Loisel repaid the necklace along with their sweat and tears. Mathilde had no choice; she had to transform herself from a vain, ungrateful, material and bored wife into a hard-working, proud and loving wife. He even says, right before meeting Mme. Forestier: “What would have happened if he hadn't lost that necklace? Who knows? Who knows? How strange and changeable life is! How little does it take to lose ourselves or be saved!”(39) In that quote I saw 2 things, when he wonders what would have happened if he hadn't lost the necklace, he doesn't go into a fairy tale about what life he could live, he just accepts that which is now, even if it's not the easiest life in the world. At the end of the quote: «How little it takes to lose ourselves or to be saved!»(39). The fact that he added “or to be saved!” at the thought of her, she tells me that she realizes that she was vain and unappreciated and that she lacked character, but now she is grateful, even though it was such a terrible thing, she was grateful to be able to say that she was a better person now, even after everything that happened to her, than she had ever “dreamed” of being before. Guy de Maupassant certainly depicted a very difficult hardship for Mathilde in “The Necklace” but in the end, everything that happened to her made her a much better and stronger woman inside and out. This story teaches a very important lesson: you have no idea what you can do and who you can become, until you find yourself playing the game and find yourself between a rock and a hard place.