Because she's too ashamed to admit it, she and her husband replace it with an identical one, going deeply into debt. For ten years, they live in poverty, working tirelessly to repay the loans. When Mathilde finally meets Madame Forestier again and confesses the truth, her friend reveals the necklace was a fake, made of paste and worth almost nothing.
Maupassant was a renowned 19th-century French author, widely regarded as one of the great masters of the short story form and a key figure in the naturalist and realist literary movements. His influence on modern short fiction was profound, impacting writers from O. Henry to Somerset Maugham with his economical style and twist endings.
The story’s famous twist at the end underscores life’s cruel ironies—how small deceptions can have enormous consequences. I think here of a pearl of wisdom that my mother was fond of saying: "Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive."
The story is likewise a critique of rigid class systems and the pressure to conform to appearances in 19th-century France. In short, “The Necklace” is a timeless parable about pride, honesty, and the high price of chasing illusions.
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Maupassant was a popular 19th-century French writer who has been described as one of the fathers of the modern short story. By the time he died at age 42 he'd written 300 short stories, six novels, three travel books, and one volume of verse. Like Chekhov, who died at 44, he his life was too short.
Born on August 5, 1850, in Normandy, France (likely at the Château de Miromesnil near Dieppe), he grew up in a bourgeois family that had recently adopted the noble "de" prefix. His parents separated when he was 11, and he was raised primarily by his literary-minded mother, Laure Le Poittevin, who introduced him to classics like Shakespeare. As a youth, he developed a love for outdoor activities, particularly boating and fishing in Normandy. He probably would have enjoyed living here in Minnesota, the "land of 10,000 lakes."
His literary career was launched through his mentorship under Gustave Flaubert—a close family friend—who rigorously trained him in precise, objective writing and introduced him to prominent writers like Émile Zola and Ivan Turgenev. Flaubert treated Maupassant less like a prodigy and more like a craft apprentice. For years, Flaubert forbade him from publishing, insisting he master sentence rhythm, structure, and restraint first. Maupassant later said Flaubert taught him “to see, not to invent.”
"I entered literary life as a meteor, and I shall leave it like a thunderbolt," he once said.
In 1880, his breakthrough short story "Boule de Suif" (often translated as "Ball of Fat" or "Dumpling") appeared in a collection and earned immediate acclaim for its sharp social commentary on hypocrisy during the war. Much, if not most of his writing was produced in the decade that followed. According to the critics, his style was characterized by concise prose, irony, psychological insight, and often pessimistic views of human nature, society, and fate.
It was said that Maupassant could draft a short story in a single sitting, sometimes in a few hours. Yet he revised obsessively. Friends described him reading sentences aloud, testing their weight and cadence, a habit inherited directly from Flaubert.
Another influence: As a young man, Maupassant served during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71). He witnessed cowardice, cruelty, and moral collapse firsthand. This experience stripped him of romantic illusions and shaped the unsentimental realism of stories like “Boule de Suif” and “Two Friends.”
Maupassant contracted syphilis in his early 20s (common at the time) and refused treatment. By the late 1880s, it caused severe mental deterioration, paranoia, hallucinations, and physical decline—reflected in works like "Le Horla." In 1892, he attempted suicide by slitting his throat and was committed to a Paris asylum, where he died on July 6, 1893, at age 42.
