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All kinds of motives are at work in this little tale, but what is particularly shocking from the point of view of indebtedness is that Mathilde and her husband were just plain wrong - they made an assumption which turned out to be incorrect.

Should they have thought otherwise? Should they have at least considered the possibility that not in a month of Sundays would Mme Forestier part with jewellery worth 36,000 francs? What allowed them to believe that she had done just that? Did Mathilde's longing for the rich life corrupt her judgement? Do the couple take some sort of vain, foolish pride in being entrusted with such a valuable? Do they offer proof that the poor are stupid? Or merely that the stupid are stupid? Or do they fall into the trap of believing that, for the rich, nothing can ever be ordinary?

This latter possibility is one I'd like to consider briefly. This is where my fourth library book comes in, You and Your Money by Alvin Hall with Karl Weber.

Alvin Hall is not in this book offering debt advice. He is rather examining our relationships with money in the light of our relationships with people. There are chapters on Money and Your Parents, Money and Your Siblings and Money and Your Children, for example. The book is rewarding and full of case studies, but I was drawn to two passages in particular.

In Money and Your Peers Hall looks at images shown in the media. He contrasts in particular a 1950s TV comedy The Honeymooners with the 1990s series Friends. In the 1950s he says the apartment depicted in the show was run-down and realistic. In the 1990s the apartments seen by viewers could not be afforded by one young person in a hundred, but so persuasive is the power of the media that it can be easy to fool ourselves into thinking that this is how our peers really do live - and therefore how we must live.

Later in the book Hall discusses money and children, referring to a habit he observes among middle-class acquaintances who pamper their offspring - behaviour which he says is inspired by the belief that this is how the rich behave. In fact, he suggests, despite frequently publicised cases of spoilt, wealthy children, the rich tend to do quite the opposite and for very good reason.

The very rich, who know a thing or two about creating and keeping family wealth, understand that indulging kids is not a healthy thing to do.

It would be safe to assume, at the very least, that Mme Forestier and her family did not acquire and keep their jewels by risking losing them. Nor by mistaking their true value...and it might just occur to you that there is no proof that Mme Forestier had any valuable jewels at all! At most, this would be an assumption.

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