Irony In Guy De Maupassant's The False Gems

Monsieur Lantin and his lady had the perfect marriage, falling deeper in love with one another by each passing day. The rising theme of irony, however, proves that appearance can overshadow reality. It creates tension between an intended meaning and a literal statement, used as a form of dry humour to provoke the reader. Throughout his short story, The False Gems, Guy de Maupassant emphasizes several forms of irony to display the universal theme of deviousness. Monsieur Lantin’s lady was thought to be an idyllic wife, but readers soon found out that the love between the married was an illusion. In addition, Monsieur Lantin uncovers that the gems his wife claimed were inauthentic were truly worth thousands, much to his confusion. Once he inherited the value of all his deceased wife’s gems, Monsieur Lantin remarried. Although his marriage with his second wife

She was the perfect wife, ruling the income of the house such that they seemed to live in luxury, despite Monsieur Lantin’s mere salary of three thousand five hundred francs. However, all the time spent in the theatre resulted in an act of persona. Her death revealed her true nature, one which she was hiding from her husband whom she seemed to love so dearly. Monsieur Lantin discovers that the “false” jewels his wife had been collecting were in fact genuine, leaving the presumption that she had been unfaithful to her husband after all these years. She seemed to make a joke of her husband’s impressionability, “Look! are they not lovely? One would swear they were real” (de Maupassant, 30). Monsieur Lantin’s vision was clouded by what he presumed to be true love, not allowing him to see through the lie. This aspect of the story expresses to readers the difference between appearance and reality. The author’s incorporation of verbal irony exposes that, in fact, the wife was the false