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The world's most beautiful and beautiful women are born, as if by some mistake of fate, into the family of a clerk; and this is the case with the one we are about to speak of. She had no dowry, no hope, no means of getting a man of money and position to know her, to understand her, to love her, to marry her; and at the end of the day she married a minor clerk in the Ministry of Education.
Not capable of adornment, she was plain, but unfortunate enough to be a degraded woman; for women have no class, no rank, and their beauty, their beauty, and their seductiveness are for their birth and family. Their natural alertness, their outstanding instincts, their suppleness of heart, constitute their only rank, and can raise the women of the folk as high as the highest noblewomen.
She felt that she had been born for all that was fine and all that was luxurious, and therefore could not help feeling miserable. She was very sad because of the shabbiness of her house, the roughness of its walls, the oldness of its furniture, and the vulgarity of its clothing.
All this, perhaps, would have gone unnoticed in the mind of another woman equal to her, yet she was saddened by it, and chagrined by it, and the appearance of the little Breton maid, who tended her trifling house, gave her all sorts of sorrowful regrets and whimsical thoughts.
She dreamed of the quiet reception rooms, how they were covered with oriental curtains, how they were lighted with bronze stiletto lamps, and how they had two tall waiters in short pants at their disposal, and how the hot air-warmer made both of them doze off in the large circle chairs. She dreamed of large living rooms draped in ancient wall coverings, of fine furniture with vases of inestimable value.
She dreamed of small, fragrant parlors where, at five o'clock in the afternoon, she could chat with affectionate boyfriends and famous men envied and eagerly sought after by the women's world.
In fact, however, she sat down every evening at supper opposite her husband at the little round table, covered with a white cloth that was changed only once every three days, and when he lifted the lid from the soup tureen, he said, with an air of pleasure, "Ha! good broth! There is nothing better in the world ......"
So she dreamed again of the sumptuous feasts, and of the splendid silver vessels, and of the wall-clothes embroidered with fairy gardens, and with the ladies in their ancient costumes, and with the strange birds of prey; and she dreamed of the delicacies of the delicacies served up on the costly platters, and the deliciousness of the dishes. She dreamed of delicacies served on costly plates, of love-words to be listened to with a bright smile as she ate a portion of sea-bass with pink flesh or a grouse-wing.
And she had no decent clothes, no jewelry, nothing. But she was inclined to rejoice only in this set, and felt she was made for it. She had expected to please, to be envied, to be seductive and courted.
She had a rich girlfriend, a girl friend at the church girls' school, but now no longer wanted to visit her, because she would always come back bitter. So she was sad, she was sorry, she was disappointed and she was worried, and one day, unexpectedly, her husband came back in the evening with a big envelope in his hand.
"See," he said, "there's something here just for you." She hastily opened the envelope, and drew from it an invitation bearing the words:
"The Minister of Education, Jorge? Lompono & Mrs. Lompono have the honor of inviting Mr. and Mrs. Locsell to an evening party on Monday, January 18th at the Headquarters Building."
Her husband hoped that she must be very happy, but she threw the invitation on the table with a sad and angry look and said coldly:
"What do you expect me to do with this?"
"But, Kindred, I thought you were probably satisfied. You've never been out of the house, and it was an opportunity, this thing, a good one! How much effort I had to go through to get it. Everyone wants invitations, it's hard to get them, and there aren't many copies to give out to coworkers. It'll be a great way to see the whole political world at the party."
She looked at him with a stormy look, and then she said in an impatient, loud voice,
"What do you expect me to wear there?"
He had not thought of this before; and stammered,
"But you wore the dress-robe in which you went to the theater. I think it is very good, I ......"
Seeing his wife shedding tears, he stopped talking, surprised, confused in his mind. Two large tears slowly flowed down from the corners of her eyes toward the corners of her mouth; he ate his mouth and said, "You're a little how? You're a little how?"
But she subdued her pain with a strong patience, and wiping her wet face, she answered in a quiet voice, "Nothing. But I have no clothes, so I cannot go to this party. If you have a colleague whose wife can dress better than I can, you will give him this invitation."
Source: from the short story "The Necklace" written by French writer Maupassant.
Extended information:
Compositional background:
In the 1880s in In the 1880s in France, the vicious development of capitalism, the big bourgeoisie is in power, the people are robbed by trickery, corruption in the government, the moral degeneration of the society, the bourgeoisie's extravagant life and the morality of the only profit-making influence on the whole society, the pursuit of hedonism and the pursuit of vanity, which has become a kind of bad social trend.
This social trend was also prevalent among the petty bourgeoisie. Since this class has a very unstable position in the capitalist society, they always want to get out of this situation and be among the upper class. However, only a few of them succeeded, while most of them fell into a more miserable situation in the competition of capitalism.
In The Necklace, Maupassant's plot sequence is a chain structure, with a necklace as the clue to unfold the story. This structure can visualize the process of the development of things, so that readers can easily and naturally understand the development of the whole story.
The heroine of The Necklace is the wife of a petty-bourgeois clerk, who has a good face and good looks, and feels that she was born to enjoy all kinds of luxurious life. She feels that she was born to enjoy all kinds of luxurious life. Thus, she is bound to be unwilling to be satisfied with the present plain life, and will eagerly aspire to the luxurious enjoyment of the high society. So, Maupassant arranged the Minister of Education, Georges Romponneau and Mrs. party, used to meet Mathilde's vanity, but also led to a series of stories.