aupassant 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