ABSTRACT
The two works share common dramatic premises: a Japanese contract wife, a charming Western mariner, and in particular a conclusion in which a shattered woman loves with desperation and futility a man who will leave her. Messager's opera imposes the sadness of the final letter, as a spectacle of grand emotion in the theatre plays out against what Loti reported in his writing: a flat, dispirited, and craven love; not the pleasures of affection, but its disillusions. One sentiment in particular interested the French love. Specifically, individual romantic love between man and woman, shaped by a courtly tradition. The coins are scattered to the sea bottom; found instead are tattered notes, scribblings of Pierre she has saved, half washed away, detailing his profound disillusion with this land 'bizarre' and 'absurd', cruel details of a land and woman he cannot and does not love.
