TWO STORIES OF GUY DE MAUPASSANT

C. Sadasivan

Groomed by Gustave Flaubert the great nineteenth century French novelist, Guy de Maupassant burgeoned and blossomed out into one of the finest writers of short stories in world literature. The following article compares two of his well-known tales.

In terms of plot, character, situation, setting and incident, Maupassants short story, Happiness affords a stark contrast to that of The Necklace. Both manifest the maxim that character is indeed destiny. The plots of these two stories play with the interlocking outcome of the emotional and economic environment of two very comely females - Mathilde Loisel in The Necklace and Suzanne de Sirmont in Happiness in the wake and aftermath of their getting married.

Suzanne, in Happiness is a rich and beautiful girl who runs away from mainland France with a good-looking boy of peasant parentage to the desolate island of Corsica. In thus marrying beneath her class she makes light of the prospect of a life-time of grinding poverty. It is a typical situation of mis-alliance, economically disastrous but emotionally enriching and ennobling...

The Necklace is designed as “a nook of life visualized through a temperament.” Mathilde Loisel “was one of those pretty and charming young girls who sometimes are born, as if by a slip of fate, into a family of clerks.” Her scope sadly circumscribed “she let herself be married to a little clerk of the Ministry of Public Instruction.”

At the very outset Maupassant portrays the character and context that admirably set the tone and texture of the story: “with women there is neither caste nor rank, for beauty; grace and charm take the place of birth and breeding” Mathilde is forever dreaming of a chance “to prove herself the equal of the very greatest ladies, “and constantly bewailing her utter lack of wealth.

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. She had a friend, a former school mate at the convent, who was rich, and whom she did not like to go to see any more because she felt so sad when she came home.

The plot thickens when Mathilde’s husband Mr. Loisel, comes home from office one evening faulting an invitation for a party thrown by the Minister of Public Instruction. He assuages his wife’s bitter misgiving in not being properly equipped thereto by buying her an expensive gown and suggesting that she borrow some jewellery for the ball from her rich intimate schoolmate, Mme, Forestier. No sooner said than done!

Among other equisite ornaments her eyes lighted on a superb diamond necklace and “her heart throbbed with an immoderate desire. Her hands trembled as she took it. She fastened it round her throat and was lost in ecstasy at her reflection in the mirror. Then she asked, hesitating, filled with anxious doubt: Will you lend me this, only this? and her friend graciously assented.

To be sure Mme Loisel was the great hit of the party:

She was prettier than any other woman present, elegant, graceful, smiling with joy. All the men looked at her, asked her name, sought to be introduced. All the attaches of the Cabinet wished to waltz with her. She was remarked by the Minister himself. She danced with rapture, with passion, intoxicated by pleasure, forgetting all in the triumph of her beauty, in the glory of her success.

Then came the climax, the turning point of the drama. After the show, in the wee hours of the morning, Mathilde became acutely self-conscious of the glaring contrast her modest wraps of common life made with the elegance of her ball dress. Hence she fled the scene “so as not to be remarked by the other women who were enveloping themselves in costly furs”.

In the scramble she descended the stairs, rushed into the streets (followed by the flustered husband), walked towards the Seine (river) in the shivering cold and at last found an ancient cab on the quay. Reaching home, Mathilde removed the wraps in front of the minor to see herself one last time in all her glory. She uttered a heart-rendering cry.

Her necklace was missing.

Her distraught husband rushed back, on foot, the way they came, searching here, there, everywhere for the fallen necklace but to no avail. “He went to police headquarters, to the newspaper offices, to offer a reward, he went to the cab companies” in vain. Frustrated, they finally repaired to the jewellers. A similar diamond necklace cost 40000 francs but could be had at a discount (36000 francs).

Mr. Loisel had 18000 francs left by his father, the rest he borrowed, pledged right, left and centre. In three days, aging five years, he bought the necklace and his wife duly returned it to her friend. They had to slog for ten long years to repay the debts incurred in getting the diamond necklace replaced.

They dismissed their servant, they changed their lodging, they rented a garret under the roof...Her husband worked in the evenings making up trade man s accounts, and late at night he often copied manuscripts for five sous a page……Madame Loisel looked old now. She had become the woman of impoverished households - strong and hard and rough. What would have happened if she had not lost her necklace? who knows? who knows? How strange and changeful is life! How small a thing is needed to make or ruin us!

One Sunday evening while walking in the Champs Elysees, she suddenly saw Mme Forestier, still young, still beautiful, still charming leading a child She accosted her school mate who hardly recognized Mathilde. “Oh, how you are changed”! “Yes I have had a hard life, since I last saw you, and great poverty and all because of you”.

Then she told Mme. Forestier the whole story, the decade long uphill struggle to redeem the heavy debts incurred in buying the diamond necklace in replacement of the lost one.

“Oh my poor Mathilde! why, my necklace was paste (imitation) it was worth at most only five hundred francs!”

