August Strindberg

Johan August Strindberg, the foremost Swedish playwright and a major influence on modern drama, was born in Stockholm on January 22, 1840, the son of a shipping merchant and his former servant. His father died when the boy was four, and his mother when he was thirteen. He entered Upsala University to study medicine, but after failing an intermediate exam, became an actor at the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm. A failure at acting, he turned to writing, returning to Upsala to study modern languages and political science. In 1870 his fourth play, a one-act, “In Rome” was performed at the Royal Theater. Leaving the university, he became a journalist and then, for eight years, a librarian at the Royal Library in Stockholm. While in this post, he met Baron Carl Gustaf Wrangel and his wife, Finnish actress Siri von Essen. Siri and Strindberg fell in love and married in 1877. Although successful as a novelist, Strindberg continued to struggle as a playwright, with his works rejected by producers or, if staged, by critics. He and his family then lived abroad for six years, while he continued to write, not plays, but short stories, novels, and poems. His collection of short stories titled “Marriage” led to his prosecution for blasphemy in 1884. At his trial in Sweden he was acquitted, but the theme of marriage continued to dominate his most successful and best-known plays which followed: “The Father” and “The Dance of Death.” Rejected by theaters in Sweden, “The Father” premiered in Copenhagen in November 1887, at which time the author’s troubled marriage was on the rocks. He was enraged at the plays of his successful contemporary, Ibsen, who took up the feminist cause in “A Doll’s House ‘ in 1881. To the Danish translator, he wrote of the Captain in ”The Father,” to suggest “that the Captain . . . conscious of his superiority, goes loftily and cynically, almost joyfully to meet his fate, wrapping himself in death as in a spider’s web which he is impotent to tear asunder. . . .”He symbolizes for me a masculinity which people have tried to pound or wheedle out of us and transfer to the third sex! It is only when he is with the woman [his wife, Laura] that he is unmanly, because that is how she wants him, and the law of adaptation forces us to play the role that our sexual partner demands.” The play was praised by the critics, and Strindberg unexpectedly found himself declared a genius and invited to present the play in Stockholm. He wrote to the Swedish director, “Act the play as Lindberg [a leading actor] acted Ibsen, i.e. not tragedy, not comedy, but somewhere midway between.” In “The Father,” Laura inadvertently leads her husband, the Captain, to believe that he is not the father of their daughter, Bertha. As the Captain is unwell (Laura has suggested to the doctor that her husband is not in his right mind) he breaks down and weeps despite her swearing that he is the father. He asks for her pity: “I who, in the barracks among the soldiers, issued commands, was, with you, the one who obeyed; I grew up at your side, looked up to you as though to a superior being, listened to you as though I was your innocent child.” When Laura replies, “I loved you as my child,” the Captain confesses: “I thought you despised my lack of masculinity, and I wanted to win you as a woman by being a man.” Laura says, “That was where you made your mistake. The mother was your friend, you see, but the woman was your enemy. Love between man and woman is war.” The Captain, after threatening to shoot Bertha, is placed in a straitjacket brought by the doctor. As he suffers a stroke, Bertha runs to her mother, crying, “Mother, mother!” The play ends with Laura saying, “My child! My child.” In “Miss Julie,” the man is the dominant character in the sexual liaison between an aristocratic young woman and her father’s valet, Jean. On midsummer night, celebrated by the servants with romancing, dancing, and singing (heard offstage), Miss Julie wanders into the kitchen of her father, the Count, to encounter Jean, and the banter between them, in which she flirts with him and orders him about, soon becomes serious and erotic. When they withdraw to consummate a sexual encounter, the ballet of peasants dances in, singing a suggestive song. As Julie and Jean re-enter, the relationship has changed; Jean takes charge. They will elope and open a hotel – if she can find the money. But she has none. Shamed, Julie now begs Jean to take her away, becomes increasingly hysterical as he refuses, puts on her traveling outfit to run away, bringing her canary, which Jean kills. “I can’t repent, can’t run away, can’t stay, can’t live—can’t die. Help me! Order me and I’ll obey you,” she cries. He whispers to her, gives her a razor, she departs to the barn as the Count rings the bell for Jean, who “cringes, then straightens himself up: ‘It’s horrible. But it’s the only possible ending. Go!’” By the time he wrote “The Dance of Death,” Strindberg was married to his second wife, Harriet Bosse, and the theme is similar