The Necklace

Reference : The Star

The short story
Below is a summary of the short story “The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant
“The Necklace” tells the story of a nineteenth-century middle-class French couple, Monsieur and Madame Mathilde Loisel. She spends a lot of time imagining herself in wealthy settings, hosting and attending high society gatherings.
Monsieur Loisel is a clerk in the Ministry of Public Instruction. He manages to obtain an invitation to an official dance at the Ministry. Madame Loisel is distraught because she has no suitable dress or jewellery for the dance.
The clerk sacrifices his savings to buy her a dress and suggests that she borrow some jewellery from her old friend, Madame Jeanne Forestier. Accordingly, Madame Loisel borrows a beautiful diamond necklace from her.
She has a wonderful time until the early hours of the morning. When the couple returns home, they discover that the necklace is missing.
Unable to bear the shame of informing Madame Forestier, Monsieur and Madame Loisel decide to buy an identical diamond necklace from the Palais Royal as a replacement. The cost is extravagant - 36,000 francs - a fortune at the time. Monsieur Loisel spends his entire inheritance and life savings, 18,000 francs left to him by his father, and incurs heavy debts by asking usurers for loans to buy the replacement. They do not inform Madame Forestier of the change and spend the next 10 years of their lives paying off the debts. Both Monsieur and Madame Loisel are forced to take on extra jobs and live in abject poverty. In time, the Madame comes to empathise with those she once looked down upon with disdain.
At the end of the 10 years, Madame Loisel, now older, tougher, more worn and less graceful from years of hard manual labour - but immensely proud €” has an opportunity to tell her old friend of the lost necklace. Madame Forestier is shocked and informs Madame Loisel that her original necklace was, in fact, an imitation, “...worth 500 francs at the most!”
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Necklace
Now, see if you can answer the questions based on this excerpt taken from “The Necklace”.
“What do you mean? You brought it back.”
“I brought you back another exactly like it. And it has taken us 10 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 Forrstier had stopped.
“You say that you bought a necklace of diamonds to replace mine?”
“Yes. You never noticed it then! They were very similar.”
a. How long did it take the Loisels to settle their debts?
Ten years. (1 mark)
b. How did Mathilde feel after having settled the debts?
Glad. (1 mark)
c. Why didn’t Madame Forrestier notice that the necklace given to her was a diamond necklace?
It was very similar to the lost one. (1 mark)
d. If you were Mathilde, what would you have done when you discovered that the lost necklace was worth only 500 francs? Give a reason for your answer.
I would have screamed in anger because of the unnecessary suffering and debts incurred or I would have just blamed myself for it. If I had told Madame Forrestier the truth in the beginning, I would not have had to borrow 36,000 francs. (2 marks)
Remember the answers to the first three questions can be found in the extract. Only the fourth question requires some interpretation on your part.