The Necklace Change

In the short story The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant, Mme. Loisel made a bad choice when she chose to not tell Mme. Forester that she had lost her necklace. This choice abruptly changed her lifestyle for the worse. Had Mme. Loisel went to Mme. Forester and told her the truth, she would have known that the necklace she lost was in fact a replica. Instead she and her husband began working to pay back the new real replacement they bought. Sadly, “...this life lasted ten years” (Maupassant 6). Essentially, Mme. Loisel and her husband, M. Loisel, wiped out their entire lifestyle of middle class comfort and demoted themselves to multiple low wage, laborious jobs in order to pay debt for an item that was in reality 72 times cheaper, hence it being a replica.
The fact of the matter is that Mme. Loisel had different personal values. Instead of being worried about honesty in this situation, her primary concern was her public image. To further expound on this, there are two different levels where this can be seen. First, she was concerned with the public image regarding how she looked at the palace to begin with, explaining why she borrowed the necklace in the first place. The other aspect of this was her willingness to not be known as the person who lost a valuable item and cannot be trusted with them. The one problem with this was that the item was not even valuable to begin with, but she did not know that. The effects of this pivotal mistake did not stop there. When Mme. Loisel encountered Mme. Forester on a street many years later, Mme. Forester could not even recognize her. It was to the point that Mme. Forester questioned, “‘But--madam--I don’t know--are you not making a mistake?’