the borrowing of the necklace. When she gets her hands in that huge, flamboyant and shiny piece of pure extravagance, she realizes that this is it for her.  At the party, she is ravishing, and wants to make sure she shines as brightly as her borrowed necklace. All the excitement is over after the ball ends, and she realizes that the necklace is gone.

After the loss of the necklace

Since the Loisels decide to hide the fact that the necklace is lost, they had to make up for it in a short period of time. After they found the replica to purchase it, they had to sacrifice their entire lifestyle to be able to afford paying for it.

Now, Madame had every reason to complain. This is the first time she came to know what it is to really sacrifice and what true problems really look like. If she was ever angry and disillusioned about her life, things were just about to get worse. We know this in the way that she changes physically, socially, and even behaviorally, after so many years working cleaning floors, moving to a smaller place, haggling the prices of things, and having to live like the lowest peasant she could have ever imagined to become.

Madame Loisel looked old now. She had become the woman of impoverished households--strong and hard and rough. With frowsy hair, skirts askew and red hands, she talked loud while washing the floor with great swishes of water.

She was no longer cute; no longer dainty, nor delicate. She was "loud", and rough, having lost the flower of femininity that is so unique to a fragile woman of the household. She even had the courage of showing herself up to Madame Forestier, who was less than pleased to have seen her, but was equally shocked at the state of her friend's appearance.

Perhaps this was not too bad for Mathilde. After all, she did learn to appreciate the value of money, in the end. Her vanity is presumably gone and certainly there are no more dreams of exquisiteness ruling her day. We never get to know what is her reaction when she finds out that the necklace was fake, but it is quite easy to imagine that her shock was quite intense.

She learns how to work hard and to be proud of what you can earn from that hard work.  At the beginning of the story, we see a petulant, whiny woman who is dissatisfied with everything around her, and always wanting more.  But, she does little more than whine about it, and never thinks of using her own ingenuity to better her station in life.  At the end of the story, she has spent ten years of her adult life living a much altered lifestyle.  She "came to know what heavy housework meant and the odious cares of the kitchen...and dressed like a woman of the people."  Of her hard work, she is proud, and "she smiled with a joy that was at once proud and ingenuous" when she discovers that Madame Forestier was none the wiser about the necklace.

Another change in Madame Loisel is that she learns humility.  She lived the life of a spoiled and proud woman before the necklace, and sat at ever meal and "thought of dainty dinners, of shining silverware".  She pines to be with great people, at great balls, and to have a great house.  At the end though, she is just a person working hard to earn her bread.  Only once in a while  does she pine, but more maturely.  Instead of moping and whining she thinks, "What would have happened if she had not lost that necklace? Who knows? who knows? How strange and changeful is life!"  She thinks of it as a life lesson, and goes about her work.  She is humbled by her experiences, and no longer the materialistic woman she used to be.

Mathilde Loisel is the main character in Guy de Maupassant's short story "The Necklace." At the beginning of the story she is described as unhappy and bored with her middle class life. She longs for the material trappings of the upper class. She takes for granted her devoted husband and comfortable, if not lavish, lifestyle. After all, she even has a maid. These things are not enough for her, however, and she dreams of wealth, luxury and being around important people. De Maupassant writes,

She would dream of great reception halls hung with old silks, of fine furniture filled with priceless curios, and of small, stylish, scented sitting rooms just right for the four o’clock chat with intimate friends, with distinguished and sought-after men whose attention every woman envies and longs to attract. 

Monsieur Loisel's thoughts and actions contrast with those of his selfish and querulous wife. 

Whereas he is content with his station in life, Madame Loisel is disappointed.

She grieved incessantly, feeling that she had been born for all the little niceties and luxuries of living. She grieved over . . . things which another woman of her class would not even have noticed.

When M. Loisel comes home, holding a large envelope with pride, he informs his wife that he has something for her. Rather than being delighted when she opens the envelope and sees an invitation to a ball at the Ministerial Mansion Mme. Loisel tosses the card aside and complains that she has nothing to wear for such an elegant occasion. Observing his wife's disappointment, her loving husband asks her how much she needs for a gown; she responds, "I think with four hundred francs I could manage it." M. Loisel turns pale. He has been saving for a rifle so that he could join friends the following summer in a hunting expedition. Unselfishly, though, M. Loisel gives the four hundred francs to his wife for a gown.

