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....