s accounts, and late
at night he often copied manuscript for five sous a page.

This life lasted ten years.

At the end of ten years they had paid everything, everything, with the
rates of usury and the accumulations of the compound interest.

Madame Loisel looked old now. She had become the woman of impoverished
households--strong and hard and rough. With frowsy hair, skirts
askew and red hands, she talked loud while washing the floor with great
swishes of water. But sometimes, when her husband was at the office, she
sat down near the window and she thought of that gay evening of long ago,
of that ball where 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 and changeful is life! How small a thing is needed
to make or ruin us!

But one Sunday, having gone to take a walk in the Champs Elysees to
refresh herself after the labors of the week, she suddenly perceived a
woman who was leading a child. It was Madame Forestier, still young,
still beautiful, still charming.

Madame Loisel felt moved. Should she speak to her? Yes, certainly. And
now that she had paid, she would tell her all about it. Why not?

She went up.

"Good-day, Jeanne."

The other, astonished to be familiarly addressed by this plain good-wife,
did not recognize her at all and stammered:

"But--madame!--I do not know--You must have mistaken."

"No. I am Mathilde Loisel."

Her friend uttered a cry.

"Oh, my poor Mathilde! How you are changed!"

"Yes, I have had a pretty hard life, since I last saw you, and great
poverty--and that because of you!"

"Of me! How so?"

"Do you remember that diamond necklace you lent me to wear at the
ministerial ball?"

"Yes. Well?"

"Well, I lost it."

"What do you mean? You brought it back."

"I brought you back another exactly like it. And it has taken us ten
years to pay for it. You can understand that it was not easy for us, for
us who had nothing. At last it is ended, and I am very glad."

Madame Forestier had stopped.

"You say that you bought a necklace of diamonds to replace mine?"

"Yes. You never noticed it, then! They were very similar."

And she smiled with a joy that was at once proud and ingenuous.

Madame Forestier, deeply moved, took her hands.

"Oh, my poor Mathilde! Why, my necklace was paste! It was worth at most
only five hundred francs!"

THE MARQUIS DE FUMEROL

Roger de Tournev