The lesson that Guy de Maupassant leaves the reader with
is that people can find satisfaction and happiness in life, regardless of what they
possess materially. The old adage "Money can't buy happiness" would see to specifically
apply here.
Madame Loisel (Mathilde) is a beautiful woman
who is married to a man who not only loves her, but wants to please her, however, this
is not enough.
She had no gowns, no jewels, nothing. And she
loved nothing but that. She felt made for that. She would have liked so much to please,
to be envied, to be charming, to be sought
after.
In the end, nothing is
ever enough until her "wanting" has destroyed her life and that of
her husband, taking ten years of their young lives to pay for the necklace she borrowed
and lost.
I think that the author intentionally uses a
necklace because it supports the theme of appearance vs reality
which runs throughout the story. Though Madame Loisel and her husband don't have much,
it is important to her that they seem to have wealth, which will
lead to an elevated social standing. This is her intent in borrowing the necklace in the
first place. However, in a desperate attempt to replace the necklace, she and her
husband lose everything, even their happiness. In the end, appearance vs reality rears
its head again when Madame Loisel learns that the necklace was made of paste—glue: the
diamonds were fake.
Oh, my poor Mathilde! Why, my necklace was paste!
It was worth at most only five hundred
francs!
The true value of the
jewelry was an illusion, as was the wealth that Madame Loisel was trying to pretend she
and her husband had.
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