When they attend the ball, Mme. Loisel delights in the attention that she receives in her lovely gown adorned with a dazzling necklace that she has borrowed from a former school friend. Even the minister himself takes notice of her. On this night, Mme. Loisel . . .

. . . giv[es] no thought to anything in the triumph of her beauty, the pride of her success . . . of all the awakened longings, of a sense of complete victory that is so sweet to a woman's heart.

She even ignores her husband who has fallen asleep. Finally, she and her husband depart at four in the morning. After they arrive home, Mme. Loisel discovers that she has lost the borrowed diamond necklace. Monsieur Loisel goes back out and retraces their steps to find the necklace, but he has no luck. Madame Loisel is too ashamed of this loss to inform her friend. Instead, she and her husband borrow the money to purchase a replacement and take it to Mme. Forestier. 

[M. Loisel] compromised the rest of his life...and then, terrified by the outlook for the future, by the blackness of despair about to close around him, and all the privations of the body and tortures of the soul,...he went to claim the new necklace.

After this financial setback, Monsieur Loisel, a changed man, labors night and day. Also changed, Madame Mathilde Loisel does the heavy housework and haggles with the grocer and the butcher. Finally, their debt is paid. One Sunday while Mme. Loisel walks on the broad boulevard named the Champs Elysées, she encounters her old friend. Mme. Forestier, who does not recognize her because she is "greatly changed." Mathilde Loisel informs Mme. Forestier that she is to blame for Mathilde's having aged. She explains to Mme. Forestier that she actually lost the diamond necklace and had to purchase another to replace it. To her surprise, Mme. Loisel learns from Mme. Forestier that the first necklace was merely made from glass. Mathilde's selfish pride, which prevented her from informing her friend of the loss, has unnecessarily caused her and her husband untold hardships.

The reader never really finds out where, exactly Madame Loisel loses the necklace.  But, the author suggests that when she is getting ready to leave the ball, and it is very late, and she has had a great time, and does not want the feeling of joy and excitement that she has experienced by tarnished by the thought of her actual life at home, that it causes her to resists the efforts of her husband who is trying to put her ragged coat on her shoulders as they venture outside to get a cab home.

It is at this point, when she is leaving the ball, and looking for a cab, or perhaps in the long walk that they make to find a cab or in the old cab that they take home that she loses the necklace.  She does not discover the necklace gone until she is at home and getting undressed.

As a result of the ten years of hard physical labor that Madame Loisel and her husband perform in order to pay off the debts incurred to buy a replacement necklace, she has lost her former beauty.  Her hair has grown coarse, her hands are red, dry and swollen from scrubbing and cleaning, she is at the end of the story, the picture of a poor scrubber woman, everything that she despises at the beginning of the story.  Gone is her beauty, which she believed put her in a different social class, far from the coarse, simple lower class girls.

"The necklace itself represents the theme of appearances versus reality. While sufficiently beautiful to make Madame Loisel feel comfortable during the ministerial ball, the necklace is actually nothing more than paste and gilt. Thus, it is not the reality of wealth or high social class that is important for Madame Loisel, just the appearance of it."

At the end of the ten years, Madame Loisel looks far older than her age would indicate.  So much so, that Madame Forestier does not even recognize her when she encounters her in the park.

Trading her life for a brief moment of acceptance into the world of the rich and priveleged, Madame Loisel experiences one night of joy and many years of suffering and sacrifice.  

In Guy de Maupassant's writings, there is close psychological examination of the inner desires of people.  Clearly, from the beginning of his short story, "The Necklace," Madame Loisel is preoccupied with the desire to be of a higher class than that into which she has been born: 

She suffered endlessly, feeling herself born for every delicacy and luxury.  She suffered from the poorness of her house, from its mean [lowly] walls, worn chairs, and ugly curtains.

