Before reading “The Jewelry” by Guy De Maupassant, I knew that I was going to get something out of it. Having read another of Maupassant’s works, “The Necklace”, I knew that his style was to teach us something. In “The Jewelry” a man named M. Lantin is our main character. Through the story we see the love Lantin has for his wife, the annoyance he has for her love of costume jewelry, and his grief and despair in losing her. Eventually, Lantin finds himself in debt and the first solution he thinks of is to sell his late-wife’s jewelry. He decides to do so because of many reasons, but mostly because, “he had always borne a secret grudge against the flash-jewelry” (The Norton Introduction to Literature, 89).
The next day Lantin goes to two jewelry stores to have one of his wife’s necklaces appraised. After hearing that the necklace was in fact real, Lantin brings all of his wife’s jewelry to the store in which it was originally bought, and the final sum offered was nearly 200,000 francs, nearly five years of his current salary. He sells it all, enjoying himself to fine wine, expensive meals, and going to the theater which “for the first time in his life he went…without feeling bored” (92). Six months after Lantin has come into his fortune he marries again, this time to a woman whom has a quick temper and “made his life miserable every day” (92).
What everyone can learn from this story is that money does not give happiness. When Lantin was married to his first wife love made living a poor, humble life worth it. With all of this new found wealth, Lantin lived without a care for a while, but ultimately, without love, ended his life in misery. I thoroughly enjoyed this story and the lessons we can learn from it.
Work Cited
De Maupassant, Guy. “The Jewelry”. The Norton Introduction to Literature. 10th ed. Ed. Alison Booth and Kelly J. Mays. New York: Norton, 2010. 87-92. Print.
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