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THE Wise homestead dated back more than a century, yet it had nothing imposing about it except its site. It was a simple, glaringly white cot-tage. There was a center front door with two win-dows on each side; there was a low slant of roof, pierced by unpicturesque dormers. On the left of the house was an ell, which had formerly been used as a shoemaker’s shop, but now served as a kitchen. In the low attic of the ell was stored the shoemaker’s bench, whereon David Wise’s grandfather had sat for nearly eighty years of working days; after him his eldest son, Daniel’s father, had occupied the same hollow seat of patient toil. Daniel had sat there for twenty-odd years, then had suddenly realized both the lack of necessity and the lack of customers, since the great shoe-plant had been built down in the vil-lage. Then Daniel had retired—although he did not use that expression. Daniel said to his friends and his niece Dora that he had “quit work.” But he told himself, without the least bitterness, that work had quit him.

After Daniel had retired, his one physiological peculiarity assumed enormous proportions. It had always been with him, but steady work had held it, to a great extent, at bay. Daniel was a moral coward before physical conditions. He was as one who suffers, not so much from agony of the flesh as from agony of the mind induced thereby. Daniel was a coward before one of the simplest, most in-evitable happenings of earthly life. He was a coward before summer heat. All winter he dreaded summer. Summer poisoned the spring for him. Only during the autumn did he experience anything of peace. Summer was then over, and between him and another summer stretched the blessed perspective of winter. Then Daniel Wise drew a long breath and looked about him, and spelled out the beauty of the earth in his simple primer of understanding. Daniel had in his garden behind the house a prolific grape-vine. He ate the grapes, full of the savor of the dead sum-mer, with the gusto of a poet who can at last enjoy triumph over his enemy.

Possibly it was the vein of poetry in Daniel which made him a coward—which made him so vulnerable. During the autumn he reveled in the tints of the landscape which his sitting-room windows com-manded. There were many maples and oaks. Day by day the roofs of the houses in the village be-came more evident, as the maples shed their crimson and gold and purple rags of summer. The oaks re-mained, great shaggy masses of dark gold and burn-ing russet; later they took on soft hues, making clearer the blue firmament between the boughs. Daniel watched the autumn trees with pure delight. “He will go to-day,” he said of a flaming maple after a night of frost which had crisped the white arches of the grass in his dooryard. All day he sat and watched the maple cast its glory, and did not bother much with his simple meals. The Wise house was erected on three terraces. Always through the dry summer the grass was burned to an ugly negation of color. Later, when rain came, the grass was a brilliant green, patched with rosy sorrel and golden stars of arnica. Then later still came the diamond brilliance of the frost. So dry were the terraces in summer-time that no flowers would flourish. When Daniel’s mother had come to the house as a bride she had planted under a window a blush-rose bush, but always the blush-roses were few and covered with insects. It was not until the autumn, when it was time for the flowers to die, that the sorrel blessing of waste lands flushed rosily and the arnica showed its stars of slender threads of gold, and there might even be a slight glimpse of purple aster and a dusty spray or two of goldenrod. Then Daniel did not shrink from the sight of the terraces. In summer-time the awful negative glare of them under the afternoon sun maddened him.

In winter he often visited his brother John in the village. He was very fond of John, and John’s wife, and their only daughter, Dora. When John died, and later his wife, he would have gone to live with Dora, but she married. Then her husband also died, and Dora took up dressmaking, supporting herself and her delicate little girl-baby. Daniel adored this child. She had been named for him, although her mother had been aghast before the propo-sition. “Name a girl Daniel, uncle!” she had cried.

“She is going to have what I own after I have done with it, anyway,” declared Daniel, gazing with awe and rapture at the tiny flannel bundle in his niece’s arms. “That won’t make any difference, but I do wish you could make up your mind to call her after me, Dora.”

Dora Lee was soft-hearted. She named her girl-baby Daniel, and called her Danny, which was not, after all, so bad, and her old uncle loved the child as if she had been his own. Little Daniel—he always called her Daniel, or, rather, “Dan’l”—was the only reason for his descending into the village on summer days when the weather was hot. Daniel, when he visited the village in summer-time, wore always a green leaf inside his hat and carried an umbrella and a palm-leaf fan. This caused the village boys to shout, “Hullo, grandma!” after him. Daniel, being a little hard of hearing, was oblivious, but he would have been in any case. His whole mind was con-centrated in getting along that dusty glare of street, stopping at the store for a paper bag of candy, and finally ending in Dora’s little dark parlor, holding his beloved namesake on his knee, watching her bliss-fully suck a barley stick while he waved his palm-leaf fan. Dora would be fitting gowns in the next room. He would hear the hum of feminine chatter over strictly feminine topics. He felt very much aloof, even while holding the little girl on his knee. Daniel had never married—had never even h ad a sweet-heart. The marriageable women he had seen had not been of the type to attract a dreamer like Daniel Wise. Many of those women thought him “a little off.”