Maupassant writes that she is "one of those" beautiful young ladies who, lacking a dowry, must live in the bourgeoisie rather than the aflluent class.  Her envy of wealth and the social life that it includes produces a negativity in Mme. Loisel:

The sight of the little Breton girl who came to do he work in her house aroused heart-broken regrets and hopeless dreams in her mind. [The Celtic Bretons were very much looked down upon by the other French people.]

In order to escape from her perceived lowly position Madame Loisel imagines how life could be for her:

She imagined silent antechambers, heavy with Oriental tapestries, lit by torches in lofty bronze sockets, with two tall footmen in knee-breeches sleeping in arm-chairs....She imagined vast saloons, hung with antique silk, exquisite pieces of furniture supporting priceless ornaments, and small, charming perfumed rooms, created just for little parties of intimate friends, men who were famous and sought after, whose homage roused every other woman's envious longings.

Mme. Loisel even envies a friend and refuses to visit her because in her envy she "would weep whole days with grief, regret, despair, and misery." When her husband brings home the invitation to a ball, she derides his kindly gesture by asking what good it is to her when she does not own an adequate dress.  After her generous and loving husband offers to sacrifice the money he has saved for a rifle and spend it on a dress for her, she ungratefully bemoans the fact that she does not have jewelry to accompany such a dress.  Upon M. Loisel's suggestion to call upon an old school friend, Madame Forestier, Mme. Loisel does so.  And, so, the necklace that she borrows from her old friend proves pivotal to the plot of this story of the myopia of Mme. Loisel who places worth upon the false value of material possessions.  For, when this necklace is lost, she loses her beauty and grace as she must haggle with the grocer and scrub her own floors.  Her poor husband works constantly to repay the debt.  Their life together is spent in penury and pettiness, when it could have been filled with love.

Mme. Loisel's final disillusion comes at the denouement of the narrative, when with false pride she boasts to Mme. Forestier that the necklace that she returned to her former friend was such a good replica that it went undetected.  The irony of her years if struggle hit her when Mme. Forestier reveals that the original was faux, as false as the values of Mme. Loisel. 

In considering comparison and contrast, it is useful, after identifying the similarities and differences, to ask the “so what?” question.  In other words, what is the thematic significance to how she is described at the beginning and how she is described at the end as a result of her experiences, namely, losing the necklace and living in poverty to pay for it?  Or, what is the significance in character?  Does she really change?  Madame Loisel tells her friend, "Yes, I have had a pretty hard life, since I last saw you, and great poverty--and that is  because of you!"  If she has lived a life of poverty, has she become more humble, changed her understanding of what is important in life, changed her values?  The irony of course is that she suffered to pay back something that she thought had value and did not.  Does this sentence, then, suggest to us that she now understands the meaning of value? While you need to think this out for yourself, I think that she does not, that her voice is full of resentment, and so her values in fact have not changed at all, she is every bit as superficial and vain at the end of the story as she is at the beginning.

Prior to losing the necklace, Madame Loisel wanted to be part of the upper class, feeling that money and nice things would somehow make her a better person. She's beautiful and feels she is "born for every delicacy and luxury" life has to offer. When she's invited to the ball, she's afraid her drab wardrobe isn't good enough to wear to the ball. She borrows a necklace from Madame Forestier for the ball and has the best night of her life at the ball. She loses the borrowed necklace and is afraid to tell her friend she lost the necklace. She replaces it with a diamond necklace that takes Madame Loisel many years to pay off. During that time, she lives in poverty. She loses all of her physical beauty due to all of her hard work.

The beginning of the short story "The Necklace" written by Guy de Maupassant is interesting because it sets us up for our opinion of Mme Loisel later. We are deliberately told of her lower middle class status and a lifestyle that is similar to a lowly clerk's. Clearly, this girl has great ideas to better this!She thinks she's a beautiful woman worth " every delicacy and luxury." The author shows how this moulds her whole personality. She thinks that trivial materilaistic things such as a gown, better furniture, a posh house will make her happy. But her ball invite makes her sad because it reminds her of her shabby clothes and lack of jewels. She finally gets these and enjoys herselfat the ball, for one evening flaunting the appearance of wealth and beauty she believes she is worth. Then she can't own up to losing the jewelry, and spends the rest of her in poverty paying for a paste necklace and losing her looks.

