Journal One- The Jewelry

The story, The Jewelry by Guy De Maupassant, is about a man named M. Lantin who is a cheif clerk at an office. M. Lantin has a wife; though, her name is never mentioned. You can tell that M. Lantin is in love with his wife, especially when they first met at the superintendent's office and he says that she was a girl that "seemed to be the very ideal of that pure good woman to whom every young man dreams of entrusting his future" (87).
In the beginning of the story, the aurthor talks about how much the wife of M. Lantin spent their six years together and how much she loved to go to the theater. She also had a odd love for fake jewelry. He also talked about even though she loved going out, she still continued to keep up with the household; it would even be appropriate to say that she provided him with a life of luxury. One night, though, his wife went out and came back very sick with pneumonia. Soon later, she died. M. Lantin refused to touch any of her belongings because it upset him too much.
M. Lantin began to draw away from his "life of luxury" because he could not stand to life that life any longer. The part in the story where "he saw a place and went in, and trying to sell such a trifling object"(89) was when he first realized that he was going to have to sell his wife's jewelry to survive. It was her favorite perl necklace. The jeweler's tells the man that the fake perl necklace is worth somewhere between twelve and fifteen thousand francs. M. Lantin was not pleased, so he moved to the next jewelry store. The next one he went to the jeweler told him that the necklace was real and was sold to "Madam Lantin" for 25,000 fancs. M. Lantin becomes very upset (after first leaving the necklace at the jeweler's store for inspection) because, as it implyed in the story, M. Lantin only has an average salary, and his wife brought in a lot of the income. It seems that he was betrayed by her. In his eyes, he probably saw her as something very bad and tried to cover it up by saying that the other jewelry were probably presents.
After that day, M. Lantin brought back all of his wife's jewelry and sold it to the store and happily quit his job.
Something very ironic about this story is that he set up a story and talked about how much a man loved a woman and was so upset when she died. Then when he finds out that their entire life together was a lie, he has not problem doing anything decieving (such as selling her favorite jewelry) to make a nice, rich living for himself. But, in the end, he still ended up miserable because he married a woman with a bad temper.


Work cited

Booth, Alison, and Kelly J. Mays. "The Jewelry." The Norton Introduction to Literature. 10th ed. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2010. 87-92. Print.