"The Necklace" is a short story by Guy de Maupassant that takes place in Paris in 1884. Mathilde, the protagonist, is a woman born into a lower-middle class family, but always imagined herself as belonging to the high-class. She believed that it was an error of fate that she was born into a lower income household. Monsieur Loisel, her husband, gets tickets to a high status ball, but she is unhappy with it because she doesn't want to embarrass herself. Her husband gives her money for a new dress and Jeanne Forestier, her friend, lends her a "diamond" necklace, which was a symbol of class. To her, the necklace represented happiness. At the ball, she feels so confident and looks very fancy, but later realizes that she lost the necklace. When they are unable to find it, they replace it and work for years to pay off the loans. After a few years, she sees her friend again and tells her the truth. Forestier surprisingly reveals that the necklace was fake and only cost about 500 francs.
I do not think that Maltilde did the "right thing." When she realized that she lost the necklace, the first thing she should have done was tell her friend the truth. Then she should have offered to pay for the necklace, even though her husband and her didn't have that much money. If she told the truth instead of hiding it, she would have saved more than 35,000 francs and a lot of time. She would not have wasted 10 years in doing hard work to pay off the dept and wouldn't have lost her beauty. The moral of the story is that telling the truth is always the best option. Throughout the short story, the tone and narrative of Maltilde showed that she was ungrateful and dissatisfied with her life, which is wrong because she should have been content with it. She should have been glad that she has a husband that loves and cares for her. Her one night of glory and popularity caused a lot of pain to her family. She should not have been too obsessed to materialistic things.