to that of “The Father,” the misery of marriage. To this is added the theme of facing death, to which Edgar responds with fierce denial. Here the characterization is much more assured than that of the earlier play, and the themes strike home more sharply. Strindberg’s married couple -- Captain Edgar and former actress Alice are stage creations irresistible to leading actors, and most recently, on Broadway, Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren proved that this classic work is great universal theater. Living on a remote island outpost on the coast of Sweden, the Captain and his wife, self-isolated from the other inhabitants because of Edgar’s nasty temper, are at war with each other, as they have been for twenty-five years of bickering, insulting parry-and-thrust. Even a card game is a combat, as Edgar enters the score in a notebook filled with tallies of the past. When not at cards, each delights in scoring verbally: “I suppose you’re attractive – to other people,” says Mr. McKellen, adding with perfect timing: “when it suits you.” When the last of a long line of servants walks out on them, Ms. Mirren pointedly describes her husband: “You are a despot with the character of a slave.” Like Albee’s George and Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” a play greatly influenced by Strindberg (a debt Albee acknowledges), Edgar and Alice thrive on conflict. They have sent their children away to school, ostensibly because of the harmful atmosphere of the tower (a former prison) in which they live, giving them “an ashen inmate look,” but probably because they want the arena of combat to themselves. For this production, Santo Loquasto designed an impressive setting – the curved brick of the dark fortress tower thrusting onto the stage. Playwright Richard Greenberg’s translation was taut and colloquial. When Alice’s cousin Kurt arrives as the newly-appointed quarantine officer, it is not long before he is drawn into the battle, forced to take one side and then the other, as Edgar and Alice present opposing views of the other half. Kurt also provides an audience for former actress Alice, costuming herself for conquest of the new arrival, whom she proceeds to seduce. Believing Kurt to be on her side, Edgar goes into town, returning to announce that as he is dying and has changed his will to exclude Alice, who meanwhile has been charging him with embezzlement of the regiment’s funds and hoping for his court martial. Except for the dying, his report is untrue. The most memorable of many such scenes takes place when Mr. McKellen as the Captain performs for Kurt his dance of the boyars while Alice plays the piano. It is indeed a “dance of death,” a heroic defiance of the end that he knows awaits, yet a determination to fight against it as long as he can. There is a Part Two to this play, which is seldom performed. It involves Kurt’s son Allan and the Captain’s beloved daughter Judith. “The Stronger” is the most popular of Strindberg’s one-act plays, written in 1889 for his projected Experiment Theater in Copenhagen, based on Antoine’s Theatre Libre in Paris, where many of Strindberg’s plays, considered experimental in their day, were performed. At the time of composing the work, he was having an affair with seventeen-year-old Martha Hansen, plus other relationships with at least two actresses. His wife Siri stood by him as he returned to her after each affair. He offered her the character of Madam X, which she turned down at first but then accepted. Obviously, he considered Siri the “stronger” in real life. The two characters in the play are Madam X, a married actress, and Mademoiselle Y, an unmarried actress. Only Madam X speaks. The two meet in a café. Madam X enters and greets Mademoiselle Y, who is seated at a table with a bottle of beer, reading a magazine: “Why Amelia darling! Fancy seeing you here! All alone on Christmas Eve, like a poor old bachelor!” Madam X continues her monologue, advising Y that she should have married a year ago, and displaying from the basket she carries the toys she has bought for her children. She speaks of her own marriage, recalling how Y had come to their home, how she became suspicious of Y, finally revealing that she knew of the affair between her husband and Y: “I hate you, hate you, hate you! But you – you just sit there, silent, calm, not caring—not caring whether it’s night or day, summer or winter, whether other people are happy or miserable—unable to hate and unable to love—motionless like a stork over a rat-hole.” At the end, Madam X thanks her protagonist, “Thank you, Amelia, for all the good lessons you’ve taught me. Thank you for teaching my husband to love! Now I am going home, to love him.” She goes. When they were written in 1907-08, “The Ghost Sonata” and “A Dream Play” were considered experimental works, although they have had had commercial success since. At the time Strindberg was living alone in a suburb of Stockholm in the apartment he had previously shared with Harriet Bosse and their daughter, Anne-Marie. He was suffering