Short Stories Old and New - Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
"It is true," Markheim said, huskily, "I have in some degree complied
with evil. But it is so with all: the very saints, in the mere exercise
of living, grow less dainty, and take on the tone of their
surroundings."
"I will propound to you one simple question," said the other; "and as
you answer, I shall read to you your moral horoscope. You have grown in
many things more lax; possibly you do right to be so; and at any
account, it is the same with all men. But granting that, are you in any
one particular, however trifling, more difficult to please with your own
conduct, or do you go in all things with a looser rein?"
"In any one?" repeated Markheim, with an anguish of consideration. "No,"
he added, with despair, "in none! I have gone down in all."
"Then," said the visitor, "content yourself with what you are, for you
will never change; and the words of your part on this stage are
irrevocably written down."
Markheim stood for a long while silent, and indeed it was the visitor
who first broke the silence. "That being so," he said, "shall I show you
the money?"
"And grace?" cried Markheim.
"Have you not tried it?" returned the other. "Two or three years ago,
did I not see you on the platform of revival meetings, and was not your
voice the loudest in the hymn?"
"It is true," said Markheim; "and I see clearly what remains for me by
way of duty. I thank you for these lessons from my soul: my eyes are
opened, and I behold myself at last for what I am."
At this moment, the sharp note of the door-bell rung through the house;
and the visitant, as though this were some concerted signal for which he
had been waiting, changed at once in his demeanor.
"The maid!" he cried. "She has returned, as I forewarned you, and there
is now before you one more difficult passage. Her master, you must say,
is ill; you must let her in, with an assured but rather serious
countenance--no smiles, no overacting, and I promise you success! Once
the girl within, and the door closed, the same dexterity that has
already rid you of the dealer will relieve you of this last danger in
your path. Thenceforward you have the whole evening--the whole night, if
needful--to ransack the treasures of the house and to make good your
safety. This is help that comes to you with the mask of danger. Up!" he
cried: "up, friend; your life hangs trembling in the scales; up, and
act!"
Markheim steadily regarded his counsellor. "If I be condemned to evil
acts," he said, "there is still one door of freedom open--I can cease
from action. If my life be an ill thing, I can lay it down. Though I be,
as you say truly, at the beck of every small temptation, I can yet, by
one decisive gesture, place myself beyond the reach of all. My love of
good is damned to barrenness; it may, and let it be! But I have still my
hatred of evil; and from that, to your galling disappointment, you shall
see that I can draw both energy and courage."
The features of the visitor began to undergo a wonderful and lovely
change; they brightened and softened with a tender triumph; and, even as
they brightened, faded and dislimned. But Markheim did not pause to
watch or understand the transformation. He opened the door and went
down-stairs very slowly, thinking to himself. His past went soberly
before him; he beheld it as it was, ugly and strenuous like a dream,
random as chance-medley--a scene of defeat. Life, as he thus reviewed
it, tempted him no longer; but on the further side he perceived a quiet
haven for his bark. He paused in the passage, and looked into the shop,
where the candle still burned by the dead body. It was strangely silent.
Thoughts of the dealer swarmed into his mind, as he stood gazing. And
then the bell once more broke out into impatient clamor.
He confronted the maid upon the threshold with something like a smile.
"You had better go for the police," said he: "I have killed your
master."
X. THE NECKLACE[*] (1885)
[* "La parure" from "Contes et nouvelles."]
BY GUY DE MAUPASSANT (1850-1893)
[_Setting_. The story is set in a Paris atmosphere of social aspiration
and discontent. The background is one of studied contrasts, contrasts
between the stolid contentment of a husband and the would-be
luxuriousness of a wife, between what Madame Loisel had and what she
wanted, between what she was and what she thought she could be, between
her brief moment of triumph and the long years of her undoing, between
the trivialness of what she did and the heaviness of her punishment.
These contrasts are developed not by reasoning but by action, each
action plunging Madame Loisel deeper and deeper into misery. The
author's attitude toward his work forms also a part of the real
background. Maupassant shows neither sympathy nor indignation. He writes
as if he were the stenographer of impersonal and pitiless fate.
