles, money and places, as Fig. 7.7 does.

• Titles and names: Mme and M. are French titles, and Loisel, Forestier and Ramponneau are French surnames. Matilda's name in the French original is Mathilde.
• Money: every price is in francs and sous, the French money of the time.
• Places: Paris, the Palais-Royal and the Champs-Élysées are all in the French capital, so the river they walk towards would be the Seine.

So the characters are French, they speak French, and what you read is a translator's English. Translators often keep titles such as Mme and coins such as sous, so that readers can still feel where the story comes from.

7.4.2 Two topics for discussion

7.5 Board exam practice

Board papers test this reader with short answers of about 40–50 words and longer answers of about 100–120 words, often a character sketch or a question on values. Passage-based questions are a good way to revise details. Write your own answer first, then compare it with the model and the key points an examiner looks for.