Mme. Loisel is characterized as a woman unhappy with her life because she feels she was meant to live a more glamorous one. From the beginning of the story, she imagines herself surrounded by finer things, even though her actual life is very ordinary.

When her husband comes home with the invitation to the party, Mme. Loisel initially refuses to go because she complains that she has nothing to wear. M. Loisel selflessly offers her his savings to buy a dress. She borrows the jewels that ultimately lead to her downfall.

At the party, she is the happiest she's ever been because she is viewed as a society woman in her beautiful dress and gorgeous jewels, (which is what she has believed she should be all along). She prolongs the evening, not wanting it to end, and then ultimately and irrevocably changes her and her husband's lives forever by losing the necklace.

Out of the very few times that Maupassant offers an insight of Monsieur Loisel's thoughts, a salient one is when the man is faced with the possibility of having to give to his wife a lot of money that he had saved up. He had just obtained an invitation to the Ministry of Education's ball, and Mathilde complained that she had nothing to wear; that she wanted a dress for the ball, and that she will have it for a few hundred francs.

Here is when we realize that the man had plans, after all, and a life of his own which he enjoys funding.

He grew a little pale, because he was laying aside just that amount to buy a gun and treat himself to a little shooting next summer on the plain of Nanterre, with several friends who went to shoot larks there of a Sunday.

While the extent of any other emotions of Monsieur is unknown, the best bet is to stick with this evidence that we do have and argue that this information helps us to see that Mathilde certainly has no other interests but those of her own. Moreover, we realize that Monsieur Loisel is not a bad husband, at all. He actually is willing to compromise for his wife. This is quite telling because we know that this is not mutual and, at the same time, sheds light as to who Mathilde really is.

Therefore, there is definitely a benefit to having some glimpses that show the feelings and emotions of Monsieur Loisel. His thoughts actually redeem him in the eyes of the reader and show his true character when juxtaposed to that of his wife.

In “The Necklace,” Guy de Maupassant describes a lovely young woman named Madam Loisel, who feels her social standing does not match up to her charm and elegance:

She suffered from the poverty of her dwelling...those things, of which another woman of her rank would never even have been conscious, tortured her and made her angry.

When she and her husband are invited to an exclusive, high-class party, she buys an expensive dress and borrows the necklace of a friend. The necklace makes an immediate impact upon her: “Her hands trembled as she looked at it. She...remained lost in ecstasy at the sight of herself.”

At the party, Mdm. Loisel succeeds in making a splash:

She was prettier than them all, elegant, gracious, smiling and crazy with joy.

Maupassant, however, never mentions the necklace or any effect it has on the other guests at the ball. It remains an open question whether the necklace was part of Mdm. Loisel’s allure or whether the elegance she felt while wearing it made the difference. It is difficult to say how long she wore the necklace at the party at all, since that night she realizes it has gone missing. One reading of the end of the story—in which the necklace turns out to have been a fake all long—is Maupassant insisting that the quality of any thing or person only has internal value. Looks can be deceiving, but the way one feels, or the way something makes someone feel, could be the only marker of true value.

Like the necklace itself, Madame Loisel is "only paste," not genuine. Although she has attended the same school as Mme. Forestier, Mme Loisel does not have the polish of a lady.  She rudely asks Mme. Forestier, "Haven't you something else?" when her friend graciously asks her to select whatever she wants from the jewelry presented her. 

At the ball, she dances madly, "giving no thought to anything in ... the pride of her success..." Ignoring her husband, she revels in the elusive moment that is no more real than her necklace.  Later, after having lost the necklace, she gives little thought to the sacrifices that her husband makes;  Mme Loisel "played her part...with sudden heroism," too proud to apologize to her husband for her error.  Finally, when her debt is paid and she has replaced the necklace, Mme Loisel blames her friend for the loss of her looks:  "I've had ...misfortunes--and all on account of you."  Even in the end Mme. Loisel fails to recognize what is of real worth and what is not.  The irony of her proud and simple joy when she asks Mme Forestier "You never noticed [the difference in necklaces]?" cannot be missed by the reader.