_Plot_. Madame Loisel, a poor but beautiful and ambitious woman, borrows
and loses a diamond necklace valued at $7200. That, at least, is what
Madame Loisel thought for ten terrible years, and that is what the
reader thinks till he comes to the last words of the story. The plot
belongs, therefore, to that large group known as hoax plots. In most of
these stories one person plays a joke on another. In this story a grim
fate is made to play the joke. In fact, the current phrase, "the irony
of fate," finds here perfect illustration. We use the expression not so
much of a great misfortune as of a misfortune that seems brought about
by a peculiarly malignant train of circumstances. The injury in this
case not only was irremediable but turned on an accident. Notice also
how Maupassant has sharpened the poignancy and bitterness of Madame
Loisel's misfortune by making it depend not only on an accident that
might so easily not have happened but on a misunderstanding that might
so easily have been explained. When Madame Loisel, just on the threshold
of her life of drudgery, took the necklace bought on credit to Madame
Forestier, the latter "did not open the case, to the relief of her
friend." The irony of fate could hardly go further; but it does go
further a little later, when Madame Forestier, still young and
beautiful, fails to recognize Madame Loisel because the latter had lost
youth, beauty, daintiness, her very self, in toiling to pay to Madame
Forestier a debt that was not a debt. Just before the final revelation
Madame Loisel is made to say, "I am very glad." There is a unique pathos
in her use of this word: it lifted her a little from the ground that her
fall might be all the harder.
There is no denying the art of this story, but it is art without heart.
The author is a craftsman rather than a creator, a master of the loom
rather than of the forge. Maupassant did perfectly what he wanted to do,
but his greatness and his limitation are both revealed. "What would have
happened," he says, "if she had not lost that necklace? Who knows, who
knows? How strange life is, how changeful! How little a thing is needed
for us to be lost or to be saved!" The greatest art may begin but not
end this way.
_Characters_. The man is only a foil to his wife. He is introduced to
bring into sharper relief her unhappiness and her powerlessness to
better her condition. He is not a bad man, nor is she a bad woman. To
say that the story turns entirely on his honor and on her false pride is
to miss, I think, the author's purpose. There is nothing distinctive in
these characters; he is better than she, but both are puppets in the
grip of brute circumstance rather than everyday characters shaped by the
ordinary pressures of life. They are not types as Rip is a type, or
Scrooge, or Oakhurst. Maupassant shows in his stories that he is
interested not so much in the free play or the full reaction of
personality as in the enslavement of personality through passion or
chance. He saw life without order because without center, without reward
because without desert; and his characters are made to see it through
the same lens and to experience it on the same level. They either do not
react or do not react nobly. Had Madame Loisel and her husband been
shaped to fit into a less mechanical scheme of things, they would have
recognized in their ten years' trial the call to something higher. They
could have used their testing as a means of understanding with keener
sympathy the lifelong testing of others. They could have attained a
self-development that would have brought a happiness undreamed of before
the fateful January 18. But this is Browning's way, not Maupassant's.
The latter prefers to make Madame Loisel and her husband chiefly of
putty so that they may illustrate the blind thrusts of accident rather
than the power of personality to turn stumbling-blocks into
stepping-stones.]
She was one of those pretty and charming girls who, as if by a mistake
of destiny, are born in a family of employees. She had no dowry, no
expectations, no means of becoming known, understood, loved, wedded by
any rich and distinguished man; and so she let herself be married to a
petty clerk in the Bureau of Public Instruction.
She was simple in her dress because she could not be elaborate, but she
was as unhappy as if she had fallen from a higher rank, for with women
there is no inherited distinction of higher and lower. Their beauty,
their grace, and their natural charm fill the place of birth and family.
Natural delicacy, instinctive elegance, a lively wit, are the ruling
forces in the social realm, and these make the daughters of the common
people the equals of the finest ladies.
She suffered intensely, feeling herself born for all the refinements and
luxuries of life. She suffered from the poverty of her home as she
looked at the dirty walls, the worn-out chairs, the ugly curtains. All
those things of which another woman of her station would have been quite
unconscious tortured her and made her indignant. The sight of the
country girl who was maid-of-all-work in her humble household filled her
almost with desperation. She dreamed of echoing halls hung with Oriental
draperies and lighted by tall bronze candelabra, while two tall footmen
in knee-breeches drowsed in great armchairs by reason of the heating
stove's oppressive warmth. She dreamed of splendid parlors furnished in
rare old silks, of carved cabinets loaded with priceless bric-a-brac,
and of entrancing little boudoirs just right for afternoon chats with
bosom friends--men famous and sought after, the envy and the desire of
all the other women.
