One evening he arrives home in particularly good spirits because he is sure he has achieved something that will delight his wife: he has managed to get an invitation for them both to attend an official reception at the ministry. That does not mean, however, that he is anything but very happy to be at home in his little flat in Paris where his very pretty young wife, Mathilde, always waits for him after his day's routine work with an economical but tasty meal. He has a little money put aside and is promising himself a few hunting trips with his friends next summer. Monsieur Loisel is a minor clerk in the Ministry of Instruction (just as Maupassant himself had been a couple of years before writing this story), and things are beginning to go reasonably well for him in his modest way. Rather than commenting on what has been taking place he leaves us to find what response we may to the situation. All this Maupassant recounts vividly without wasting a word. This is a story of aspirations and fears, and then there is a conclusion rich in ambiguities that has the force and heartbreaking irony of tragedy. In just a few pages it vividly evokes a situation with which every reader-especially female Parisian readers at the time of the Third Republic towards the end of the nineteenth century-could easily identify. First published in the daily newspaper Le Gaulois on 17 February 1884 and then included in 1885 in Contes du jour et de la nuit (Stories of Day and Night), "The Necklace" ("La Parure") is rightly one of the most famous of all Guy de Maupassant's short stories.
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