Madame Louisel

         Madame Louisel is a greedy, self-absorbed woman whose thoughtless actions lead her to debt and triadic poverty.

 Married to a middle-class clerk, Madame Louisel felt as though she “…suffered endlessly, feeling herself born for every delicacy and luxury...” (82). Only when she had bought herself a nice dress, and borrowed a friend’s jeweled necklace in order to attend a ball, was she happy and content. Sometime during her carefree evening, either during the ball or after it, she had lost her friend’s necklace. Being the selfish, stubborn woman that she was, instead of letting her friend know that she had lost it, she kept it to herself and borrowed money in order to buy a new necklace to replace the old one.

         

        After 10 long, hard years of enduring hardships and labor, Madame Louisel was finally free of the necklace’s debt. Running into the friend who had lent her the necklace that ruined her life so long ago, she most likely had a heart attack when her friend told her “…Oh my poor Mathilde! But mine was an imitation. It was worth at the very most five hundred francs…” (85) and not worth half the money she had spent on the real replacement.

     

       Being the selfish woman that she is, Madame Louisel’s downfall is brought on by her greed for finery and lust for riches.