“Oh, my poor Mathilde! Why, my necklace was paste! It was worth at most only five hundred francs!”
This is the last line of what is perhaps Maupassant’s most famous story. It is an exercise in the ironic twist ending because this revelation comes after ten years of misery for the friend who had borrowed Madame Forestier’s diamond necklace, lost it and then went into great debt to buy a replacement. “The Necklace” is certainly the most well-known of Maupassant’s stories which lead to an ironic twist, but is far from the only one.
All were crowding around M. Bermutier, the judge, who was giving his opinion about the Saint-Cloud mystery. For a month this in explicable crime had been the talk of Paris. Nobody could make head or tail of it.
Although consider a literary author, Maupassant also excelled in writing within certain genre conventions. “The Hand” is a supernatural story about a disembodied hand and murder. The story is related by magistrate and so carries from the beginning a certain amount of leverage of veracity. As told, the events surrounding the murder definitely convey a sense of the uncanny and inexplicable.
“Didn’t I tell you that my explanation would not satisfy you?”
“The Hand” ends with a twist as well, but in a much different way. After listening to the story of the disembodied hand and the murder from the judge, his audience complains that he leaves things too ambiguous: there is neither explanation nor climax. They demand to know what the judge thinks happened and he eschew all supernatural properties to suggest that the answer lies in the owner of the disembodied hand being alive rather than dead. The tale winds up being a story about storytelling and listening than a mere horror story.
“I can tell you a terrible story about the Franco–Prussian war.”
Although not one of Maupassant’s most famous short stories, this opening line is particularly relevant to a significant block of his body of work. The Franco-Prussian War provides a background to a number of different stories in most of which the Prussians are depicted as particularly vile and sinister beings capable of the most inhuman of action and distressing of crimes. The line spoken here could actually be transferred intact to dozens of stories by Maupassant and act quite appropriately as an introduction to the narrative which it precedes.
I suddenly recalled the theory of a friend of mine, an observant and philosophical physician whom constant attendance in hospitals has brought into daily contact with girl-mothers and prostitutes, with all the shame and all the misery of women, of those poor women who have become the frightful prey of the wandering male with money in his pocket.
Perhaps just as many prostitutes population the short stories of Maupassant as Prussians. Prussians and prostitutes often come into contact with each other and the result is either tragedy for the prostitute or humiliation for the Prussian. This particular story does not feature a Prussian nor do a great many others. The plethora of prostitutes in the stories of Maupassant can be boiled down to the essential quality of prostitution examined here: it is a profession that has far more to do with predatory instinct and economics than sexuality.
"It doesn't soil the underwear more than other skins, this black skin?"
This was a question asked by the mother when Boitelle says that he is bringing a black woman (referred to as the Negress) home. The author's intention is reveals the naive and narrow minded views of the Boitelle's parents through humor. This also shows the racism that French people had towards black people during the time the story was written.
