“The Necklace”
“The Necklace” is not just Maupassant’s most famous use of the ironic twist ending, it is one of the all-time iconic ironic twist endings in literary history. It is a story about a husband and wife attending a gala ball for which the wife borrows an expensive diamond necklace from a friend. The necklace is lost sometime during the ball and the couple spiral into poverty from the debt of affording an exact duplicate to return to the owner. Only after ten years of misery do they learn that the borrowed necklace was itself really a worthless imitation.
“A Piece of String”
In this story a man named Hauchecorne reaches down to pick up the title object at the very worst moment possible. Soon enough circumstances have converged to make an entire village suspect him guilty of stealing a pocket-book. The reader’s awareness that he actually is innocent thus makes the reactions of the townspeople ironic in a more literary sense. However, irony in a more popular sense is soon demonstrated when Hauchecorne’s increasingly agitated protestations of innocence actually serve to cement suspicions of his guilt even when the discovery of the lost item seems to prove his story.
“The Jewels”
Maupassant unleashes a torrent of irony in this story. By the end, the protagonist has learned that the woman he married because she epitomized virtue was routinely cheating on him, that the costume jewelry she insisted on wearing which drove him nuts are actually of tremendous value because the jewels are real and the kicker: following his wife’s death and the revelations about her true nature, he marries a second to a woman who actually is the epitome of virtue and he’s miserable.
“Mademoiselle Fifi”
The irony in this story is exhibited right in the title. What one might naturally assume to be a story featuring another of the many prostitutes that inhabit his body of work turns out to be as ironically unexpected as possible. Mademoiselle Fifi is the nickname for Second Lieutenant Wilhelm von Eyrick who dressed like a dandy, but is the most sadistic of the Prussian officers currently occupying a French village.
“Two Friends”
The irony in “Two Friends” is revving at a gentle hum throughout most of this story of two old friends reunited in the midst of the Franco-Prussian War. And then, just before things take a terrible and tragic turn, the irony spikes in a beautifully wrought paragraph:
“…the two began placidly discussing political problems with the sound common sense of peaceful, matter-of-fact citizens…And Mont-Valerien thundered ceaselessly, demolishing the houses of the French with its cannon balls, grinding lives of men to powder, destroying many a dream, many a cherished hope, many a prospective happiness; ruthlessly causing endless woe and suffering in the hearts of wives, of daughters, of mothers, in other lands.”
