Gujarat Board GSEB Class 10 English Textbook Solutions Footprints Without Feet Chapter 7 The Necklace Textbook Exercise Important Questions and Answers, Notes Pdf.
Gujarat Board Textbook Solutions Class 10 English Footprints Without Feet Chapter 7 The Necklace
GSEB Class 10 English The Necklace Text Book Questions and Answers
Read and Find Out (Textbook Page No. 39)
Question 1.
What kind of a person is Mme Loisel and why is she always unhappy?
Answer:
Mme Loisel is young, pretty, ordinary but discontented woman. She is of a humble background but dreams of riches and comforts. She is proud of her beauty and wants to be admired. Her meagre resources are not enough to satisfy her expensive cravings making her angry all the time.
Question 2.
What kind of a person is her husband?
Answer:
Her husband M. Loisel, is an ordinary and average young man. A mere clerk by profession, he is still contented with his job. Also, he is a caring man as he is excited to show the dinner invitation to his wife.
Read and Find Out (Textbook Page No. 41)
Question 1.
What fresh problem now disturbs Mme Loisel?
Answer:
After spending a fortune on a beautiful dress, Mme Loisel is faced with yet another disaster. She frets over the fact that she does not have a beautiful jewel to go with her dress. So, she asks her husband to pass on the invitation to someone else.
Question 2.
How is the problem solved?
Answer:
Matilda Loisel’s husband, M. Loisel, comes to her rescue. First, he suggests her to wear fresh flowers. Matilda just mocked at the idea. Then, he advises her to borrow some jewels from her rich friend, Mme Forestier. Thus, the problem is solved as Mme Forestier lends her a beautiful diamond necklace.
Read and Find Out (Textbook Page No. 42)
Question 1.
What do Mr and Mme Loisel do next?
Answer:
The Loisels leave no stone unturned. M. Loisel goes back and searches the lost necklace. Then, he goes to the police and to the cab offices. Also, they put out an advertisement in the newspapers and offer a reward to anyone who finds: the necklace. But, all their efforts go in vain.
Question 2.
How do they replace the necklace?
Answer:
After all other efforts fail, the couple decides to buy a. new identical necklace to replace the lost one. M. Loisel pooled eighteen thousand francs of his inheritance and borrowed the rest. Then they managed to buy the new necklace: for thirty-six thousand francs and returned it to the rightful owner.
Think about it
Question 1.
The course of the Loisels’ life changed due to the necklace. Comment.
Answer:
It takes Loisels’ a decade to pay back the money they borrowed to buy the necklace. And, it changed everything for them. They had to move to the poorest quarters of the city. With no maids or assistance, Matilda had to cook, clean, mend, sew, bargain with the grocer and butcher to save every sou just for mere survival. The husband had to work in the evening and night to pay their debt. In this way, the course of the Loisels’ life changed due to the necklace.
Question 2.
What was the cause of Matilda’s ruin? How could she have avoided it?
Answer:
Matilda’s pride and her materialistic aspirations coupled with her dishonesty pave the way for her ruin. She could have avoided it by learning to accept her current situation and being content with what she had.
Question 3.
What would have happened to Matilda if she had confessed to her friend that she had lost her necklace?
Answer:
Truth and honesty would have saved Matilda from her doom. If only she has been courageous enough to confess to her friend the truth of the necklace, she would have come to know that it was a fake one that cost a mere five hundred francs.
She would not have spent her husband’s entire inheritance and borrowed eighteen thousand francs to pay for its replacement. In fact, she would have saved herself and her husband from ten long years bf crushing poverty, misery and back-breaking labour.
Question 4.
If you were caught in a situation like this, how would you have dealt with it?
Answer:
Foremost of all, I would have done my best not to become a victim of my own pride and aspirations. If I was caught in such a situation, I would have let the truth out and then face the consequences. Honesty would have been the way out for me.
Talk about it
Question 1.
The characters in this story speak in English. Do you think this is their language? What clues are there in the story about the language its characters must be speaking in?
Answer:
Though the characters speak in English, it is not their language. Maupassant wrote the story in French and it was translated into English. Again the very text throws up enough words in French to prove it otherwise. First, the very names of characters like ‘Mme Loisel, Mme Forestier and the minister’s name George S Ramponneau indicate their French origin.
Then, the words for currency like ‘Franc’ and ‘Sou’ s show the same. Also, the shop’s location at ‘Palais Royal’ and ‘Champs-Elysees’ point out the French location and history of the characters and the story.
Question 2.
Honesty is the best policy.
Answer:
Honesty is definitely the best policy. Falsehood and hypocrisy seem very attractive and rewarding at first. But, the path they tread on leads to nothing but misery, evil and utter gloom. Honesty, on the contrary, seems to be a difficult choice in pursuit of material happiness. However, it is the only choice for a life of contentment, peace and everlasting happiness.
Question 3.
We should be content with what life gives us.
Answer:
Life is a great mystery. For every individual, this mystery of life comes wrapped in a unique package. For some, it is all riches, comfort, name and fame. For some, it is nothing but sheer hunger, poverty, anguish and an everyday quest for bare survival. One, however, must learn to live within one’s means and be content with what one has. One may try to improve his lot by honest means but eventually must be at peace with what one manages to have.
The Necklace Summary in English
The Necklace Summary:
Matilda everywhere Loisel is attractive and pretty, but unhappy, very unhappy. She believes that life has played her false. She feels relegated to a lower station than she deserves. She wanted to be appreciated and loved by some rich gentleman from a good family, but instead, having no dowry, she had to settle for a junior clerk in the Ministry of Public Instruction.