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Setting. The story is set in a Paris atmosphere of social aspiration and discontent. The background is one of studied contrasts, contrasts between the stolid contentment of a husband and the would-be luxuriousness of a wife, between what Madame Loisel had and what she wanted, between what she was and what she thought she could be, between her brief moment of triumph and the long years of her undoing, between the trivialness of what she did and the heaviness of her punishment. These contrasts are developed not by reasoning but by action, each action plunging Madame Loisel deeper and deeper into misery. The author’s attitude toward his work forms also a part of the real background. Maupassant shows neither sympathy nor indignation. He writes as if he were the stenographer of impersonal and pitiless fate.

Plot. Madame Loisel, a poor but beautiful and ambitious woman, borrows and loses a diamond necklace valued at $7200. That, at least, is what Madame Loisel thought for ten terrible years, and that is what the reader thinks till he comes to the last words of the story. The plot belongs, therefore, to that large group known as hoax plots. In most of these stories one person plays a joke on another. In this story a grim fate is made to play the joke. In fact, the current phrase, “the irony of fate,” finds here perfect illustration. We use the expression not so much of a great misfortune as of a misfortune that seems brought about by a peculiarly malignant train of circumstances. The injury in this case not only was irremediable but turned on an accident. Notice also how Maupassant has sharpened the poignancy and bitterness of Madame Loisel’s misfortune by making it depend not only on an accident that might so easily not have happened but on a misunderstanding that might so easily have been explained. When Madame Loisel, just on the threshold of her life of drudgery, took the necklace bought on credit to Madame Forestier, the latter “did not open the case, to the relief of her friend.” The irony of fate could hardly go further; but it does go further a little later, when Madame Forestier, still young and beautiful, fails to recognize Madame Loisel because the latter had lost youth, beauty, daintiness, her very self, in toiling to pay to Madame Forestier a debt that was not a debt. Just before the final revelation Madame Loisel is made to say, “I am very glad.” There is a unique pathos in her use of this word: it lifted her a little from the ground that her fall might be all the harder.

There is no denying the art of this story, but it is art without heart. The author is a craftsman rather than a creator, a master of the loom rather than of the forge. Maupassant did perfectly what he wanted to do, but his greatness and his limitation are both revealed. “What would have happened,” he says, “if she had not lost that necklace? Who knows, who knows? How strange life is, how changeful! How little a thing is needed for us to be lost or to be saved!” The greatest art may begin but not end this way.

Characters. The man is only a foil to his wife. He is introduced to bring into sharper relief her unhappiness and her powerlessness to better her condition. He is not a bad man, nor is she a bad woman. To say that the story turns entirely on his honor and on her false pride is to miss, I think, the author’s purpose. There is nothing distinctive in these characters; he is better than she, but both are puppets in the grip of brute circumstance rather than everyday characters shaped by the ordinary pressures of life. They are not types as Rip is a type, or Scrooge, or Oakhurst. Maupassant shows in his stories that he is interested not so much in the free play or the full reaction of personality as in the enslavement of personality through passion or chance. He saw life without order because without center, without reward because without desert; and his characters are made to see it through the same lens and to experience it on the same level. They either do not react or do not react nobly. Had Madame Loisel and her husband been shaped to fit into a less mechanical scheme of things, they would have recognized in their ten years’ trial the call to something higher. They could have used their testing as a means of understanding with keener sympathy the lifelong testing of others. They could have attained a self-development that would have brought a happiness undreamed of before the fateful January 18. But this is Browning’s way, not Maupassant’s. The latter prefers to make Madame Loisel and her husband chiefly of putty so that they may illustrate the blind thrusts of accident rather than the power of personality to turn stumbling-blocks into stepping-stones.

She was one of those pretty and charming girls who, as if by a mistake of destiny, are born in a family of employees. She had no dowry, no expectations, no means of becoming known, understood, loved, wedded by any rich and distinguished man; and so she let herself be married to a petty clerk in the Bureau of Public Instruction.

She was simple in her dress because she could not be elaborate, but she was as unhappy as if she had fallen from a higher rank, for with women there is no inherited distinction of higher and lower. Their beauty, their grace, and their natural charm fill the place of birth and family. Natural delicacy, instinctive elegance, a lively wit, are the ruling forces in the social realm, and these make the daughters of the common people the equals of the finest ladies.

She suffered intensely, feeling herself born for all the refinements and luxuries of life. She suffered from the poverty of her home as she looked at the dirty walls, the worn-out chairs, the ugly curtains. All those things of which another woman of her station would have been quite unconscious tortured her and made her indignant. The sight of the country girl who was maid-of-all-work in her humble household filled her almost with desperation. She dreamed of echoing halls hung with Oriental draperies and lighted by tall bronze candelabra, while two tall footmen in knee-breeches drowsed in great armchairs by reason of the heating stove’s oppressive warmth. She dreamed of splendid parlors furnished in rare old silks, of carved cabinets loaded with priceless bric-a-brac, and of entrancing little boudoirs just right for afternoon chats with bosom friends—men famous and sought after, the envy and the desire of all the other women.