Madame Loisel comes from the type of family that Guy de
Maupassant loved to satirize: one of the petty bureaucrats of the French civil
service. She is born, "as if by an accident of fate into a family of clerks." This
family of clerks can afford no dowry and no social contacts, so the petty way of life is
perpetuated as Mathilde Loisel herself marry a civil servant. Trapped in this mediocre
life, Madame Loisel "grieved incessantly," as she feels that with her beauty, she is
meant for a better life since her beauty, charm, and grace can "take the place of birth
and breeding."
The irony is that even though she has such
beauty and feels herself meant for more, Mme. Loisel has yet the petty mentality of her
bureaucratic background and is, thus, neither able to appreciate what she does possess
in her loving husband, nor is she able to discriminate what is false from what is real
in her shortsightedness. Thus, she fails to realize that the necklace that she has lost
is mere "paste."
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