from the skin disease psoriasis and from the first symptoms of the stomach cancer from which he would die in five years. Writing of the former work to his German translator, Strindberg describes it as having ”the wisdom that comes with age, as our knowledge increases and we learn to understand. This is how ‘The Weaver’ weaves men’s destinies: secrets like these are to be found in every home. People are too proud to admit it; most of them boast of their imagined luck, and hide their misery.” Of “The Dream Play,” he wrote that he “attempted to imitate the inconsequent yet transparently logical shape of a dream. Everything can happen, everything is possible and probable….The characters split, double, multiply, evaporate, condense, disperse, assemble. But one consciousness rules over them all, that of the dreamer.” Strindberg wrote seven more plays after these two, his last being “The Great Highway.” In 1910 his experimental Intimate Theater failed, after which he spent the last three years of his life writing pamphlets on politics, sociology, and philology. He died of cancer on May 14, 1912, at the age of sixty-three. Strindberg wrote sixty-two plays. These, together with his novels, essays, short stories, memoirs, poems, and theses on science, philosophy and philology fill over fifty volumes. He wrote both expressionistic works, like “The Dream Play,” and naturalistic plays like “Miss Julie”. In the latter, considered experimental in his day, he perfected a type of dialogue that was far from realistic, being terse and fragmentary, colloquial prose that could also be poetic and symbolic. In plumbing the psychological depths of his characters, he was a forerunner of modern drama. Eugene O’Neill, whose “Long Day’s Journey into Night” had its world premiere at Sweden’s Royal Theatre, acknowledged Strindberg’s influence, as did Harold Pinter, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee.

The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin

Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband's death. It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Her husband's friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently Mallard's name leading the list of "killed." He had only taken the time to assure himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message. She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister's arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her. There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul. She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which some one was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves. There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met and piled one above the other in the west facing her window. She sat with her head thrown back upon the cushion of the chair, quite motionless, except when a sob came up into her throat and shook her, as a child who has cried itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams. < 2 > She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off yonder on one of those patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of intelligent thought. There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air. Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. She was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will - as powerless as her two white slender hands would have been. When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under her breath: "free, free, free!" The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body. She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial. She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome. There would be no one to live for during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination. < 3 > And yet she had loved him - sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being! "Free! Body and soul free!" she kept whispering. Josephine was kneeling before the closed door with her lips to the keyhole, imploring for admission. "Louise, open the door! I beg, open the door - you will make yourself ill. What are you doing Louise? For heaven's sake open the door." "Go away. I am not making myself ill." No; she was drinking in a very elixir of life through that open window. Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long. She arose at length and opened the door to her sister's importunities. There was a feverish triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory. She clasped her sister's waist, and together they descended the stairs. Richards stood waiting for them at the bottom. Some one was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard who entered, a little travel-stained, composedly carrying his grip-sack and umbrella. He had been far from the scene of accident, and did not even know there had been one. He stood amazed at Josephine's piercing cry; at Richards' quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife. But Richards was too late. When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease - of joy that kills.

