Madame Chrysanthème

A French naval officer takes a temporary wife in Nagasaki for the length of his ship's stay, furnishes a paper house on a hill, and is faintly bored by all of it — including her. Loti was Julien Viaud, a career officer who rose to captain and wrote from every port the navy sent him to; this 1887 book gave Puccini's Butterfly its situation, and it is far colder than anything the opera does with it. The narrator's condescension is on the page for the reader to judge.