projecting the droplet a metre’s distance so that—either by chance or thanks to a minutely planned gesture—it landed on the painting just where it needed to. The bird’s head was painted in transparent colours with delicately deepening shadows, a detailed and natural anatomical depiction, a fragile, vibrant head infused with profound solitude, portraying for the emperor the image of himself as a small boy of three, perched on a throne of filigreed gold, borne by four intertwined dragons, raised to a height that a child’s eye could barely reach, the throne on which he had felt his weightless body transformed into that of a little bird huddled in its nest way up high in the audience hall, which was filled with both an icy cold and, paradoxical though this may seem, deathly silence, where the deafening cries of the tens of thousands of courtiers prostrating themselves before him rang round as they would in a vast abyss, merging into a series of long, dark and terrifying echoes.
“What Puyi did not reveal to his cousin,” the professor pointed out, “was that, despite the endless time he spent in contemplation, he never succeeded in putting down a single brushstroke, the least spot of ink, the tiniest scribble on the silk. In the end all that Huizong’s works inspired in him was profound self-loathing. At the end of each session, the sumo put away the paintbrushes—brushes that had never been dipped into the ink, which slowly thickened, gradually coagulating and clouding irremediably—then he would gather the scraps of virgin silk torn up and thrown away by Puyi, and bury them in the courtyard beneath a layer of earth and rotting leaves. This period of ‘meditation on painting,’ as Puyi called it, ended in a spectacular episode, not devoid of an element of comedy: late in November 1926, towards the end of a snowy night, some courtiers were horrified to spot Puyi, who was twenty at the time, in the feeble morning light, his frail naked body wrapped in a long boa of black and white feathers as he perched, shivering, on the branch of an elm tree just like the bird painted by Huizong eight hundred years earlier. Not one of his servants dared approach him, except for the sumo, the only person allowed to enter his study (strictly out of bounds to anyone else) so that he could put more wood on the fire in winter and stand behind him mutely waving a fan in summer. No one will ever know what degree of intimacy there was between the young fallen emperor and his Japanese sumo but, if the recollections of one of the last eunuchs in Tianjin are to be believed, every time Puyi descended into unshakeable lethargy after a hysterical outburst, the sumo would lie down beside him in his bed and hold him in his arms, day and night. But on the morning in question when the sumo reached out to his master to take him in his arms, the elm branch—which had already bowed considerably under Puyi’s weight—snapped with a deafening crack and both men fell, in each others arms, though neither was injured thanks to the snow on the ground in the courtyard.
“Another singular detail is that Huizong, himself a painter and calligrapher, was also a great collector or even the greatest ever, an area that no doubt requires vast wealth but also a knowledge of art, in a word: taste. Even I, who am no artist,” the professor confided, “have read and reread once a year the catalogues of Huizong’s collection, which list six thousand and three hundred works with their titles, descriptions, painters’ biographies and, most importantly, the emperors own comments, piecing together the genesis of each creation. Almost all of these works have now disappeared, but reading the catalogues affords the same pleasure as looking at an old map of a town or neighbourhood, where the observer can wander through imaginary remains, recognising crossroads, losing his way in a market, following the course of a moat, looking out for its ripples along the sinuous outline of city walls, although it will vanish the moment he feels he has grasped it. Can you understand why a great wave of happiness washed over me when, looking at an enlarged photograph, I spotted the titles of two works from this mythical catalogue on the label of a chest that was handed down to Huizong and later belonged to our last emperor?