The Necklace

She was one of those pretty and charming girls born, as though fate had blundered over her, into a family of artisans. She had no marriage portion, no expectations, no means of getting known, understood, loved, and wedded by a man of wealth and distinction; and she let herself be married off to a little clerk in the Ministry of Education. Her tastes were simple because she had never been able to afford any other, but she was as unhappy as though she had married beneath her; for women have no caste or class, their beauty, grace, and charm serving them for birth or family, their natural delicacy, their instinctive elegance, their nimbleness of wit, are their only mark of rank, and put the slum girl on a level with the highest lady in the land. She suffered endlessly, feeling herself born for every delicacy and luxury. She suffered from the poorness of her house, from its mean walls, worn chairs, and ugly curtains. All these things, of which other women of her class would not even have been aware, tormented and insulted her. The sight of the little Breton girl who came to do the work in her little house aroused heart-broken regrets and hopeless dreams in her mind. She imagined silent antechambers, heavy with Oriental tapestries, lit by torches in lofty bronze sockets, with two tall footmen in knee-breeches sleeping in large arm-chairs, overcome by the heavy warmth of the stove. She imagined vast saloons hung with antique silks, exquisite pieces of furniture supporting priceless ornaments, and small, charming, perfumed rooms, created just for little parties of intimate friends, men who were famous and sought after, whose homage roused every other woman's envious longings. When she sat down for dinner at the round table covered with a three-days-old cloth, opposite her husband, who took the cover off the soup-tureen, exclaiming delightedly: "Aha! Scotch broth! What could be better?" she imagined delicate meals, gleaming silver, tapestries peopling the walls with folk of a past age and strange birds in faery forests; she imagined delicate food served in marvellous dishes, murmured gallantries, listened to with an inscrutable smile as one trifled with the rosy flesh of trout or wings of asparagus chicken. < 2 > She had no clothes, no jewels, nothing. And these were the only things she loved; she felt that she was made for them. She had longed so eagerly to charm, to be desired, to be wildly attractive and sought after. She had a rich friend, an old school friend whom she refused to visit, because she suffered so keenly when she returned home. She would weep whole days, with grief, regret, despair, and misery. * One evening her husband came home with an exultant air, holding a large envelope in his hand. "Here's something for you," he said. Swiftly she tore the paper and drew out a printed card on which were these words: "The Minister of Education and Madame Ramponneau request the pleasure of the company of Monsieur and Madame Loisel at the Ministry on the evening of Monday, January the 18th." Instead of being delighted, as her husband hoped, she flung the invitation petulantly across the table, murmuring: "What do you want me to do with this?" "Why, darling, I thought you'd be pleased. You never go out, and this is a great occasion. I had tremendous trouble to get it. Every one wants one; it's very select, and very few go to the clerks. You'll see all the really big people there." She looked at him out of furious eyes, and said impatiently: "And what do you suppose I am to wear at such an affair?" He had not thought about it; he stammered: "Why, the dress you go to the theatre in. It looks very nice, to me . . ." He stopped, stupefied and utterly at a loss when he saw that his wife was beginning to cry. Two large tears ran slowly down from the corners of her eyes towards the corners of her mouth. < 3 > "What's the matter with you? What's the matter with you?" he faltered. But with a violent effort she overcame her grief and replied in a calm voice, wiping her wet cheeks: "Nothing. Only I haven't a dress and so I can't go to this party. Give your invitation to some friend of yours whose wife will be turned out better than I shall." He was heart-broken. "Look here, Mathilde," he persisted. "What would be the cost of a suitable dress, which you could use on other occasions as well, something very simple?" She thought for several seconds, reckoning up prices and also wondering for how large a sum she could ask without bringing upon herself an immediate refusal and an exclamation of horror from the careful-minded clerk. At last she replied with some hesitation: "I don't know exactly, but I think I could do it on four hundred francs." He grew slightly pale, for this was exactly the amount he had been saving for a gun, intending to get a little shooting next summer on the plain of Nanterre with some friends who went lark-shooting there on Sundays. Nevertheless he said: "Very well. I'll give you four hundred francs. But try and get a really nice dress with the money." The day of the party drew near, and Madame Loisel seemed sad, uneasy and anxious. Her dress was ready, however. One evening her husband said to her: "What's the matter with you? You've been very odd for the last three days." "I'm utterly miserable at not having any jewels, not a single