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. It is 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

Madame Chrysanthème  ·  Pierre Loti, 1887

Translated by Clémence Aubert

Kindle & Paperback Published July 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 that ended in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly: a short story, a Broadway play, an opera. The last new English translation we can trace appeared in 1905.

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.

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Colomba Forthcoming

Colomba  ·  Prosper Mérimée, 1840

Translated by Clémence Aubert

Kindle & Paperback Forthcoming

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. It is a novella about vendetta, loyalty, and the pull of a world that precedes the one the novel’s hero has tried to inhabit. The novel pulls two ways at once, and both are easy to lose: it is a romance of the island, and it is a cold-eyed account of a killing that the island’s own logic requires. What holds them together is the irony Mérimée frames the whole thing in, and that is what Clémence Aubert’s translation is built to keep.

The third book in Espresso French Classics, following Mérimée’s Carmen. We will post the publication date here once it is set, and a pre-order link when one exists.

About the translator

Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème turns on an effect that is easy to lose: a narrator who, page by page, manages to condemn himself without quite meaning to. Producing a contemporary English that stays with that irony, rather than rescuing the narrator from himself, is the project that brought Clémence Aubert to EPH. She lives in Lyon. The body of her work has been 19th-century French fiction, Maupassant and Loti and Zola, and her conviction is that these novels are stranger and less comfortable than their English reputations suggest, and better for being read that way. Madame Chrysanthème is her first translation for Espresso Publishing House.

Read more about Clémence Aubert and the Espresso French Classics →