The Necklace
She was one of those pretty and charming girls who are sometimes, as if by a mistake of destiny, born in a family of clerks. So begins The Necklace, Guy De Maupassant’s devastating 1884 short story of a borrowed piece of fake jewelry and the subsequent ironies—dramatic and situational—that resonate seamlessly with similar decisions students are making in 2025.
She had no dowry, no expectations, no means of being known understood, loved, wedded by any rich and distinguished man; So she marries a poor office worker but was as unhappy as though she had fallen from her proper station. She dreams of better things—footmen, tapestries, shining silverware, tall bronze candelabras. And jewelry. When invited to a fancy ball, she borrows an exquisite piece of jewelry from a wealthy friend.
All of a sudden, she discovered, in a black satin box, a superb necklace of diamonds, and her heart began to beat with an immoderate desire. Her hands trembled as she took it. She fastened it around her throat, outside her high-necked dress, and remained lost in ecstasy at the sight of herself.
She goes to the ball, has a great time. She is young and beautiful, dances and chats with everyone. And loses the necklace on the way home.
There follows ten years of privation and hardship. Mathilde washes floors. Her husband gets a second job. They borrow money at usurious rates, paying back one loan by scrounging money from another. They replace the necklace and work around the clock for decades to pay for it.
Years later, Mathilde sees her wealthy friend in the park. Her friend has remained youthful and fit, has a child. The friend doesn’t even recognize Mathilde who is stooped and aged from years of endless work and lack of sleep.
Yes, I have had hard days enough since I have seen you, days wretched enough—and that because of you!
Her friend informs Mathilde that the original necklace was not made of diamonds but of glass, that there was no need to replace it with an item 50 times as valuable, that the years of struggle, work, and debt were meaningless.
And the story ends before Mathilde can remark on the tragedy of her wasted youth,
***
I substituted a “good college” for the perfect piece of jewelry and the analogy hit me on the head. Kids pursue highly rejective schools as if attending will make them—I don’t know—Smart? Popular? Employable? Content? If sleeping in a garage doesn’t make you a car then attending a highly rejective school doesn’t increase the number of books you’ve read.
Joe volunteers at the hospital Thursday nights from 6:00 to 10:00 pm. He is tasked with putting old patient files into a wall of cabinets. An honors student, Joe knows the alphabet pretty well. The job takes about 15 minutes each week. Joe sits aimlessly for the rest of his four-hour shift.
When asked why, given his full schedule, Joe doesn’t do something more pleasant and productive, he replies that he needs 300 hours of community service to be competitive on his college applications.
The majority of students whom I’ve advised these past four decades have also been involved in some meaningless, misguided activity believing that their chances of admission improve if they sit alone in a room doing nothing but amassing hours. Kids become “paper members” of clubs, play sports in which they possess neither ability nor interest, attend meetings or, in an especially overt waste of time and treasure, drive their teacher’s kid to their Cub Scout meeting.
Don’t misunderstand. There is nothing more appropriate for adolescents than involvement, volunteering, giving back, participating. But cleaning up a beach because you believe that beaches should be clean is more cogent than standing around on the sand thinking that you’re going to be admitted to a competitive college because you put a piece of plastic in a trash bucket.
And what of that goal, that diamond necklace of admission to a top college. As I have pointed out repeatedly—“incessantly” it could be argued—where you go matters less than how you do. Could De Maupassant’s She had no dowry, no expectations, no means of being known understood, loved, wedded by any rich and distinguished man be updated to read: The student had no 4.0, no expectation of being admitted to Stanford, Dartmouth, or Duke… so instead of enjoying her adolescence, she engaged in pointless, disagreeable tasks. She could have been happy and done well at any of the hundreds of colleges that admit the majority of their applicants, many of whom haven’t sat alphabetizing in hospital basements. She could have gone on to graduate school, performed brilliantly, been content with her admissions decisions.
While we’re on the subject of hours ill spent, how much of the time you spend with your kids is conflictual? Are the arguments about homework, bedtime, chores comparable to Mathilde taking a second job scrubbing floors… to pay for a necklace that, as it happens, has no value.