stone, to wear," she replied. "I shall look absolutely no one. I would almost rather not go to the party." < 4 > "Wear flowers," he said. "They're very smart at this time of the year. For ten francs you could get two or three gorgeous roses." She was not convinced. "No . . . there's nothing so humiliating as looking poor in the middle of a lot of rich women." "How stupid you are!" exclaimed her husband. "Go and see Madame Forestier and ask her to lend you some jewels. You know her quite well enough for that." She uttered a cry of delight. "That's true. I never thought of it." Next day she went to see her friend and told her her trouble. Madame Forestier went to her dressing-table, took up a large box, brought it to Madame Loisel, opened it, and said: "Choose, my dear." First she saw some bracelets, then a pearl necklace, then a Venetian cross in gold and gems, of exquisite workmanship. She tried the effect of the jewels before the mirror, hesitating, unable to make up her mind to leave them, to give them up. She kept on asking: "Haven't you anything else?" "Yes. Look for yourself. I don't know what you would like best." Suddenly she discovered, in a black satin case, a superb diamond necklace; her heart began to beat covetously. Her hands trembled as she lifted it. She fastened it round her neck, upon her high dress, and remained in ecstasy at sight of herself. Then, with hesitation, she asked in anguish: "Could you lend me this, just this alone?" "Yes, of course." She flung herself on her friend's breast, embraced her frenziedly, and went away with her treasure. The day of the party arrived. Madame Loisel was a success. She was the prettiest woman present, elegant, graceful, smiling, and quite above herself with happiness. All the men stared at her, inquired her name, and asked to be introduced to her. All the Under-Secretaries of State were eager to waltz with her. The Minister noticed her. < 5 > She danced madly, ecstatically, drunk with pleasure, with no thought for anything, in the triumph of her beauty, in the pride of her success, in a cloud of happiness made up of this universal homage and admiration, of the desires she had aroused, of the completeness of a victory so dear to her feminine heart. She left about four o'clock in the morning. Since midnight her husband had been dozing in a deserted little room, in company with three other men whose wives were having a good time. He threw over her shoulders the garments he had brought for them to go home in, modest everyday clothes, whose poverty clashed with the beauty of the ball-dress. She was conscious of this and was anxious to hurry away, so that she should not be noticed by the other women putting on their costly furs. Loisel restrained her. "Wait a little. You'll catch cold in the open. I'm going to fetch a cab." But she did not listen to him and rapidly descended the staircase. When they were out in the street they could not find a cab; they began to look for one, shouting at the drivers whom they saw passing in the distance. They walked down towards the Seine, desperate and shivering. At last they found on the quay one of those old nightprowling carriages which are only to be seen in Paris after dark, as though they were ashamed of their shabbiness in the daylight. It brought them to their door in the Rue des Martyrs, and sadly they walked up to their own apartment. It was the end, for her. As for him, he was thinking that he must be at the office at ten. She took off the garments in which she had wrapped her shoulders, so as to see herself in all her glory before the mirror. But suddenly she uttered a cry. The necklace was no longer round her neck! < 6 > "What's the matter with you?" asked her husband, already half undressed. She turned towards him in the utmost distress. "I . . . I . . . I've no longer got Madame Forestier's necklace. . . ." He started with astonishment. "What! . . . Impossible!" They searched in the folds of her dress, in the folds of the coat, in the pockets, everywhere. They could not find it. "Are you sure that you still had it on when you came away from the ball?" he asked. "Yes, I touched it in the hall at the Ministry." "But if you had lost it in the street, we should have heard it fall." "Yes. Probably we should. Did you take the number of the cab?" "No. You didn't notice it, did you?" "No." They stared at one another, dumbfounded. At last Loisel put on his clothes again. "I'll go over all the ground we walked," he said, "and see if I can't find it." And he went out. She remained in her evening clothes, lacking strength to get into bed, huddled on a chair, without volition or power of thought. Her husband returned about seven. He had found nothing. He went to the police station, to the newspapers, to offer a reward, to the cab companies, everywhere that a ray of hope impelled him. She waited all day long, in the same state of bewilderment at this fearful catastrophe. Loisel came home at night, his face lined and pale; he had discovered nothing. < 7 > "You must write to your friend," he said, "and tell her that you've broken the clasp of her necklace and are getting it mended. That will give us time to look about us." She wrote at his dictation. * By the end of a week they had lost all hope. Loisel, who had aged five years, declared: "We must see about replacing the