When she sat down to dinner at a little table covered with a cloth three
days old, and looked across at her husband as he uncovered the soup and
exclaimed with an air of rapture, "Oh, the delicious stew! I know
nothing better than that," she dreamed of dainty dinners, of shining
silverware, of tapestries which peopled the walls with antique figures
and strange birds in fairy forests; she dreamed of delicious viands
served in wonderful dishes, of whispered gallantries heard with a
sphinx-like smile as you eat the pink flesh of a trout or the wing of a
quail.
She had no dresses, no jewels, nothing; and she loved nothing else. She
felt made for that alone. She was filled with a desire to please, to be
envied, to be bewitching and sought after. She had a rich friend, a
former schoolmate at the convent, whom she no longer wished to visit
because she suffered so much when she came home. For whole days at a
time she wept without ceasing in bitterness and hopeless misery.
Now, one evening her husband came home with a triumphant air, holding in
his hand a large envelope.
"There," said he, "there is something for you."
She quickly tore open the paper and drew out a printed card, bearing
these words:--
"The Minister of Public Instruction and Mme. Georges Rampouneau request
the honor of M. and Mme. Loisel's company at the palace of the Ministry,
Monday evening, January 18th."
Instead of being overcome with delight, as her husband expected, she
threw the invitation on the table with disdain, murmuring:
"What do you wish me to do with that?"
"Why, my dear, I thought you would be pleased. You never go out, and
this is such a fine opportunity! I had awful trouble in getting it.
Every one wants to go; it is very select, and they are not giving many
invitations to clerks. You will see all the official world."
She looked at him with irritation, and said, impatiently:
"What do you expect me to put on my back if I go?"
He had not thought of that. He stammered:
"Why, the dress you go to the theatre in. It seems all right to me."
He stopped, stupefied, distracted, on seeing that his wife was crying.
Two great tears descended slowly from the corners of her eyes toward the
corners of her mouth. He stuttered:
"What's the matter? What's the matter?"
By a violent effort she subdued her feelings and replied in a calm
voice, as she wiped her wet cheeks:
"Nothing. Only I have no dress and consequently I cannot go to this
ball. Give your invitation to some friend whose wife has better clothes
than I."
He was in despair, but began again:
"Let us see, Mathilde. How much would it cost, a suitable dress, which
you could wear again on future occasions, something very simple?"
She reflected for some seconds, computing the cost, and also wondering
what sum she could ask without bringing down upon herself an immediate
refusal and an astonished exclamation from the economical clerk.
At last she answered hesitatingly:
"I don't know exactly, but it seems to me that with four hundred francs
I could manage."
He turned a trifle pale, for he had been saving just that sum to buy a
gun and treat himself to a little hunting trip the following summer, in
the country near Nanterre, with a few friends who went there to shoot
larks on Sundays.
However, he said:
"Well, I think I can give you four hundred francs. But see that you have
a pretty dress."
* * * * *
The day of the ball drew near, and Madame Loisel seemed sad, restless,
anxious. Her dress was ready, however. Her husband said to her one
evening:
"What is the matter? Come, now, you've been looking queer these last
three days."
And she replied:
"It worries me that I have no jewels, not a single stone, nothing to put
on. I shall look wretched enough. I would almost rather not go to this
party."
He answered:
"You might wear natural flowers. They are very fashionable this season.
For ten francs you can get two or three magnificent roses."
She was not convinced.
"No; there is nothing more humiliating than to look poor among a lot of
rich women."
But her husband cried:
"How stupid you are! Go and find your friend Madame Forestier and ask
her to lend you some jewels. You are intimate enough with her for that."
She uttered a cry of joy.
"Of course. I had not thought of that."
The next day she went to her friend's house and told her distress.
Madame Forestier went to her handsome wardrobe, took out a large casket,
brought it back, opened it, and said to Madame Loisel:
"Choose, my dear."
