if there must be a little moue in the very sound, as if a
pretty, taking little pout, such as they put on, and also a little pert
physiognomy, were described by it."

Lieutenant Pinkerton, equally ignorant with Lieutenant Loti but
uninstructed evidently, marries a geisha whose father had made the
happy dispatch at the request of the Son of Heaven after making a
blunder in his military command. She is Cio-Cio-San, also Madama
Butterfly, and she comes to her wedding with a bevy of geishas or
mousmes (I do not know which) and a retinue of relations. All enjoy the
hospitality of the American officer while picking him to pieces, but
turn from their kinswoman when they learn from an uncle, who is a
Buddhist priest and comes late to the wedding like the wicked fairy in
the stories, that she has attended the Mission school and changed her
religion. Wherefore the bonze curses her: "Hou, hou! Cio-Cio-San, hou,
hou!"

Sharpless, United States Consul at Nagasaki, had not approved of
Pinkerton's adventure, fearing that it might bring unhappiness to the
little woman; but Pinkerton had laughed at his scruples and emptied his
glass to the marriage with an American wife which he hoped to make some
day. Neither Loti nor Long troubles us with the details of so prosaic a
thing as the marriage ceremony; but Puccini and his librettists make
much of it, for it provides the only opportunity for a chorus and the
musician had found delightfully mellifluous Japanese gongs to add a
pretty touch of local color to the music. Cio-Cio-San has been
"outcasted" and Pinkerton comforts her and they make love in the
starlight (after Butterfly has changed her habiliments) like any pair
of lovers in Italy. "Dolce notte! Quante stelle! Vieni, vieni!" for
quantity.

This is the first act of the opera, and it is all expository to
Belasco's "Tragedy of Japan," which plays in one act, with the pathetic
vigil separating the two days which form its period of action. When
that, like the second act of the opera, opens, Pinkerton has been gone
from Nagasaki and his "wife" three years, and a baby boy of whom he has
never heard, but who has his eyes and hair has come to bear Butterfly
company in the little house on the hill. The money left by the male
butterfly when he flitted is all but exhausted. Madama Butterfly
appears to be lamentably ignorant of the customs of her country, for
she believes herself to be a wife in the American sense and is
fearfully wroth with