Espresso Publishing House released a new English translation of Pierre Loti’s 1887 novel “Madame Chrysanthème” on July 14, 2026.

The book is a French naval officer’s fictionalized diary of a marriage he arranges for a season in Nagasaki, to Chrysanthème herself, whom he leaves behind without much feeling when his ship sails.

The novel stands at the head of the literary line that runs through John Luther Long’s 1898 story and David Belasco’s 1900 play to Giacomo Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” which Puccini built from the play he saw staged in London before the opera’s premiere in 1904.

“Most people meet this story through Puccini, as the tragedy of a woman who is abandoned. Loti’s original is a cooler and more uncomfortable thing, a Frenchman’s diary of a marriage he never takes seriously and a country he mostly fails to see. We translated it because we wanted English readers to be able to sit with the source and notice how much the opera softened and how much it simply invented. Reading Loti next to Puccini puts the chill back into a story we’ve been taught to hear as romance, and I think that makes the opera stranger and sadder, not less,” publisher Idara Crespi told OperaWire.