Reality finally sinks in for Madame Loisel when she loses the necklace and, instead of admitting this to Madame Forestier, she and her husband decide to mortgage their future and pay for the lost jewelry. The change is an unexpected turn for Mathilde, who was never satisifed with her husband's government job nor their relatively simple lifestyle. In her fantasy world, she believed she was deserving of the riches of the wealthy and that she was living a life of "poverty;" but after losing the diamond necklace, she discovers what real poverty is like. As for the change, she sees the drastic measures her husband takes to make up for her mistake. He is forced to

... borrow, asking a thousand francs of one, five hundred of another, five louis here, three louis there. He gave notes, took up ruinous obligations, dealt with usurers and all the race of lenders. He compromised all the rest of his life... and, frightened by the trouble yet to come, by the black misery that was about to fall upon him, by the prospect of all the physical privations and moral tortures that he was to suffer...

Her pride seems to disappear and, for once, she thinks not only of herself. She foresees the "privations" to come for the family and, surprisingly,

She bore her part, however, with sudden heroism. That dreadful debt must be paid. She would pay it.

Her servant had performed all of the duties of the house before the necklace was lost. Now, Mathilde does all of her own housework as well as taking on cleaning duties of others. Her transformation is both mental and physical: She accepts the burden she has placed upon herself, and

... had become the woman of impoverished households--strong and hard and rough.

Perhaps it is the knowledge that her fantasy came true, if only for a few hours--"to please, to be envied, to be charming, to be sought after," to be the belle of the ball--that allows her to continue the "tortures" of a common working woman until her debt is paid.

With Madame Forestier's sparkling diamonds adorning her pretty neck, Mathilde Loisel feels like a star. She's always thought herself so much better than her lowly petit bourgeois existence would suggest; but now, she feels like a princess as she becomes the center of attention at the Education Ministry ball. Heads turn; she's by far the most beautiful woman there, and all men's eyes are upon her. No less a VIP than the Minister himself notices Mathilde, and all the cabinet officials want to dance with her. She is truly the belle of the ball and the toast of high society. Isn't it amazing what a diamond necklace can do?

Madame Loisel feels that she's now become what she always really was: a lady of the aristocracy. Only, she isn't really. Just as her aristocratic pretensions are fake, so too are the diamonds which so cruelly fan the flames of her delusions of grandeur.

When she subsequently loses the necklace, Madame Loisel is devastated. But somehow she and her husband must pay for a replacement, however much it costs. So they take out huge loans with a number of different creditors, even though they know full well they won't be able to pay them back for many years to come.

After laying down 36,000 francs for a replacement necklace, the Loisels are humiliatingly forced into a drastic change in their lifestyle. They dismiss their maid; they move into a poky little garret; they have no choice but to work their fingers to the bone just to make ends meet. And this goes on for ten long, miserable years. Mathilde and her husband now know what it's like to be very poor.

And this is what's so ironic. In wearing the necklace, Mathilde thought she would rise above her straightened circumstances, to become the princess she always thought she was. Yet now, when Madame Forestier catches up with her after all this time, the physical signs of a decade of grinding poverty are visibly etched all over Mathilde's drawn, haggard features. Instead of going up in the world, Madame Loisel has come crashing down to the very bottom. Although she may have developed all the strength and hardy roughness of the impoverished Parisienne, her new life is still a far cry, not just from her fantasies of gracious living, but also from the simple but perfectly comfortable lifestyle she enjoyed before that fateful night at the Education Ministry ball.

Mathilde Loisel's actions greatly differ from the beginning to the end of the story.

In the beginning, she complains about living in poverty, even though she has a beautiful home, food on her table, and a servant. She leads a relaxed lifestyle, and never has to cook or clean. She feels she has married beneath her and blames her artist parents for this.

After they buy the necklace, her life has changed dramatically. They are forced to give up their home and get a small place. She has to do her own laundry, cooking and cleaning, and this ages her. When she runs into her friend, she looks so much older that her friend doesn't even recognize her, possibly mistaking her for a homeless person. Age and poverty have taken their toll on her. She even has to work for other people at times, and has to bargain with people at the market over every penny.

And this is just her changes. Her husband is forced to do work harder and take out ridiculous loans just to replace the necklace she lost.

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