Her existence is one of constant frustration. She hates her plain apartment, its absence of pictures on the walls, its shoddy furniture. Even the sight of her maid, doing housework, fills her with hopeless regrets and provokes flights of fancy about more opulent surroundings. Though other women of her class may come to terms with their station in life, Matilda never can.
She is so humiliated by her lower-middle-class existence that she even refuses to see one of her old friends whom she has known from her days at the convent school. Madame Forestier is wealthy, and Matilda finds visits to her too painful to bear; so, she spends her days hanging around her drab flat, sometimes crying the entire time, overcome with worry, regret, desperation, and distress.
Her husband, on the other hand, seems better adjusted. He does not notice that the tablecloth has been in use for three days. When he is served a simple casserole, he can exclaim with pleasure: “Well, a good hot pot. I don’t know anything better than that.” One day, he comes home from his office with an invitation to a party that is being given by his superior, the minister of public instruction.
Instead of greeting the news with delight, Matilda throws the invitation down on the table, saying that it is no good to her because she has nothing suitable to wear for such an occasion. Her husband tries to convince her that it was very difficult for a junior clerk to get asked to such an event. “You will see the whole world of officialdom there,” he says, suggesting that she wear that good-looking dress she once wore to the theatre. She refuses and tells him to give the invitation to a colleague whose wife is better turned out than she Monsieur Loisel tries another tack.
He asks her how much it would cost to get a proper dress. She thinks it over, trying to estimate what an old miser like him would be willing to spend. She decides on the sum of four hundred francs that, as it happens, is exactly the amount that he has put away to buy himself a gun so he could join some friends who go Sunday Clark shooting on the Nanterre flatlands. He is not happy to forgo his pleasure but agrees.
An appropriate dress is ordered and is ready before the date of the dance. Matilda, however, is still depressed. Now she complains that” she does not have any jewellery to wear with it. Her husband suggests flowers. She is unimpressed.
He then suggests that she go to her rich friend Madame Forestier and borrow some jewellery. His wife thinks it a good idea and the next day goes and explains the situation to her. Madame Forestier is more than willing to comply and goes to a wardrobe to get a large jewellery casket. She tells Matilda to take what she likes.
Such an embarrassment of riches makes it difficult for Matilda to make up her mind. She asks to see something else. Suddenly, she discovers a black satin case that contains a magnificent necklace, “a river of diamonds.” With tremulous voice, she asks if she may borrow this item. “But yes, certainly,” says her friend. Matilda throws her arms around her friend’s neck, and then joyously hurries home with her treasure.
At the minister’s party, Matilda scores a success. She appears to be the prettiest woman in the room; all men’s eyes are on her. Even the minister notices her. She dances throughout the night, leaving her exhausted husband dozing in a small drawing room with three other husbands whose wives are also enjoying themselves. When me party breaks up at four o’clock, Matilda wants to get away as fast as possible because she does not want the other women, who all w$ar furs, to notice her plain cloth coat.
She runs out to the street hoping to find a cab, but the search takes her down to the Seine where, at last, she and her husband find an old dilapidated brougham stationed along the embankment. The ride back to their dismal apartment is sad for Matilda with her fresh memories of her triumph.
Once home, as she is taking off her wraps, she discovers that the necklace is no longer around her neck. They search in the folds of her clothes. They cannot find the necklace. Her husband goes out and retraces their path home. He returns several hours later having found nothing.
The next day, he goes to the police and files a report. He then advertises in the lost-and-found in the papers, but still, nothing. To give them time to continue the search, they tell Madame Forestier that the clasp on the necklace is being repaired. After five days, however, when nothing shows up, they decide that the necklace is truly gone and they must have it replaced.
They take the necklace case from jeweller to jeweller to find a strand of diamonds that matches the one lost. They finally see one in a shop at the Palais-Royal. The price, with a four thousand franc discount, is thirty-six thousand francs. The Loisels pay for it with an eighteen thousand franc inheritance that the husband has received from his father, and by borrowing the rest in small amounts, thereby mortgaging their lives for the next decade. The replacement necklace is returned to Madame Forestier, who remarks rather coldly that it should have been returned sooner because she might have needed it. She does not bother to open the case. The Loisels are left with their debts.
They get rid of their maid. They move to a poorer apartment. The wife now has to do all the menial work herself: wash the sheets, carry garbage down to the street, carry up the water, do her own shopping, bargaining with everybody to save a few sous. The husband moonlights, working in the evenings for a bookkeeper and often at nights, doing copying at twenty-five centimes a page. This goes on year after year until the debt is paid.
The time of penury has transformed Matilda into a poor, prematurely old hag, with a loud voice, red hands, and neglected hair, but in her misery, she often remembers the minister’s ball, where she had her great success. What, she asks herself, would have been her fortune had she not lost the necklace?
One Sunday, as she strolls along the Champs-Elysees, she sees Madame Forestier taking a child for a walk. Jeanne Forestier is still young-looking and attractive. Now that the debt for the necklace has been satisfied, Matilda Loisel decides to tell her old friend everything that happened. She stops to speak to her but is not recognized until she introduces herself. She explains that life has been pretty grim.
She tells her about the lost necklace, how she had it replaced and for the past ten years has been slaving to pay for it. She is relieved that the long ordeal is over, and naively proud that her friend never knew that a different necklace had been returned to her. Madame Forestier is deeply touched. Taking both of her friend’s hands she says, “Oh! My poor Matilda! But mine was a fake. It was worth no more than five hundred francs!”