She saw first of all some bracelets, then a pearl necklace, then a
Venetian cross of gold set with precious stones of wonderful
workmanship. She tried on the ornaments before the glass, hesitated,
could not make up her mind to part with them, to give them back. She
kept asking:
"You have nothing else?"
"Why, yes. But I do not know what will please you."
All at once she discovered, in a black satin box, a splendid diamond
necklace, and her heart began to beat with boundless desire. Her hands
trembled as she took it. She fastened it around her throat, over her
high-necked dress, and stood lost in ecstasy as she looked at herself.
Then she asked, hesitating, full of anxiety:
"Would you lend me that,--only that?"
"Why, yes, certainly."
She sprang upon the neck of her friend, embraced her rapturously, then
fled with her treasure.
* * * * *
The day of the ball arrived. Madame Loisel was a success. She was
prettier than all the others, elegant, gracious, smiling, and crazy with
joy. All the men stared at her, asked her name, tried to be introduced.
All the cabinet officials wished to waltz with her. The minister noticed
her.
She danced with delight, with passion, intoxicated with pleasure,
forgetting all in the triumph of her beauty, in the glory of her
success, in a sort of mist of happiness, the result of all this homage,
all this admiration, all these awakened desires, this victory so
complete and so sweet to the heart of woman.
She left about four o'clock in the morning. Her husband had been dozing
since midnight in a little deserted anteroom with three other gentlemen,
whose wives were having a good time.
He threw about her shoulders the wraps which he had brought for her to
go out in, the modest wraps of common life, whose poverty contrasted
sharply with the elegance of the ball dress. She felt this and wished to
escape, that she might not be noticed by the other women who were
wrapping themselves in costly furs.
Loisel held her back.
"Wait here, you will catch cold outside. I will go and find a cab."
But she would not listen to him, and rapidly descended the stairs. When
they were at last in the street, they could find no carriage, and began
to look for one, hailing the cabmen they saw passing at a distance.
They walked down toward the Seine in despair, shivering with the cold.
At last they found on the quay one of those ancient nocturnal cabs that
one sees in Paris only after dark, as if they were ashamed to display
their wretchedness during the day.
They were put down at their door in the Rue des Martyrs, and sadly
mounted the steps to their apartments. It was all over, for her. And as
for him, he reflected that he must be at his office at ten o'clock.
She took off the wraps which covered her shoulders, before the mirror,
so as to take a final look at herself in all her glory. But suddenly she
uttered a cry. She no longer had the necklace about her neck!
Her husband, already half undressed, inquired:
"What is the matter?"
She turned madly toward him.
"I have--I have--I no longer have Madame Forestier's necklace."
He stood up, distracted.
"What!--how!--it is impossible!"
They looked in the folds of her dress, in the folds of her cloak, in the
pockets, everywhere. They could not find a trace of it.
He asked:
"You are sure you still had it when you left the ball?"
"Yes. I felt it on me in the vestibule at the palace."
"But if you had lost it in the street we should have heard it fall. It
must be in the cab."
"Yes. That's probable. Did you take the number?"
"No. And you, you did not notice it?"
"No."
They looked at each other thunderstruck. At last Loisel put on his
clothes again.
"I am going back," said he, "over every foot of the way we came, to see
if I cannot find it."
So he started. She remained in her ball dress without strength to go to
bed, sitting on a chair, with no fire, her mind a blank.
Her husband returned about seven o'clock. He had found nothing.
He went to police headquarters, to the newspapers to offer a reward, to
the cab companies, everywhere, in short, where a trace of hope led him.
She watched all day, in the same state of blank despair before this
frightful disaster.
Loisel returned in the evening with cheeks hollow and pale; he had found
nothing.
"You must write to your friend," said he, "that you have broken the
clasp of her necklace and that you are having it repaired. It will give
us time to turn around."
She wrote as he dictated.
* * * * *
At the end of a week they had lost all hope.
And Loisel, looking five years older, declared:
"We must consider how to replace the necklace."
The next day they took the box which had contained it, and went to the
place of the jeweller whose name they found inside. He consulted his
books.
"It was not I, madame, who sold the necklace; I must simply have
furnished the casket."
Then they went from jeweller to jeweller, looking for an ornament like
the other, consulting their memories, both sick with grief and anguish.
