The Necklace by Guy De Maupassant

    Guy De Maupassant, French author,1850-1893.

    Maupassant is well known by almost every person who have had a experience in school in China because his eminent works, The Necklace, is chosen into the Chinese textbook of middle school.  But the majority of Chinese have no knowledge that Maupassant's major is law.  Some colleagues have made great endevours to figure out how many authors throughout the whold world have majored at law.  It was a terrible pity that Maupassant was omitted by them.

   The plots, characters and process of the story in The Necklace are extremely famous in China.  It is unnecessary to relate it again.  The English translation is also beautiful, elegant, charming.

    She was one of those pretty and charming girls who are sometimes, as if by a mistake of destiny, born in a family of clerks.  She had no dowry, no expections, no means of being known, understood, loved, wedded by any rich and distinguished man; and she let herself be married to a little clerk at the Ministry of Public Instruction.

    She dressed plainly because she could not dress well, but she was as happy as though she had really fallen from her proper station.

    She suffered ceaselessly, feeling herself born for all the delicacies and all the luxuries.  She suffered from the poverty of her dwelling, from the wretched look of the walls, from the worn-out chairs, from the ugliness of the curtains.  All those things, of which another woman of her rank would never even have been conscious, tortured her and made her angry.

    She had no dresses, no jewels, nothing.  And she loved nothing but that; she felt make for that.  She would so have liked to please, to be envied, to be charming, to be sought after.

    But one evening, her husband returned home with a triumphant air, and holding a large envelope in his hand.

    Instead of being delighted, as her husband hoped, she threw the invitation on the table with distain, murmuring:

    "What do you want me to do with that?"

    She looked at him with an irritated glance, and said, impatiently:

    "And what do you want me to put on my back?"

    Two great tears descended slowly from the corners of her eyes toward the corners of her mouth.

    "Only I have no dress and therefore I can't go to this ball.  Give your card to some collegue whose wife is better equipped than I."

    She reflected several seconds, making her calculations and wondering also what sum she could ask without drawing on herself an immediate refusal and a frightened exclamation from the economical clerk.

    There's nothing more humiliating than to look poor among other women who are rich.

    All of sudden she discovered, in a black satin box, a superb necklace of diamonds, and her heart began to beat with an immoderate desire.  Her hands trembled as she took it.  She fastened it around her throat, outside her high-necked dress, and remained lost in ecstasy at the sight of herself.

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

    She danced with intoxication, with passion, made drunk by pleasure, forgetting all, in the triumph of her beauty, in the glory of her success, in a sort of cloud of happiness composed of all this homage, of all this admiration, of all these awakened desires, and of that sense of complete victory which is so sweet to a woman's heart.

    She felt this, and wanted to escape so as not to be remarked by the other women, who were enveloping themselves in costly furs.

    And he went out.  She sat waiting on a chair in her ball dress, without strength to go to bed, overwhelmed, without fire, without a thought.       ....he was urged by the least suspicion of hope.    At the end of a week they had lost all hope.

    He did 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 life, risked his signature without even knowing if he could meet it; and, frightened by the pains yet to come, by the black misery which was about to fall upon him, by the prospect of all the physical privation and of all the moral tortures which he was to suffer, he went to get the new necklace, putting down upon the merchant's counter thirty-six thousand francs.

    And this life lasted for ten years.

    And the end of ten years, they had paid everything, everything, with the rates of usury, and the accumulations of the compound interest.

   She look old now.  She had become the woman of improverished households--strong and hard and rough.        But sometimes, when her husband was at the office, she sat down near the window, and she thought of that gay evening of long ago, of that ball where she had been so beautiful and so feted.

    "Oh, my poor Mathilde!  Why, my necklace was paste.  It was worth at most five hundred francs."