diamonds." Next day they took the box which had held the necklace and went to the jewellers whose name was inside. He consulted his books. "It was not I who sold this necklace, Madame; I must have merely supplied the clasp." Then they went from jeweller to jeweller, searching for another necklace like the first, consulting their memories, both ill with remorse and anguish of mind. In a shop at the Palais-Royal they found a string of diamonds which seemed to them exactly like the one they were looking for. It was worth forty thousand francs. They were allowed to have it for thirty-six thousand. They begged the jeweller not to sell it for three days. And they arranged matters on the understanding that it would be taken back for thirty-four thousand francs, if the first one were found before the end of February. Loisel possessed eighteen thousand francs left to him by his father. He intended to borrow the rest. He did borrow it, getting a thousand from one man, five hundred from another, five louis here, three louis there. He gave notes of hand, entered into ruinous agreements, did business with usurers and the whole tribe of money-lenders. He mortgaged the whole remaining years of his existence, risked his signature without even knowing if he could honour it, and, appalled at the agonising face of the future, at the black misery about to fall upon him, at the prospect of every possible physical privation and moral torture, he went to get the new necklace and put down upon the jeweller's counter thirty-six thousand francs. < 8 > When Madame Loisel took back the necklace to Madame Forestier, the latter said to her in a chilly voice: "You ought to have brought it back sooner; I might have needed it." She did not, as her friend had feared, open the case. If she had noticed the substitution, what would she have thought? What would she have said? Would she not have taken her for a thief? * Madame Loisel came to know the ghastly life of abject poverty. From the very first she played her part heroically. This fearful debt must be paid off. She would pay it. The servant was dismissed. They changed their flat; they took a garret under the roof. She came to know the heavy work of the house, the hateful duties of the kitchen. She washed the plates, wearing out her pink nails on the coarse pottery and the bottoms of pans. She washed the dirty linen, the shirts and dish-cloths, and hung them out to dry on a string; every morning she took the dustbin down into the street and carried up the water, stopping on each landing to get her breath. And, clad like a poor woman, she went to the fruiterer, to the grocer, to the butcher, a basket on her arm, haggling, insulted, fighting for every wretched halfpenny of her money. Every month notes had to be paid off, others renewed, time gained. Her husband worked in the evenings at putting straight a merchant's accounts, and often at night he did copying at twopence-halfpenny a page. And this life lasted ten years. At the end of ten years everything was paid off, everything, the usurer's charges and the accumulation of superimposed interest. Madame Loisel looked old now. She had become like all the other strong, hard, coarse women of poor households. Her hair was badly done, her skirts were awry, her hands were red. She spoke in a shrill voice, and the water slopped all over the floor when she scrubbed it. But sometimes, when her husband was at the office, she sat down by the window and thought of that evening long ago, of the ball at which she had been so beautiful and so much admired. < 9 > What would have happened if she had never lost those jewels. Who knows? Who knows? How strange life is, how fickle! How little is needed to ruin or to save! One Sunday, as she had gone for a walk along the Champs-Elysees to freshen herself after the labours of the week, she caught sight suddenly of a woman who was taking a child out for a walk. It was Madame Forestier, still young, still beautiful, still attractive. Madame Loisel was conscious of some emotion. Should she speak to her? Yes, certainly. And now that she had paid, she would tell her all. Why not? She went up to her. "Good morning, Jeanne." The other did not recognise her, and was surprised at being thus familiarly addressed by a poor woman. "But . . . Madame . . ." she stammered. "I don't know . . . you must be making a mistake." "No . . . I am Mathilde Loisel." Her friend uttered a cry. "Oh! . . . my poor Mathilde, how you have changed! . . ." "Yes, I've had some hard times since I saw you last; and many sorrows . . . and all on your account." "On my account! . . . How was that?" "You remember the diamond necklace you lent me for the ball at the Ministry?" "Yes. Well?" "Well, I lost it." "How could you? Why, you brought it back." "I brought you another one just like it. And for the last ten years we have been paying for it. You realise it wasn't easy for us; we had no money. . . . Well, it's paid for at last, and I'm glad indeed." < 10 > Madame Forestier had halted. "You say you bought a diamond necklace to replace mine?" "Yes. You hadn't noticed it? They were very much alike." And she smiled in proud and innocent happiness. Madame Forestier, deeply moved, took her two hands. "Oh, my poor Mathilde! But mine was imitation. It was worth at the very most five hundred francs! . . . "