Madame
Chrysanthème

About the book

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. She remains at the centre of the book as an absence, observed in minute detail, never quite reached. The novel’s discomfort is the point.

Madame Chrysanthème was one of the most widely read French novels of its era. From it descended a short story, a Broadway play, and finally 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.

Pierre Loti

Pierre Loti was the pen name of Julien Viaud (1850–1923), a French naval officer who eventually rose to the rank of captain and spent decades crossing between the Mediterranean, Asia, the Pacific, and the Atlantic on postings that gave him the material for his novels. He was one of the most widely read French writers of the late nineteenth century. Not despite his naval career but because of it. He went where other novelists could not.

His books drew directly on his postings: Tahiti, Senegal, Turkey, Morocco, Brittany, and Japan each produced a novel. Madame Chrysanthème, published in 1887 after his 1885 Nagasaki assignment, became perhaps his most consequential work, not because of its literary reputation (which remained contested) but because of what it generated. John Luther Long’s short story of 1898, David Belasco’s play, and at last Puccini’s 1904 opera all trace their origin to Loti’s novel. He was elected to the Académie française in 1891.

Loti’s prose style is hard to characterise without reading it. He writes about surfaces with great precision: what things look like, how they smell, the quality of light in a particular city at a particular hour. The people around him are another matter. From them he keeps a distance that his admirers called honesty and his critics called coldness. The argument has never been settled. Madame Chrysanthème is the place to begin.

Clémence Aubert, translator

Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème has not had a proper English edition since 1897. The translations that exist are Victorian. Polite where Loti is wry, smoothed where he is uncomfortable. They lose the novel’s central effect: a narrator who, page by page, manages to condemn himself without quite meaning to. The work of producing a contemporary rendering 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, and the case she keeps returning to is that the English-language editions of these novels (Maupassant, Loti, Zola) have been rendered too palatable, for too long. Madame Chrysanthème is her first translation for Espresso Publishing House.

Read more about Clémence Aubert →

This edition

This Espresso Publishing House edition is the first new translation of Madame Chrysanthème since Laura Ensor’s Victorian version of 1897. It includes an original introduction by Clémence Aubert placing Loti and the novel in their literary and historical context; a translator’s note on the specific challenges of his prose style; a glossary of Japanese terms and phrases used throughout the text; and historical notes on Loti’s Nagasaki posting and the chain of adaptations the novel inspired.

Kindle pre-order available now. Kindle and paperback editions release July 14, 2026.