They found, in a shop at the Palais Royal, a string of diamonds which
seemed to them exactly what they were looking for. It was worth forty
thousand francs.[*] They could have it for thirty-six thousand.
[* A franc is equal to twenty cents of our money.]
So they begged the jeweller not to sell it for three days. And they made
an arrangement that he should take it back for thirty-four thousand
francs if the other were found before the end of February.
Loisel had eighteen thousand francs which his father had left him. He
would borrow the rest.
He did borrow, asking a thousand francs of one, five hundred of another,
five louis here, three louis there. He gave notes, made ruinous
engagements, dealt with usurers, with all the tribe of money-lenders. He
compromised the rest of his life, risked his signature without knowing
if he might not be involving his honor, and, terrified by the anguish
yet to come, by the black misery about to fall upon him, by the prospect
of every physical privation and every mental torture, he went to get the
new necklace, and laid down on the dealer's counter thirty-six thousand
francs.
When Madame Loisel took the necklace back to Madame Forestier, the
latter said coldly:
"You should have returned it sooner, for I might have needed it."
She did not open the case, to the relief of her friend. If she had
detected the substitution, what would she have thought? What would she
have said? Would she have taken her friend for a thief?
* * * * *
Madame Loisel now knew the horrible life of the needy. But she took her
part heroically. They must pay this frightful debt. She would pay it.
They dismissed their maid; they gave up their room; they rented another,
under the roof.
She came to know the drudgery of housework, the odious labors of the
kitchen. She washed the dishes, staining her rosy nails on the greasy
pots and the bottoms of the saucepans. She washed the dirty linen, the
shirts and the dishcloths, which she hung to dry on a line; she carried
the garbage down to the street every morning, and carried up the water,
stopping at each landing to rest. And, dressed like a woman of the
people, she went to the fruiterer's, the grocer's, the butcher's, her
basket on her arm, bargaining, abusing, defending sou[*] by sou her
miserable money.
[* A sou, or five-centime piece, is equal to one cent of our money.]
Each month they had to pay some notes, renew others, obtain more time.
The husband worked every evening, neatly footing up the account books of
some tradesman, and often far into the night he sat copying manuscript
at five sous a page.
And this life lasted ten years.
At the end of ten years they had paid everything,--everything, with the
exactions of usury and the accumulations of compound interest.
Madame Loisel seemed aged now. She had become the woman of impoverished
households,--strong and hard and rough. With hair half combed, with
skirts awry, and reddened hands, she talked loud as she washed the floor
with great swishes of water. But sometimes, when her husband was at the
office, she sat down near the window and thought of that evening at the
ball so long ago, when she had been so beautiful and so admired.
What would have happened if she had not lost that necklace? Who knows,
who knows? How strange life is, how changeful! How little a thing is
needed for us to be lost or to be saved!
* * * * *
But one Sunday, as she was going for a walk in the Champs Elysees to
refresh herself after the labors of the week, all at once she saw a
woman walking with a child. It was Madame Forestier, still young, still
beautiful, still charming.
Madame Loisel was agitated. Should she speak to her? Why, of course. And
now that she had paid, she would tell her all. Why not?
She drew near.
"Good morning, Jeanne."
The other, astonished to be addressed so familiarly by this woman of the
people, did not recognize her. She stammered:
"But--madame--I do not know you. You must have made a mistake."
"No, I am Mathilde Loisel."
Her friend uttered a cry.
"Oh! my poor Mathilde, how changed you are!"
"Yes, I have had days hard enough since I saw you, days wretched
enough--and all because of you!"
"Me? How so?"
"You remember that necklace of diamonds that you lent me to wear to the
ministerial ball?"
"Yes. Well?"
"Well, I lost it."
"How can that be? You returned it to me."
"I returned to you another exactly like it. These ten years we've been
paying for it. You know it was not easy for us, who had nothing. At last
it is over, and I am very glad."
Madame Forestier was stunned.
"You say that you bought a diamond necklace to replace mine?"
"Yes; you did not notice it, then? They were just alike."
And she smiled with a proud and naive pleasure.
Madame Forestier, deeply moved, took both her hands.
"Oh, my poor Mathilde! Why, my necklace was paste. It was worth five
hundred francs at most."