The crucial incident of the loss of the necklace is the fulcrum of the plot, with the ironical twist in the denouement of this most remarkable short story in all literature.

There is hardly any complexity of plot in Happiness. It is a straightforward love story but the way it is rendered makes it a master piece of narrative art.

It was tea-time in the villa that overlooked the Mediterranean Sea. In the twilight members of the group were talking tenderly about the perennial subject, Love - reconizing distinctions of the degree, setting down limits, bringing forward example and generally puzzling out the question whether that universal passion is transient, evanescent, or enduring. Suddenly someone staring out of the window, shouted, “Look over there. What is it?” Someone said: “It is Corsica. It can be seen like this two or three times a year, in certain exceptional conditions, when the air is perfectly clear, and it is no longer hidden by those sea-mists which always veil the distance.”

And thereby hangs this tale, told by an old man, speaking for the first time to the company present, as if pat in answer to the question raised. Five years back the wiry gentleman had taken a trip to Corsica, wandering for a month through the wilds of the magnificent and barbaric island inhabited by “half-civilized races, easily moved to anger, malicious, thoughtlessly cruel, yet hospitable, generous, loyal, simple-minded, opening the door to the passer-by, and giving his faithful friendship in exchange for the smallest mark of sympathy”.

One evening, after a ten-hour tramp, the die-hard trekker reached a lonely little house. A stern, old, and exceptionally clean woman answered the knock. Inside, an old man, rose up from a chair, greeted him and sat down again without saying a word. “Excuse him,” the woman explained in excellent French, “he is deaf now, he is eighty-two”. She further clarified that they the couple were from metropolitan France, “but have been here for fifty years”.

After partaking dinner (a simple one dish fare - a thick soup of potatoes, bacon and cabbage) the traveller moved over the threshold of the cottage. Overcome by the gloomy atmosphere, he sat brooding over the futility of existence. Soon the old woman joined the unsolicited guest and, out of simple curiosity, asked his domicile. An extraordinary agitation shook her when he replied, “From Nancy”. That being her place of provenance she inquired of many families, notably the Saint-Allaizes, Brismares, and finally the Sirmonts. The traveller was wonderstruck when the poor old hostess distressfully confided that General Henri de Sirmont happened to be her own brother!

The story-teller recalled the great scandal five decades ago, when the beautiful high society girl eloped with her young handsome Lochinvar, the lowly non-commissioned officer in her father’s regiment. The intrepid young lovers were hunted high and low but could not be traced and were given up as dead. And now the traveller found the then Mademoiselle Suzanne in this god forsaken place. “That is he!” the ageing Suzanne pointed out. “I knew then that she was still loving him, and that she still was the enticing light of bygone days in his eyes”. In a voice straight from her heart she affirmed that he had made her “very, happy” and that she “never had a single regret.”

This rich girl had followed this man, this peasant. Herself had become a peasant. She had fashioned for herself a life like this, devoid of grace, of luxury of any kind of daintiness, and had trained to become accustomed to his simple habits. And she still loved him!...She slept on a straw mattress at his side, she had never thought of anything but him. She had never regretted her jewels, her fine clothes, the softness of chairs, the scent of warm rooms, with their tapestries, or the delicious comfort of a feather-bed. She had never needed anything but him; as long as he was there, she desired nothing else.

Quite young, she had given up life, society, and those who had brought her up and loved her. She had come, alone with him, to this wild valley. He had been everything to her, everything that one desires, everything that one dreams of, everything that one is always for always hoping for. From beginning to end he had filled her life with happiness. She could not have been happier.

All night, as I listened to the hoarse breathing of the old soldier in his pallet beside her who had followed him so far, I thought of this strange and simple adventure, of this happiness, which was so complete yet made up of so little.

At day break I left the house, after shaking the hands of the old couple.

As the story teller finished, “Away on the horizon Corsica buried itself in the darkness, disappearing slowly in the sea, from which it had risen as if by itself to tell the story of the two humble lovers whom its shores had sheltered.”

Poverty is the common ground underpinning the post-material lives of the two lovely lasses. Scarcity being the essence of value, Mathilde is the weaker vessel; Suzanne the stronger woman. Economics gives way and yields place to the force of love in Happiness whereas in The Necklace material lowliness makes Mathilde pine for what is not, aspiring for a slice of aristocratic life, if only for a day. For once Mathilde’s face is her fortune; she walks in beauty, dances in ecstasy, becomes the Queen Bee, the prima donna of the party. Unfortunately, she pays a heavy price for her one-night pre-emience. The deus exmachina of the plot, the loss of the borrowed ‘diamond’ necklace, sentences the Loisels for a decade of hard labour. Cinderlla’s beauty is worn out by drudgery.

A superfine understanding of feminine psychology is the hall-mark of Maupassant’s stories. The title Happiness captures the essence of the transcendence of love over material destitution; in the other, The Necklace, being the villain of the piece, hits the nail on the head as it were.

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