I like this episode, but it is only losely based on the original story. In de Maupassant's original, the wife is a social climber married to a simple bureaucrat whom she views as beneath her. She pushes her husband to get an invitation to a fancy ball and then imposes on a friend to barrow what she believes is a diamond necklace to wear to the ball because she believes that she is too good to wear flowers or costume jewelry as her husband suggests. As in the radio version, she and her husband do spend years paying off their loan for the necklace, they obtain that loan from a bank; neither the husband nor wife go crazy or die in any manner during the course of the story. In the end, it is the wife who finally confesses to her friend that she lost the necklace after the debt has been paid at a huge sacrife to her and her husband, only to learn that the necklace was paste and that she and her husband have sacrificed the best years of their lives to keep up appearances to the wife's wealthy friend.

The original is about the sin and consequences of false pride. The wife is not a sympathetic character. While I enjoyed this story, it lacks the irony and sense of poetic justice that made de Maupassant's story a classic. 