A series from Espresso Publishing House

Espresso French Classics

Nineteenth-century French fiction, newly translated into English.

The nineteenth century was France's defining period in fiction — and also the stretch of literary history where the English shelf runs thinnest. The canonical names survive: Flaubert, Zola, Hugo. Behind them, largely untranslated or translated once in the Victorian era and never again, are writers who were read across Europe in their time. Pierre Loti was one of the most widely read French novelists of the late nineteenth century. Prosper Mérimée shaped the short fiction of his generation. Their English editions have aged out of reach.

The Espresso French Classics series translates this overlooked tradition into contemporary English. Each title is translated directly from the original French, with a full editorial apparatus: introduction, translator's note, glossary, and the historical context necessary to read the work on its own terms. All titles in the series are translated by Clémence Aubert.

Titles in the Series

Madame Chrysanthème

Madame Chrysanthème July 2026

Madame Chrysanthème  ·  Pierre Loti, 1887

Translated by Clémence Aubert

Kindle & Paperback · Forthcoming July 14, 2026

In the summer of 1885, French naval officer Pierre Loti arrived in Nagasaki on a three-month posting and arranged, following local custom, to rent a small house and a temporary wife. Madame Chrysanthème is the novel he made from that arrangement — part journal, part portrait, written in a voice of such cool, precise attention that it is sometimes mistaken for indifference. It is not. Loti watches everything: the paper screens, the painted fans, the coins his wife tests between her teeth on the last morning. What he cannot quite see is Chrysanthème herself.

The novel reached Paris in 1887 and made Loti one of the most widely read French novelists of his era. It set in motion a chain of adaptations — a short story, a Broadway play, an opera — that ended in Puccini's Madama Butterfly. This is its first new English translation in over a century.

This edition includes a translator's note by Clémence Aubert, a glossary of Japanese terms, and historical notes on Loti, the 1885 Nagasaki posting, and the novel's afterlife in opera and theatre.

Pre-order Kindle — $4.99

Paperback edition available July 2026.

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Colomba April 2027

Colomba  ·  Prosper Mérimée, 1840

Translated by Clémence Aubert

Kindle & Paperback · Forthcoming April 2027

Nineteenth-century Corsica. Orso della Rebbia returns to the island from the French army to find that his father has been killed — shot in an ambush, the killer known to everyone but never tried. His sister Colomba is waiting. She wants blood. He has learned, in France, to want justice instead. What follows is a story about the distance between those two things, and whether that distance can survive a landscape that does not recognise it.

Prosper Mérimée is remembered in English almost entirely for Carmen. Colomba, longer and more formally ambitious, has been largely left behind — a novella about vendetta, loyalty, and the pull of a world that precedes the one the novel's hero has tried to inhabit. The existing English editions have aged in different directions — some softening Mérimée into romance, others approaching the text as an anthropological document. Neither approach preserves the quality that makes the novel work: the cold irony with which Mérimée frames a story of genuine, unresolvable violence. This translation by Clémence Aubert restores that quality.

Forthcoming April 23, 2027. Pre-order link will be added when available.

About the translator

Pierre Loti's Madame Chrysanthème has not had a proper English edition since 1897. The ones that exist are Victorian affairs — polite where Loti is wry, smoothed where he is uncomfortable. What they lost is the novel's central effect: a narrator who, page by page, manages to condemn himself without quite meaning to. Clémence Aubert studied French literature at the Université Lumière Lyon 2. She came to the book through its existing translations, and to the conviction that what Madame Chrysanthème needs is a contemporary rendering that stays with Loti's irony rather than softening it. Madame Chrysanthème is her first translation for Espresso Publishing House.

Read more about Clémence Aubert and the Espresso French Classics →